1. Fred Trump was the father of the 45th and 47th US president, Donald Trump.
58 Facts About Fred Trump
2.
Fred Trump was investigated for profiteering by a US Senate committee in 1954 and again by New York State in 1966.
3.
Donald Fred Trump became the president of his father's real-estate business in 1971.
4.
In 1927, Fred Trump was arrested at a Ku Klux Klan demonstration; there is no conclusive evidence that he supported the organization.
5.
From World War II onward, to avoid associations with Nazism, Fred Trump denied his German ancestry and supported Jewish causes.
6.
Fred Trump was conceived in Bavaria, where his parents wished to residency, but Friedrich was banished for dodging the draft.
7.
The family returned to New York on July 1,1905, and moved to the Bronx, where Frederick Christ Trump was born on October 11.
8.
At the age of 10, Fred Trump worked as a delivery boy for a butcher.
9.
From 1918 to 1923, Fred Trump attended Richmond Hill High School in Queens, while working as a caddy, curb whitewasher, delivery boy, and newspaper hawker.
10.
Interested in becoming a builder, Fred Trump put up a garage for a neighbor and took night classes in carpentry and reading blueprints; he reputedly studied plumbing, masonry, and electrical wiring via correspondence courses, although other biographical sources limit his construction education to the period after high school when he was working in the field.
11.
Fred Trump's mother held the business in her name until he reached 21, the age of majority.
12.
Fred Trump purportedly built 19 more homes by 1926 in Hollis, Queens, selling some before they were finished to finance others.
13.
In 1927, Fred Trump was arrested at a Ku Klux Klan demonstration, although there is no conclusive evidence that he supported the organization.
14.
In 1933, Fred Trump built one of New York City's first modern supermarkets, called Fred Trump Market, in Woodhaven, Queens.
15.
Fred Trump made use of loan subsidies created by the Federal Housing Administration not long after the program was initiated via the National Housing Act of 1934, which enabled the discriminatory practice of redlining.
16.
Fred Trump planned to build 700 houses there, which would have been both his and the state FHA office's biggest project to date, but following the attack on Pearl Harbor and the United States's declaration of war on Japan, the project was dissolved in favor of defense housing at the East Coast's naval nexus, Hampton Roads's Norfolk, Virginia, where Fred Trump was already working on an apartment complex.
17.
Congress added a provision to the National Housing Act generating mortgage insurance for defense apartments, through which Fred Trump was allowed to own the properties he built for war workers.
18.
Fred Trump built barracks and garden apartments for US Navy personnel near major shipyards in Norfolk and Newport News, Virginia, as well as Chester, Pennsylvania.
19.
Decades after hiring PR man Howard Rubenstein to generate press about his life story mirroring the rags-to-riches novels of 19th-century author Horatio Alger, in 1985, Fred Trump was awarded the Horatio Alger Award.
20.
Fred Trump then attributed to William Shakespeare the saying "Never follow an empty wagon because", pointing to his cranium, "nothing ever falls off".
21.
Fred Trump went on to introduce his surviving nuclear family.
22.
Fred Trump argued that because he had not withdrawn the money, he had not literally pocketed the profits.
23.
In 1961, Trump donated $2,500 to the re-election campaign of New York mayor Robert F Wagner Jr.
24.
Fred Trump built more than 27,000 low-income apartments and row houses in the New York area altogether, including Brooklyn and Queens.
25.
In 1966, Fred Trump was again investigated for windfall profiteering, this time by New York State investigators.
26.
Under testimony on January 27,1966, Fred Trump said that he had personally done nothing wrong and praised the success of his building project.
27.
At a highly publicized ceremony in September 1966, Fred Trump demolished the park's Pavilion of Fun, a large glass-enclosed amusement center.
28.
Fred Trump reportedly sold bricks to ceremony guests to smash the remaining glass panels, which included an iconic representation of the park's mascot, the "Funny Face".
29.
That year, Fred Trump reputedly secured Donald a deferment from the Vietnam War by prioritizing maintenance for a tenant who, ostensibly in exchange, diagnosed Donald with bone spurs.
