In 1905, a German immigrant named Friedrich Trump wrote a desperate letter to Prince Luitpold of Bavaria, begging to be allowed to remain in Germany with his pregnant wife. He had left the country twenty years earlier without completing his mandatory military service, and Bavaria considered him a deserter. The prince refused his request. Friedrich and his wife Elizabeth boarded a ship back to New York, and three months later their son Fred was born.
That boy would go on to build more than 27,000 apartments across Brooklyn and Queens, and his grandson would become President of the United States. The story begins in 1885, when Friedrich, a 16-year-old from the vineyard town of Kallstadt in the German Palatinate, crossed the Atlantic alone. His father had died when he was eight, and after training as a barber, he found no opportunity at home. He spent six years cutting hair in the tenements of the Lower East Side before moving to Seattle in 1891.
There he opened a restaurant in the red-light district that offered food, drink, and private rooms upstairs, with local newspaper ads discreetly noting the availability of “rooms for ladies. ”
When the Klondike gold rush exploded in 1897, roughly 100,000 people headed north toward the Yukon. Friedrich did not join them to hunt for gold. Instead, he followed the crowds to Bennett, British Columbia, where he and a partner built the Arctic Restaurant and Hotel.
Thousands of prospectors camped through the winter, waiting for the spring thaw, with money and time but nowhere to spend either. Friedrich gave them exactly that place. When the railroad opened a new route and bypassed Bennett, he dismantled the restaurant, hauled the lumber north to Whitehorse, and rebuilt the operation where the rail line met the river. By 1900, he had spent two years in the North without ever swinging a pickaxe, and returned to New York wealthier than most men twice his age.
A year later, Friedrich went home to Kallstadt as a prosperous man. He proposed to Elizabeth Christ, the daughter of a former neighbor, and they married in August 1902. Elizabeth was miserable in New York, and by 1904 the couple was back in Germany, planning to stay. But when Friedrich reappeared in Bavarian civil records, officials discovered he had left the country in 1885 without completing his military service.
In February 1905, a royal decree stripped him of his citizenship and ordered him to leave the kingdom. His letter appealing to the prince described his parents as honest and pious people and pleaded that expulsion would destroy his young family. The appeal was rejected without explanation. In July 1905, Friedrich and Elizabeth left Kallstadt for the last time.
She was seven months pregnant. Their second child, Frederick Christ Trump, was born in the Bronx that October; everyone called him Fred. The family settled in Queens, where Friedrich bought vacant lots and small parcels of property. Then the Spanish flu arrived.
On May 29, 1918, Friedrich collapsed during a walk through Queens with his 12-year-old son. He died the next morning, one of the earliest cases of the pandemic that would kill an estimated 50 million people worldwide. He was 49. Friedrich left behind a seven-room house, five vacant lots, a modest savings, and 14 mortgages on properties, totaling roughly $31,000.
Instead of selling and returning to Germany, the 37-year-old widow held on to everything. She formed a company called E. Trump and Son. At 17, Fred built his first house in Wood Haven, Queens, using $800 from family savings, sold it at a profit, and broke ground on the next one before the season ended.
Through the 1920s and 1930s, Fred expanded from single-family homes to entire blocks of row houses across Flatbush and East Brooklyn. He used FHA loans almost from the moment the program launched in 1934, borrowing federal money at terms so generous that his personal risk on each project shrank nearly to zero. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle called him the Henry Ford of the homebuilding industry in 1938. He standardized materials and floor plans so he could build faster and cheaper than any competitor in the city.
After World War II, Fred told business partners and customers that his family was Swedish, not German. His most reliable market was middle-class Jewish families in Brooklyn and Queens, and German heritage was toxic after the war. The story held for decades and eventually made it into Donald Trump’s 1987 book, The Art of the Deal, where he wrote that his grandfather came from Sweden as a child. In 1936, Fred married Mary Anne MacLeod, an immigrant from the Isle of Lewis in Scotland’s Outer Hebrides.
She had arrived in America six years earlier at 18, speaking Gaelic as her first language. Together they had five children between 1937 and 1948: Maryanne, Fred Jr. , Elizabeth, Donald, and Robert. Fred built them a 23-room Georgian Revival mansion on Midland Parkway in Jamaica Estates, with nine bathrooms and a detached garage for his limousine.
During the war, Fred built barracks and garden apartments for the United States Navy along the east coast. The postwar years brought real scale. Shore Haven in Bensonhurst was a breakthrough: 32 six-story buildings and a shopping center backed by nearly $10 million in federal financing. Beach Haven near Coney Island followed with 1,860 apartments and another $16 million from the same program.
