Trump Revealed - Softcover

Michael Kranish; Marc Fisher

Softcover

ISBN 10: 147115971X ISBN 13: 9781471159718

Publisher: Simon And Schuster, 2016

Synopsis

The most current and definitive investigation into the life and times of the President of the United States, Donald Trump. Trump Revealed was reported by a team of award-winning Washington Post journalists and co-authored by investigative political reporter Michael Kranish and senior editor Marc Fisher. Trump Revealed offers the most thorough and wide-ranging examination of Donald Trump's public and private lives to date, from his upbringing in Queens and formative years at the New York Military Academy, to his turbulent careers in real estate and entertainment, to his astonishing rise as the Republican presidential nominee and now President-elect. The book is based on the investigative reporting of more than two dozen Washington Post reporters and researchers who leveraged their expertise in politics, business, legal affairs, sports and other areas. The effort was guided by a team of editors headed by Executive Editor Martin Baron, who joined the newspaper in 2013 after his successful tenure running The Boston Globe. His team's investigation of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church inspired the Academy Award-winning film Spotlight, which stars Michael Keaton, Mark Ruffalo and Rachel McAdams.

About this title

About the Author

Marc Fisher is a senior editor at The Washington Post, where he has been the enterprise editor, local columnist, and Berlin bureau chief, among other positions over thirty years at the paper. He is the author of Something in the Air, a history of radio, and After the Wall, an account of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany. Fisher wrote several of the Washington Post articles that won the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting in 2016 and the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in 2014. Visit MarcFisher.com. Michael Kranish is an investigative political reporter for The Washington Post. He is the coauthor of John F. Kerry and The Real Romney, both Boston Globe biographies of the presidential candidates, and the author of Flight from Monticello: Thomas Jefferson at War. He was the recipient of the Society of Professional Journalists Award for Washington Correspondence in 2016. Visit MichaelKranish.com.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Trump Revealed 1

Gold Rush: The New Land

On a June day in 2008 by the northwest coast of Scotland, a cluster of townsfolk in the Outer Hebrides gazed skyward at an approaching airplane. The islands on which they lived were shaped like a medieval club, narrow at the southern end, thick at the north, splayed amid choppy gray-blue waters. Much of the lightly populated land appeared from afar to be an endless greensward, fields reaching to ragged cliffs and rocky beaches, beyond which lay a string of islets. The islanders waited as the Boeing 727 banked toward them.

The jet was an unusual visitor, nothing like the propeller-powered puddle jumpers or rattling Royal Mail craft that frequented the island. Having traversed the Atlantic Ocean on its voyage from Boston, the craft cut through the winds, bounced its wheels on the tarmac, and taxied toward the small terminal in Stornoway, population eight thousand, the main city on the Isle of Lewis. The plane had been retrofitted to the exacting specifications of its owner, Donald J. Trump, of Manhattan. It had a master bedroom, spacious seating for twenty-four passengers, a dining area for five guests with accompanying china and crystal serving, and, for good measure, two gold-plated sinks. A single word in capital letters, TRUMP, streaked across the fuselage. As the plane’s engines shut down, Trump’s underlings unloaded cases of his books, which would be given like totems to the islanders. One case was labeled TRUMP: HOW TO GET RICH and another NEVER GIVE UP.

Trump, dressed in a dark suit, white shirt, and blue tie that hung well below his belt, his thatch of blondish hair flapping in the breeze, greeted the islanders. Then he and his fellow travelers headed to a black Porsche Cayenne and two BMW X5s. The entourage drove along winding roads for seven miles, past green hills rolling down to a bay, through neighborhoods of waterfront homes and small industrial buildings, until they arrived at a gray house known as 5 Tong, named for the village in which it was located. Trump exited his car and peeked inside. The dwelling was so modest that Trump remained inside for only ninety-seven seconds. Photos were taken, and the story line seemed neatly complete: Trump visits the birthplace of his mother, Mary Anne MacLeod.

“I feel very comfortable here,” Trump told the gathered reporters. “When your mother comes from a certain location, you tend to like that location. I do feel Scottish, but don’t ask me to define that. There was something very strong from my mother.” In case anyone had failed to notice, Trump added, “I have a lot of money.”

Trump had been here only once before, when he was three or four years old, and this stay seemed as brief as possible, barely three hours. There was talk of Trump’s turning a local castle into a luxury hotel. Then it was off to another part of Scotland, where Trump hoped this rare reminder of his heritage might help persuade politicians to let him build a massive golf resort and housing development on environmentally sensitive land near Aberdeen.

Trump’s mother’s story was a classic one of desire for a new life in a strange land, freighted with a seemingly unrealistic dream of unimaginable riches. The wealth, in the case of Trump’s family, would one day come. But that result could hardly have been envisioned if one could step back in time to a scene captured in a grainy photograph taken near the very spot that Trump visited so briefly on that June day.

