THE ATLANTIC OCTOBER 2019 83his petition for residency is denied. Indignant, he
takes his new family and his new money back to
New York City, where he is free to pursue that
shape-shifting mirage—is it starting to resemble
respectability?— without the weight of a past. By
the time the Spanish flu takes him at age 49, he’s
amassed a modest fortune—the modern equivalent
of half a million dollars—and a small portfolio of
outer-borough properties. It isn’t Rockefeller money,
but it’s enough, just barely, to launch a dynasty.
To keep the family afloat, Friedrich’s widow, Eliza-
beth, assigns each of her children a job in their fledg-
ling real-estate business. But it’s Fred, the middle
child, who has a knack for building, both houses and
empires, and he takes charge shortly after high school.
Fred runs the enterprise in a clock-racing,
corner- cutting scramble, selling each new house to
cover construction costs for the last. He backslaps
his way through Brooklyn’s political machine, cozies
up to mobsters. One house in Woodhaven leads to
two in Queens Village, then several more in Hollis.
When the federal government starts offering loans
to Depression- plagued developers, Fred is first in
line—and soon he has an army of shovel-wielding
workers digging 450 foundations out of the East
Flatbush swampland.
As rows of mass-produced “Trump Homes”
spread across Brooklyn and Queens, the papers call
Fred the Henry Ford of home building. Later, when
the scandals start to come out—the charges of profi-
teering, and fraud, and banning black tenants—the
papers find other things to call him. Infamy attends
each new triumph. By the 1950s, he has built thou-
sands of houses and apartments, and become the
kind of landlord Woody Guthrie writes songs about.
When the time comes to plan his own succession,
Fred turns first to his eldest son and namesake. But
Fred Jr. has no feel for the business—he’s soft and
free-spirited, and wants to fly airplanes. Donald is
the one with a taste for combat, and to him the great
unconquered frontier lies across the East River. Don-
ald sees more than money in Manhattan. He sees
fame, status, entrée into elite society—things the
Trumps have never had.
The market on the island is crowded and hos-
tile, but Fred and Donald work closely to plot their
invasion. Together, they cook books, fleece inves-
tors, and fool one regulator after another. Some of
the scion’s schemes pay off. Others prove disas trous.
But his signal achievement is forging the Donald
Trump persona itself—that high-flying playboy, that
self-made man, that larger-than-life titan the tab-
loids can’t resist. It’s a creation of both father and
son, and it will do more for the family business than
any casino or skyscraper.
Today a photo of Fred sits in the Oval Office, look-
ing out on an empire much vaster and more power-
ful than even he could have imagined. And while
the president writes his chapter in history, the next
generation waits in the wings, jockeying for position,
feuding over status, knowing only one of them can
be the heir.
I.
They stood shoulder to shoulder—Don Jr., Ivanka, Jared, and Eric— watching
the conquest unfold on TV. Ohio was theirs. Then North Carolina and Flor-
ida, too. The vaunted midwestern “blue wall” was crumbling on live TV, as
ashen-faced pundits muttered about the electoral map. The scene was sur-
real, and delicious.
While Don and Eric fielded congratulatory text messages, some in the
room noticed Ivanka cut through the thick scrum of campaign aides and
attach herself to her father’s side. “Did you hear that, Dad?” she asked when-
ever the TV delivered good news, expertly guarding his attention just as she
had since she was a young girl.
Around midnight, the family realized they would need a victory speech.
No one had bothered to write one, because Trump wasn’t supposed to win—
at least not electorally. He was supposed to go down in a spectacular blaze
of made-for-TV martyrdom that all of them could capitalize on. Ivanka had
a book coming out. Don and Eric were working on a line of patriotically
themed budget hotels. And preliminary talks were under way to launch a
Trump-branded TV network that would turn disgruntled voters into viewers.
Now they needed a new plan.
One by one, they retreated from the buzzing hive on the 14th floor of
Trump Tower and rode the elevator up to their father’s penthouse. Steve
Bannon and Stephen Miller—sleep-deprived and pulsing with adrenaline—
began punching out a draft for the president-elect to read. But Ivanka took
one glance over Miller’s shoulder and concluded that it wouldn’t do. (Some-
one who read it later summed up the tone as “We won; fuck you.”) The next
act of the Trump story was beginning tonight. This was a task for family.
Gathered around the dining-room table with a coterie of aides and allies,
Trump’s three oldest children took turns dictating while the speechwriter
typed. The final product—a laundry list of thank yous interspersed with patri-
otic platitudes—was notable only for its un-Trumpian restraint. With his fam-
ily lined up behind him onstage, Trump intoned, “I pledge to every citizen of
our land that I will be president for all Americans.”
The speech was bland and forgettable, but hall-of-fame oratory wasn’t
the goal. The remarks were a placeholder, a chance for the family to work
out their next moves. “They’re undeniably adaptable,” Kellyanne Conway,
a senior advi ser to the president, told me of Trump’s children. “When the
family business was real estate, they learned contracts and building approv-
als and architecture. Then it was television, and they learned that industry.
Now, a decade later, they’ve turned around and learned politics.”
But this latest reinvention has set off a power struggle within the first
family, one that has played out largely away from public view. The presi-
dent and his children—who declined to be interviewed for this story—have
labored to project an image of unity. But over the past several months, I
spoke with dozens of people close to the Trumps, including friends, for-
mer employees, White House officials, and campaign aides. The succes-
sion battle they described is marked by old grievances, petty rivalries—and
deceptively high stakes.
In his brief time on the political stage, Donald Trump has comman-
deered the national conservative movement, remade the Republican Party
in his image, and used his office to confer untold value on the Trump brand.