Fred built entire neighborhoods while shouldering almost none of the financial risk, because the federal government guaranteed the loans. Fred embedded himself in the Brooklyn Democratic machine for the rest of his career. He regularly took the local party boss, a young accountant named Abraham Beame who would become mayor of New York, and a fixer and attorney named Abraham “Bunny” Lindenbaum to dinner. They made sure his zoning requests and project approvals sailed through the system.
The crown jewel came with Trump Village on Coney Island, 3,800 apartments in seven towers backed by a $60 million state construction loan. To get the land, Fred used his political connections to override a competing bid from the Garment Workers Union. Nine hundred families living on the site were displaced, and Fred offered them units in the new development knowing most could not afford the prices. In the summer of 1954, Fred sat in a witness chair in Washington and was asked to account for $3.
7 million that could not be found in the buildings he had been paid to construct. The United States Senate Banking Committee had launched an investigation into developers who profiteered from federal housing contracts. Investigators had discovered that builders were inflating construction budgets to pocket the gap between what they claimed a project cost and what it actually cost to build. The case centered on Beach Haven.
An FHA investigator found a gap of at least $3. 5 million between reported costs and actual expenditures, money that never returned to the federal program. Fred and his business partner had purchased a piece of land for $34,200, then leased the same land back to their own corporation for nearly $77,000 per year under a 99-year contract. He had also inflated the overall construction budget to secure a larger loan than the project required, and every dollar of the gap became profit.
Senator Homer Capehart of Indiana called what he was hearing “nauseous” and compared the profiteering to the Teapot Dome scandal, the 1920s bribery case that sent a cabinet secretary to prison. Fred’s testimony offered the committee almost nothing. Asked when he had purchased a specific property, he told the senators it might have been five, eight, or ten years earlier. Pressed on other details, he responded with long pauses and vague answers that appeared designed to run out the clock.
One more detail emerged: his business partner on Beach Haven held a 25% stake in the project and had documented connections to the Gambino and Genovese crime families. Fred confirmed the partnership but declined to discuss his partner’s background. The hearings made front pages and editorials demanded reform. Then almost nothing happened.
No charges were filed, no fines were levied, and no contracts were revoked. The Brooklyn political machine held firm, and within a few years Fred broke ground on Trump Village. Donald Trump’s uncle, John George Trump, was Fred’s younger brother, and their paths could not have diverged more sharply. While Fred mass-produced row houses, John completed a doctorate at MIT and worked alongside physicist Robert Van de Graaff developing high-voltage electrostatic generators capable of producing over a million volts of energy.
They adapted the generators to deliver targeted radiation to tumors previously considered inoperable, pioneering an approach that became a foundation of modern radiation oncology. During World War II, John worked on radar systems at MIT’s Radiation Laboratory. In 1943, after Nikola Tesla died alone in a New York hotel room, the Office of Alien Property called John in to review Tesla’s papers to determine whether his theoretical “death ray” weapon posed any military risk. John concluded that nothing in the collection contained a workable weapons design.
John later co-founded High Voltage Engineering Corporation, which commercialized the generator technology for hospitals and research institutions worldwide. In 1983, President Reagan presented him with the National Medal of Science. He died in February 1985 at 77. Donald Trump has mentioned his uncle frequently over the years, but John spent his entire career outside the family business and died the least remembered Trump of his generation.
Fred’s eldest son, Fred Jr. , known as Freddy, was a natural entertainer, warm and social. He joined a historically Jewish fraternity at Lehigh University even though his family was not Jewish. He was the expected heir to the family business and tried to work in it, but the fit was wrong.
What held him was flying. In 1964, he applied to the Trans World Airlines pilot training program and was accepted, qualifying as a co-pilot. Fred Senior reportedly dismissed the career with a phrase that would follow his son for the rest of his life, calling him a “chauffeur in the sky. ” Donald, ten years younger and already working in the family business, echoed the tone: “Come on, Freddy, what are you doing?
You’re wasting your time. ”
Freddy married Linda Clapp in 1962, a stewardess he met while she was vacationing in the Bahamas. The drinking started by the late 1960s. His work suffered, TWA let him go, and the marriage ended in divorce in the mid-1970s.
He drifted back into his father’s orbit, taking a position doing maintenance on Trump properties. He moved back into his parents’ 23-room mansion on Midland Parkway, where he lived in an unfurnished attic. On September 26, 1981, Freddy died of a heart attack at 42. Chronic alcohol abuse had destroyed his body.
Years later, Donald described his brother as “a fantastic guy who got stuck on alcohol,” and in a separate conversation offered something rarer: “I do regret having put pressure on him. ”
The family business had long had a policy shaped by race. On rental applications at Trump-owned apartment buildings, employees had developed a system: when a Black person applied, staff marked the paperwork with a single letter C, for “colored. ” The practice was found across multiple properties maintained over years, consistent enough to constitute a pattern.