  ·  ·  ·  

THE BLACK-AND-WHITE PHOTO WAS taken in 1930 at 5 Tong. A woman is slightly hunched over, wearing a full-length dress, her hair tied back, a strap around her shoulder. The strap is attached to a bundle on her back that is about ten times the size of her head. She is, according to the caption written by the Tong historical society, a Trump ancestor, possibly Donald’s grandmother, “carrying a creel of seaweed on her back.” In the background is a young lady, perhaps Trump’s mother, Mary MacLeod, then eighteen years old, and already planning to leave her increasingly destitute island and find her way to America.

Mary grew up in this remote place speaking the local Gaelic dialect. Tong had been home to Mary’s parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents, as well as countless cousins. The land around the home was known as a croft, a small farm typically worked by the mother, enabling the father to spend much of his time fishing. It was a spare existence, with many properties “indescribably filthy, with doors so low it is necessary to crawl in and out,” according to a local history. Families struggled to cobble together incomes through a combination of farming in the acidic soil and raising animals, fishing in the nearby bay and rivers, and collecting peat to be sold or used as fuel and seaweed to be used as fertilizer on the difficult land. It was all too common for men to sink with their sailing ships, a fate that in 1868 befell Mary’s thirty-four-year-old grandfather, Donald Smith, who had the same first name Mary gave decades later to her son, Donald Trump.

Mary was born in 1912 during the height of a boom in herring, the fatty fish that had become a delicacy throughout Europe. Many young residents worked the trade, gutting the fish or traveling with the fleets. Mary was a child during World War I, when the island’s fishing industry collapsed. Ten percent of the male population died. A wave of emigration took place as families searched for economic opportunity elsewhere. One Tong man was said to have done so well that when he returned for a visit, he arrived in a big American car with white tires and gave local children a ride.

Then, in 1918, one of the greatest businessmen of the era, Lord Leverhulme, known for his family’s Lever soap empire, paid 143,000 pounds to purchase the Isle of Lewis, on which Tong was located. He moved into the sprawling Lews Castle and announced a series of grand schemes, including the marketing of local fish at hundreds of retail shops across the United Kingdom. Most of all, he urged residents to trust him.

Amid this brief period of hope came another tragedy. On New Year’s Day 1919, a yacht carrying British soldiers went off course, hit rocks, and killed 174 men from Lewis, again diminishing the island’s male population. Soon, it became apparent that Leverhulme’s grand promises would not pan out, and the islanders rebelled. A group of Tong men invaded a farm owned by Leverhulme and staked claim to the land. By 1921, Leverhulme had halted development on Lewis and focused just on neighboring Harris, best known for the wool fabric called Harris Tweed. His business dealings elsewhere were struggling, especially in a global recession, and in 1923, Leverhulme’s dream of a Lewis utopia went bust. Leverhulme died two years later, and as Mary entered her teenaged years, hundreds of people fled the island.

The MacLeods took pride in the island’s sturdy stock; their family crest featured a bull’s head and the motto HOLD FAST. But that became nearly impossible with the onset of the Great Depression in the fall of 1929; opportunities for a young woman to be anything other than a farmer or child-bearing collector of seaweed were scarce. So on February 17, 1930, after Black Tuesday and all the other blackness brought on by the Depression, Mary Anne MacLeod boarded the SS Transylvania, a three-funneled ship built four years earlier. The vessel spread 552 feet from stem to stern, 70 feet across the beam, and carried 1,432 passengers. Mary, an attractive young woman with fair skin and blue eyes, appears to have been on her own, filing on board between the McIntoshes and McGraths and McBrides. She called herself a “domestic,” a catchall for “maid” or whatever other labor she might find once she reached New York. She told immigration officials at Ellis Island that she planned to stay in Queens with her older sister, Catherine, who had married and just given birth to a baby boy. Mary declared that she planned to be a permanent resident, hoping to gain citizenship in her adopted land.

  ·  ·  ·  

THE UNITED STATES HAD welcomed immigrants for much of its history, importing laborers and encouraging settlement in the West. But a combination of economic downturns, nativism, and the rise of the eugenics movement had recently made it increasingly difficult for certain groups of people to become US citizens. Crackdowns began in the early 1920s. The Ku Klux Klan sought to all but take over the 1924 Democratic National Convention in New York City, urging severe limits on immigrants and bashing Catholics, prompting brawls in the aisles of sweltering Madison Square Garden. More than twenty thousand Klansmen rallied nearby, celebrating when the convention narrowly failed to pass a platform plank condemning the group. The ensuing Klanbake, as the days of rage became known, so disrupted the convention that it took 103 ballots to select nominee John W. Davis, who lost the general election to Republican Calvin Coolidge. Nonetheless, the KKK continued to wield political power, and an anti-immigrant mood gripped the country as the economy weakened. The Democrats’ 1928 nominee, Al Smith, was pilloried by the KKK because he was Catholic, and he lost to Republican Herbert Hoover. By 1929, Congress passed legislation cutting the immigration quotas for many countries, including European nations such as Germany. Soon, hundreds of thousands of Mexicans would be expelled. Those from China, Japan, Africa, and Arabia were given little chance of gaining US citizenship. At the same time, Congress nearly doubled the quota for immigrants from much of the British Isles. Mary, coming from the preferred stock of British whites, would be welcomed at a time when the United States was closing its doors to many others.

