Too Much and Never Enough, стр. 29

pointless. What exactly was he being promoted to do? My grandfather had no development projects, the political power structure he’d depended on for decades was unraveling, and New York City was in dire financial straits. The main purpose of the promotion was to punish and shame Freddy. It was the latest in a long line of such punishments, but it was almost certainly the worst, especially given the context in which it happened.

Fred was determined to find a role for Donald. He had begun to realize that although his middle son didn’t have the temperament for the day-to-day attention to detail that was required to run his business, he had something more valuable: bold ideas and the chutzpah to realize them. Fred had long harbored aspirations to expand his empire across the river into Manhattan, the Holy Grail of New York City real estate developers. His early career had demonstrated that he had a knack for self-promotion, dissembling, and hyperbole. But as the first-generation son of German immigrants, Fred had English as his second language and he needed to improve his communication skills—he had taken the Dale Carnegie course for a reason, and it wasn’t to boost his self-confidence. But the course had been a failure. And there was another obstacle, perhaps even more difficult to overcome: Fred’s mother, as forward thinking as she had been in some ways, was generally very austere and traditional. It was okay for her son to be successful and rich. It was not okay for him to show off.

Donald had no such restraint. He hated Brooklyn as much as Freddy did but for very different reasons—the bleak working-class smallness of it, the lack of “potential.” He couldn’t get out of there fast enough. Trump Management was located on Avenue Z, right in the middle of Beach Haven in South Brooklyn, one of my grandfather’s largest apartment complexes. He hadn’t made many alterations. The narrow outer office was crammed with too many desks, and the small windows admitted little light. If Donald had thought of the surrounding buildings and complexes in terms of number of units, the value of the ground leases, and the sheer volume of income that poured into Trump Management every month, he would have recognized the huge opportunity. Instead, whenever he stood outside the office and surveyed the utilitarian sameness of Beach Haven, he must have felt suffocated by the sense that it was all beneath him. A future in Brooklyn wasn’t what he wanted for himself, and he was determined to get out as quickly as possible.

Besides being driven around Manhattan by a chauffeur whose salary his father’s company paid, in a Cadillac his father’s company leased to “scope out properties,” Donald’s job description seems to have included lying about his “accomplishments” and allegedly refusing to rent apartments to black people (which would become the subject of a Justice Department lawsuit accusing my grandfather and Donald of discrimination).

Donald dedicated a significant portion of his time to crafting an image for himself among the Manhattan circles he was desperate to join. Having grown up a member of the first television generation, he had spent hours watching the medium, the episodic nature of which appealed to him. That helped shape the slick, superficial image he would come to both represent and embody. His comfort with portraying that image, along with his father’s favor and the material security his father’s wealth afforded him, gave him the unearned confidence to pull off what even at the beginning was a charade: selling himself not just as a rich playboy but as a brilliant, self-made businessman.

In those early days, that expensive endeavor was being enthusiastically, if clandestinely, funded by my grandfather. Fred didn’t immediately realize the scope of Donald’s limitations and had no idea that he was essentially promoting a fiction, but Donald was happy to spend his father’s money either way. For his part, Fred was determined to keep money pouring into his son’s pocket. In the late 1960s, for example, Fred developed a high-rise for the elderly in New Jersey, a project that was in part an exercise in how to get government subsidies (Fred received a $7.8 million, practically interest-free loan to cover 90 percent of the cost of the project’s construction) and in part an example of how far he was willing to go to enrich his second son. Although Donald put no money toward the development costs of the building, he received consulting fees, and he was paid to manage the property, a job for which there were already full-time employees on site. That one project alone netted Donald tens of thousands of dollars a year despite his having done essentially nothing and having risked nothing to develop, advance, or manage it.

In a similar sleight of hand, Fred bought Swifton Gardens, an FHA project originally costing $10 million to build, at auction for $5.6 million. In addition, he secured a $5.7 million mortgage, which also covered the cost of upgrades and repairs, essentially paying zero dollars for the buildings. When he later sold the property for $6.75 million, Donald got all of the credit and took most of the profits.

My dad’s dream of flying had been taken away from him, and he had now lost his birthright. He was no longer a husband; he barely saw his kids. He had no idea what was left for him or what he was going to do next. He did know that the only way for him to retain any self-respect was to walk away from Trump Management, this time for good.

Dad’s first apartment after he moved out of the Highlander was a studio in the basement of a brick row house on a quiet, shady street in Sunnyside, Queens. He was thirty-two years old and had never lived on his own.

The first thing we saw when we walked through the door was a tank holding two garter snakes and a terrarium with a ball python.

Another tank stocked with goldfish, and another