In October 1973, the Department of Justice filed a civil rights lawsuit against Fred Trump, Donald Trump, and Trump Management Corporation, charging systematic violation of the Fair Housing Act across 39 buildings containing more than 14,000 rental units. The government built its case through testing. Pairs of applicants with comparable income and qualifications were sent to Trump rental offices, one Black and one white. The results were consistent: white applicants were shown available apartments and invited to sign leases, while Black applicants were told nothing was open.
At a property called Ocean Terrace, barely 1% of tenants were Black. At Lincoln Shore, the figure was zero. Fred and Donald did not respond with contrition. They hired Roy Cohn, who had built a reputation as chief counsel to Senator Joseph McCarthy during the anti-communist hearings, and whose client list later included mob bosses, real estate developers, and political operators.
Cohn’s first move was to file a counter-suit against the Justice Department for $100 million, accusing the government of unfair investigation tactics. It was dismissed, but it sent a public signal that the Trumps considered themselves the wronged party. The case was settled in June 1975. Under the agreement, Trump Management committed to advertise vacancies in minority-focused media, notify the Urban League of available units, and allow the Justice Department to review its compliance.
The settlement did not require Fred or Donald to admit any discrimination and imposed no financial penalty. Cohn remained Donald’s personal attorney and adviser for the next decade before being disbarred in 1986. In 1992, Fred Trump’s children created a company called All County Building Supply and Maintenance. The company purchased boilers, cleaning supplies, and maintenance equipment for Fred’s apartment buildings, then billed each building at cost plus a service fee.
According to a New York Times investigation published in 2018, every invoice carried a markup of 20% to 50% above the actual purchase price, and the difference flowed directly to Fred’s four surviving children. The payments were structured to look like operating costs, and the IRS registered the invoices as routine maintenance expenses. The Times reviewed more than 100,000 pages of financial records, including confidential tax returns, and documented a pattern of transfers stretching back decades. Fred and Mary Trump had moved more than $1 billion in real estate assets to their children through property sales priced far below market value, interest-free loans that were never repaid, trust arrangements structured to shrink the taxable estate, and the All County invoice scheme.
Fred’s real estate holdings were listed on tax filings at a combined $41. 4 million; the same properties were later sold for more than 16 times that amount. On the total value of the transfers, the family paid roughly 5% in taxes. The investigation later won the Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting.
By the time the largest transfers were taking place, Fred had received an Alzheimer’s diagnosis in the early 1990s. Legal and financial authority shifted to his children, primarily Donald and Robert. Fred Trump died on June 25, 1999, at 93. Mary died 13 months later.
The estate was divided according to a will revised multiple times, including during the years of Fred’s illness. Fred Junior’s two children, Mary and Frederick III, received significantly less than their aunts and uncles. Frederick III had a young son named William born with cerebral palsy, and the child’s medical costs were covered through a health insurance plan carried by the family business. According to Mary Trump’s later account and legal filings, that coverage was terminated after she and her brother formally contested the terms of the will.
A family worth over a billion dollars had cut medical insurance for an infant with a serious neurological condition while his father was in the middle of a legal dispute over inheritance. Mary and Frederick III settled in 2001, accepting approximately $2. 7 million and signing away their claims. Neither had access to the full scope of the family’s financial records at the time.
When the Times published its investigation in October 2018, the statute of limitations had expired on most of the transactions described. In 2020, Mary Trump published a memoir, Too Much and Never Enough, describing the family dynamics that shaped her father’s life. That same year, she filed a lawsuit against Donald Trump, Maryanne Trump Barry, and the estate of Robert Trump, alleging fraud and misrepresentation of the value of the estate. The court ruled against her, finding that the 2001 agreement was legally binding.
The house on Midland Parkway was sold after Fred and Mary died, and the Tudor house on Wareham Place where Donald was born was auctioned to a private buyer for $2. 14 million. The physical landmarks of the family’s life in Queens passed into other hands one by one. Kallstadt is still there.
The vineyards line the same Palatinate hillsides that Friedrich Trump’s family worked before he was born. In the Landau archive in Speyer, a letter sits in a filing cabinet, written by a man about to be expelled from his country. The handwriting is careful, and the tone shifts between deference and desperation. The request was denied.
Friedrich is buried at All Faiths Cemetery in the Middle Village neighborhood of Queens, with Elizabeth near him. Fred is there as well, the builder who turned government contracts and political favors into tens of thousands of apartments, and who spent three decades telling everyone his family came from Sweden. Fred Jr. is nearby.
John, the brother who left no buildings, chose a life outside the family business and is not buried with the others in Queens. The buildings Fred Senior constructed still stand across Brooklyn and Queens, and tens of thousands of people live in apartments he built. His name appears on almost none of them.
That was his preference.