As Mary made her way across the Atlantic, the Transylvania battled a horrific storm. Finally, as the vessel reached New York Harbor, a driving rain stirred the swells, and bolts of lightning knocked out power, including the torch in the Statue of Liberty, which nonetheless welcomed the world’s tired and poor. The lead story on the front page of the New York Times on the day of Mary’s arrival seemed reassuring: “Worst of Depression Over, Says Hoover, with Cooperation Lessening Distress.” Hoover pinned his hopes on a construction boom, which he insisted had accelerated “beyond our hopes.” His hopes would prove far too optimistic. Hoover was soon replaced in the White House by New York’s governor, Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and it would take years of government intervention for America to dig itself out of the Depression. But one of those who shared Hoover’s hopes for a construction boom was a young man named Fred Trump. He was the son of a German immigrant and was on his way to making a fortune by building modest homes in the same area of New York City where Mary MacLeod now was headed.

  ·  ·  ·  

THE TRUMP SIDE OF the family’s American saga begins with Donald’s grandfather, Friedrich. He was raised in a wine-producing village in southwest Germany called Kallstadt, which looked appealingly verdant and prosperous to the casual eye, but which held little future for the ambitious teenager who would later be Donald Trump’s paternal grandfather.

The steep-roofed two-story house on Freinsheim Street where Friedrich grew up was just a few minutes’ walk from the bell tower of the Protestant church in Kallstadt’s center. With two or three bedrooms to accommodate a family of eight, it was far from the grandest vintner’s house. But if the Trumps weren’t the richest winemakers in late-nineteenth-century Kallstadt, they secured a decent income. They owned land on which to grow grapes, and their house had several outbuildings for livestock and a great arched cellar adjoining the ground-floor rooms where the annual harvest would be fermented.

Kallstadt lies in the Pfalz, or Palatinate, a lush, undulating region of the Rhine Valley to which millions of German-American families such as the Trumps trace their roots and where the Nazis later created a Weinstrasse, or wine route, to market produce after they had driven out the local Jewish merchants. Sheltered by the Haardt Mountains to the west, the gentle topography created a Mediterranean-like climate, a so-called German Tuscany, where almonds, figs, and sweet chestnuts thrived. Grapes had been cultivated for at least two thousand years since the Romans built a villa on a hill above the village. Orderly rows of Riesling crisscrossed fields and filled tiny plots between village houses.

Years of unrest prompted many to flee, establishing a history of emigration, and cementing the interdependence of the families who stayed. Outgoing and proud of their shared past, the people of Kallstadt came to be known as Brulljesmacher, or “braggarts.” It is uncertain when the Trumps first came to the Palatinate or when they settled on the spelling of the family name. Family genealogists and historians have found various spellings, including Dromb, Drumb, Drumpf, Trum, Tromb, Tromp, Trumpf, and Trumpff. More recent headstones in Kallstadt spell the family name Trump, though in the local Palatinate dialect, the final p is pronounced with emphasis, almost like Tromp-h.

Friedrich, Donald Trump’s grandfather-to-be, was born on March 14, 1869. He was a frail child, unfit for backbreaking labor in the vineyards. He was eight years old when his father, Johannes, died of a lung disease. His mother, Katherina, was left to run a household of children ranging in age from one to fifteen, as well as the winery. Debts began to mount. Katherina sent Friedrich, her younger son, off when he was fourteen for a two-year apprenticeship with a barber in nearby Frankenthal.

Friedrich, however, saw no future in the Palatinate village and decided to join the stream of Germans looking for a better life in the United States. Friedrich traveled 350 miles north to Bremen, a port teeming with emigrants, and boarded the SS Eider. The two-funneled German ocean liner was bound for New York City, where Friedrich would find his older sister, Katherine, who had already married a fellow emigrant from Kallstadt. Friedrich arrived in New York on October 19, 1885. Immigration records list his occupation as “farmer” and his name as “Friedrich Trumpf, ” although he would soon be known by Trump. He was sixteen years old.

But Friedrich’s departure ran afoul of German law. A three-year stint of military service was mandatory, and to emigrate, boys of conscription age had to get permission. The young barber didn’t do so, resulting in a questionable status that would undermine any future prospect of return: Friedrich Trump was an illegal emigrant. Luckily, US officials didn’t care about the circumstances under which he left Germany. US immigration law at the time granted Germans preferred status; they were viewed as having the proper white European ethnic stock and an industrious nature. Friedrich was one of about a million Germans who immigrated to the United States in 1885, more than had ever before come in one year.

The SS Eider delivered him to Castle Garden, the main entry point for immigrants before the f...

About this edition

• Publisher: Simon And Schuster
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 147115971X
• ISBN 13: 9781471159718
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 448