Sunday, February 21, 2016

Donald Trump's Inherited Wealth and Family Background Revisited

The ultra-rich deal-maker and television celebrity (whose campaign for the 2016 Republican Party presidential nomination has been given a lot of Big Media television news coverage in recent months), Donald Trump, apparently received a lot of help, historically, from his multi-millionaire father, Fred Trump, in becoming an extremely wealthy business deal-maker. As former Village Voice reporter Wayne Barrett's 1992 book, Trump: The Deals and The Downfall, observed:


"...Recognizing how dependent Donald [Trump]'s early career was on his father's resources and guile, I rummaged through half-a-century of Fred Trump history, finding haunting parallels between the machinations of the father and son....

"His father, Fred Trump, was more than a friend to him, more than a parent...He had grown up under Fred's stern watch...He liked to pretend he'd done it on his own, announcing that `the working man likes me because he knows I didn't inherit what I've built'...The Trump legend--invented by Donald himself--never acknowledged the defining imprint of Fred's money...on the...early deals that were the foundation of his success....

"...The bankers sifting through Donald's assets had begun asking about Fred [Trump]'s...They sensed that his steady rental and co-op empire, thousands of middle-class apartments largely unencumbered by debt, might become Donald's...They concluded that Fred had a minimum of $150 million `that could be drawn on,' according to one involved banker..."

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