Further reading, Supplement the Second:
=> By the early 1890s, Friedrich had learned English; morphed from a skinny teenager into an adult man with a handlebar moustache; become a naturalized U.S. citizen, an easy matter at a time when there were no immigration quotas (much less debates about “birthright”); changed the spelling of his name to the more American-sounding Frederick; and made his way to Seattle...
A quick study, Trump headed for a prime location, the city’s red-light district, known as the Lava Beds. There he leased a tiny storefront restaurant named the Poodle Dog, which had a kitchen and a bar and advertised “private rooms for ladies”–code for prostitutes. It would allow the resourceful Trump, who renamed it the Dairy Restaurant, to offer the restless, frustrated public some right-now satisfaction in the form of food, booze and easily available sex.
... In 1894, he heard that John D. Rockefeller, the wealthiest man in the world, was bankrolling a mining operation in a small town north of Seattle named Monte Cristo. Without delay, Trump scoped out the best location there, secured it by filing a bogus mineral claim, built a hotel on the parcel even though it didn’t actually belong to him, and began giving the customers, once again, exactly what they wanted: plenty to eat, lots to drink and of course women.
... By June 1900, he was living in White Horse, a Yukon outpost at the end of the newly built railroad but hundreds of miles south of the gold fields, and he was the proprietor of yet another eatery, the Arctic Restaurant. Once again, he had chosen a prime location, across the street from the railroad depot; once again he had built on land for which he did not have a valid legal claim; and once again he was deploying the Trump formula of giving customers still in search of their first nugget something they could enjoy on the spot—a bar, gambling facilities and separate areas, curtained off with dark velvet, for what were known as “sporting ladies.”
... Unlike his grandson, who would become too big to fail in business and, more recently, to ignore in politics, Friedrich Trump was not big enough to get away with being a draft-dodger. He and his wife, then pregnant with Fred, Donald’s father, would not be allowed to resume their German citizenship and it would not be extended to their daughter; instead, they were deported—the same fate that Donald would like to impose on undocumented immigrants in the U.S. today. <=
Ironical story is ironical.
=> In the mid-50s, when he was building apartments financed by New York state, Fred Trump found more loopholes. He set up shell equipment companies and then rented bulldozers and dump trucks from them at inflated prices; he overestimated the cost of construction and pocketed the difference when he came in remarkably far under budget; and when called to account before a state commission, he made the case that his huge profits were not unethical because that was what he was good at and it was the way it should be.
In the 1970s, when Donald came into the family business, these same lessons from his grandfather and father would provide the template for everything he did. He gave his customers not what they thought they wanted but what they actually wanted, buildings that were big and brassy, full of mirrors and shiny surfaces. <=
Say, there's a spot-on description for what he's still doing now. Nailed it.
=> Known for being hands-on with every construction project, he cut costs on Trump Tower by using undocumented Polish demolition workers who were paid an under-the-table $5 an hour and slept on the building site, but he later testified in court that he hadn’t noticed them. When construction was stalled on his first Atlantic City casino, he misrepresented this state of affairs to visiting executives from his partner on the project, Holiday Inns, by directing bulldozer drivers to dig pointless holes and pile up dirt—a subterfuge he later bragged about in his first book,
The Art Of The Deal. He kept going through setbacks—divorces, corporate bankruptcies and projects that seemed to have run into stone walls—always spinning a positive scenario in which he was coming out on top and everyone else was left in the dust. And regardless of the circumstances, he insisted that he was a winner, everyone else was a loser, end of story. <= ---
The Man (men) who made Donald Rump Who He Is