30.
The younger Fred Trump entered the real-estate business in Manhattan, while his father operated primarily in Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island.
31.
Some sources state that Fred Trump planned the expansion of the business to Manhattan.
32.
Fred Trump has great vision and everything he touches seems to turn to gold.
33.
Minority applicants turned away from renting apartments complained to the New York City Commission on Human Rights and the Urban League, leading these groups to send test applicants to Fred Trump-owned complexes in July 1972.
34.
Fred Trump advised me not to rent to persons on welfare.
35.
In early 1976, Fred Trump was ordered by a county judge to correct code violations in a 504-unit property in Seat Pleasant, Maryland.
36.
In 1987, when Donald's loan debt to his father exceeded $11 million, Fred invested $15.5 million in Trump Palace Condominiums; in 1991, he sold these shares to his son for $10,000, thus appearing to evade millions of dollars in gift taxes by masking a hidden donation, and benefiting from a legally questionable write-off.
37.
In 1976, Fred Trump set up trust funds of $1 million for each of his five children and three grandchildren, which paid out yearly dividends.
38.
Mary L Trump recounted that as her grandfather's dementia progressed, he failed to recognize people he had known for decades, including her and Donald.
39.
In 1993, the anticipated shares of Fred Trump's estate amounted to $35 million for each surviving child.
40.
Fred Trump finally fell ill with pneumonia and was admitted to Long Island Jewish Medical Center for a few weeks, where he died at age 93 on June 25,1999.
41.
Fred Trump's body was buried in a family plot at the Lutheran-Christian All Faiths Cemetery in Middle Village, Queens.
42.
Fred Trump's will divided over $20 million after taxes among his surviving children and grandchildren.
43.
In December 2003, it was reported that Fred Trump's four surviving children would sell the apartments they acquired in 1997 to an investment group led by Rubin Schron, priced at $600 million; the sale occurred in May 2004.
44.
Fred Trump met his future wife, Mary Anne MacLeod, an immigrant from Tong, Lewis, Scotland, at a dance party in the early to mid-1930s.
45.
Fred Trump told his mother the same evening that he had met his future wife.
46.
Fred Trump later falsely claimed that he was of Swedish descent, and in 1973 wrongly stated that he was born in New Jersey; these deceptions were sustained in the 1980s by Donald Fred Trump and the author of Donald's first biography.
47.
Fred Trump was a teetotaler and an authoritarian parent, imposing strict table manners and curfews, as well as forbidding cursing, lipstick, and snacking between meals.
48.
Additionally, the mansion featured a surveillance system and an intercom, which Fred Trump used to censure his children.
49.
Fred Trump took his children to building sites to collect empty bottles to return for the deposits.
50.
Fred Trump was a supporter of Southern Baptist evangelist Billy Graham, whom he took his family to see speak at Yankee Stadium.
51.
Fred and Mary Trump supported medical charities by donating buildings.
52.
Fred Trump supported the private Kew-Forest School, where his children attended and he served on the board of directors.
53.
Together with Donald in the 1980s, Fred provided over $350,000 to city politicians including Mayor Ed Koch, Council president Andrew Stein, Controller Harrison J Goldin, and four of the five borough presidents.
54.
Jerome Tuccille's 1985 biography of Donald Trump repeats Fred's fabrication that he was born in New Jersey and erroneously states that his middle name was Charles.
55.
Donald's The Art of the Deal alleges that Fred Trump was born in New Jersey and further that he was the son of an immigrant from Sweden.
56.
In 1989, Fred Trump reputedly lectured Donald that he could "have a thousand mistresses" but not to get caught in a single specific extramarital affair.
57.
In 2019, the American journalist and conspiracy theorist Wayne Madsen accused Fred Trump of being a Nazi sympathizer on the basis of the German American Bund's presence in New York.
58.
In mid-2020, fact-checking company Logically concluded that there was a lack of clear evidence that Fred Trump was a Nazi supporter.