Дональд Трамп - Triggered

My grandfather Fred Trump grew up in a working-class section of Queens called Woodhaven. When he was a little boy, he sold a local newspaper, making a half-cent a copy. Once he became strong enough to carry a golf bag, he caddied at the nearby Forest Park Golf Course. His building career began in his early teens. It was then that he took a job as a carpenter’s assistant. In the 1920s, Woodhaven was booming. New manufacturing offered plenty of jobs, and improved transportation made it attractive for commuters into the city. Houses went up by the hundreds. My grandfather learned the building trade on the job site and from the ground up. It was a good thing that work was steady. When he was just thirteen, his father passed away, making him the man of the house. He was responsible for putting food on the table for his mother, sister, and brother.

When I was young, my parents would take us—my sister, brother, and me—to visit my grandparents in Jamaica Estates once a month. In the house my father had grown up in, my grandmother would make a big Sunday dinner. Sometimes during those visits, my grandfather would take me to visit job sites or collect rents at some of his properties. The job site stuff was fun; the rent stuff, not so much. My grandfather had strict Germanic ways, and because he had become the man of the house at thirteen, he had a different perspective on life. It was a perspective that not a lot of people have today. His motto was “To retire is to expire.” He really didn’t know how to have fun. Even late into life, in his 90s with Alzheimer’s disease, he went into the office because that’s what he knew and loved. My uncle kept him busy with older expired contracts because work was his life.

I don’t know if I ever fully enjoyed most of the time I spent with him as a kid. As a child, it was tough to relate to him. But I would come to respect and truly appreciate the drive and work ethic I saw in him—the pure survival mode he had to take on when he was a small child changed him permanently. It was unlike anything I ever could have imagined.

By high school, Fred Trump had started his own construction business. He built a garage for a guy and did it better, cheaper, faster than any of his competitors. Then he built another one. And another one, putting them up so fast it was as if he were trying to keep up with the production of Henry Ford’s Model T, which was then coming off the assembly line. He called his company E. Trump & Son. His mother’s name was Elizabeth, and she took care of the books until Fred was legally old enough to do it himself. By then he was already well on his way to putting up twenty buildings. His properties weren’t fancy, but they were “spic and span,” functional, and solidly built. “Mint condition” was the phrase he would use to describe them. He paid the same attention to small details that my father would, only Fred Trump’s focus was on non-luxury products. Because of that, he would go on to become one of the biggest developers in Brooklyn. His was the quintessential Horatio Alger story, one of hard work, determination, and opportunity.

As a young boy, my dad would go to job sites with his father, just as I did with both of them. I guess you could say my future was cemented during that time.

Now, it’s not as though I was destined to become Donald J. Trump 2.0. There’s only one of that man. The idea, however, that I wouldn’t work for The Trump Organization now seems preposterous, although it took me a year out in the woods to realize that. It was never a question of whether I would go back to New York City, just when.

The “when” came on a Tuesday in the second week of September 2001. I was coming out of the woods in Colorado, fresh off a morning elk hunt during archery season, when I heard the news on the radio driving over Independence Pass back into town. Like many people, when I first heard that a plane had flown into the World Trade Center, I thought it was a small single-engine. I figured it was small and hard to control, like one of the planes I used to fly. When I found out it was a terrorist attack, and the towers had collapsed, killing nearly three thousand people, there was only one place I wanted to be.

A day or two later, I packed up the Jeep and headed back home.

My first job in the real estate business after college was on a project called Trump Place that now sits on a seventy-six-acre plot of land on the banks of the Hudson River. I was working on the building with some of my father’s partners, Hudson Waterfront Associates. Once the New York Central Railroad yards, it was the last undeveloped tract in Manhattan. I learned about “ground-up” construction. The project included a combination of very-high-end condominiums and rental apartments.

Along with construction, I learned marketing and leasing. My next assignment came two years later and was a completely different kind of construction from the first job. We bought an existing seventy-five-year-old building on Park Avenue and turned it into high-end condominiums. The old adage “They don’t build them like they used to” doesn’t necessarily mean what you might think. The building had been the Hotel Delmonico, and there was a surprise behind every wall. There were rent-controlled apartments that we had to retrofit around, floors and walls that didn’t match the building drawings that we had. We also had a couple of partners, including General Electric Pension Trust. There were lots of balls in the air. Because I was young enough and dumb enough, I did all the jobs no one else wanted to do. I knew that everyone on the project had about 10 percent of his or her job they hated doing. During those first years, I made it my business to take that 10 percent off their hands. An executive was too busy to handle some aspect of the construction or marketing? I’d gladly take it off his or her plate. Because of my willingness to work and learn, I went from a project manager to basically having ownership of all aspects of the job.

Another old adage is “Responsibility is taken, not given.” I took that one to heart.

The next job I worked on was the Trump International Hotel & Tower in Chicago. Here again, the project was a totally different animal than the other jobs. The plans called for a ninety-eight-story tower with a hotel, condominiums, and retail space including restaurants and a spa, built on the banks of the Chicago River. With the world-renowned architect Adrian Smith we came up with a fabulous design built on the site of the former Chicago Sun-Times building. Long considered an eyesore on a beautiful riverside plot of land, it was the only project I ever worked on where no one was upset that we were demolishing a building.

With a growing family and commuting two or three times a week to Chicago, I wasn’t watching intently what was going on in Washington, DC. My interest in politics, such as it was, was mostly local, fiscally conservative, and seen through a business lens. I’d show up at certain events and support certain politicians who could give us support when we needed it during every project. I didn’t necessarily have to believe in the person’s politics (I’m in New York City, after all, so most times I didn’t) or particularly love the politicians with whom I dealt. But as Michael Corleone said to his brother Sonny in The Godfather , “It’s not personal, it’s strictly business.” At least most of the time, that is. Every now and then you ran into a politician who took things very personally.

In the mid-eighties, when my father first began planning the development of the West Side Yard, a local state assemblyman from the district fought the project as though he had a personal vendetta. Even more curious was that his opposition to the plan made no sense. The land was desolate, crime-ridden, and an eyesore. DJT was going to turn it into a beautiful, thriving business and residential community. My father even scaled his plans down to appease the assemblyman and others, to no avail. Then, in 1993, the assemblyman ran for Congress and was elected to represent the Tenth District on the west side of Manhattan. He took his hostility toward my father with him to Washington. One of the aspects of the planned construction involved moving the West Side Highway. In order to do so, DJT needed federal approval and funds. The congressman from the west side went out of his way to make sure the federal government would not give my dad a dime.