Age, Biography, and Wiki
Fred Trump was born on October 11, 1905, in the Bronx, New York. He was the son of German immigrants and developed a keen interest in real estate from an early age. Fred Trump passed away on June 25, 1999, at the age of 93. His life was marked by significant contributions to the real estate industry, particularly in Brooklyn and Queens, where he built thousands of homes and apartments.
| Occupation | Billionaire |
|---|---|
| Date of Birth | 11 October 1905 |
| Age | 119 Years |
| Birth Place | New York City, U.S. |
| Horoscope | Libra |
| Country | U.S |
| Date of death | 25 June, 1999 |
| Died Place | New Hyde Park, New York, U.S. |
Height, Weight & Measurements
There is no publicly available information on Fred Trump's height and weight.
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Dating & Relationship Status
Fred Trump married Mary Anne MacLeod in 1936, and they had five children together, including Donald Trump, who would later become the 45th President of the United States. The couple remained married until Mary Anne's death in 2000.
Frederick Christ Trump Sr. (October 11, 1905 – June 25, 1999) was an American real-estate developer and businessman. He was the father of the 45th and 47th U.S. president, Donald Trump.
Born in the Bronx in New York City to German immigrant parents, Trump began working in home construction and sales in the 1920s before heading the real-estate business started by his parents (later known as the Trump Organization). His company rose to success, building and managing single-family houses in Queens, apartments for war workers on the East Coast during World War II, and more than 27,000 apartments in New York overall. Trump was investigated for profiteering by a U.S. Senate committee in 1954 and again by New York State in 1966. Donald Trump became the president of his father's real-estate business in 1971. Two years later, they were sued by the U.S. Justice Department's Civil Rights Division for racial discrimination against black people.
According to The New York Times, Fred and his wife, Mary, provided over $1 billion (in 2018 currency) to their children, avoiding over $500 million in gift taxes. In 1992, Fred and Donald set up a subsidiary which was used to funnel Fred's finances to his progeny. Shortly before his death, Fred transferred the ownership of most of his buildings to his surviving children, who several years later sold them for over 16 times their previously declared worth.
Trump's father, the German-born Frederick Trump, amassed considerable wealth during the Klondike Gold Rush by running a restaurant and brothel for miners. Friedrich returned to Kallstadt in 1901, and, by the next year, met and married Elizabeth Christ. Later that year, the family returned to Kallstadt. Fred was conceived in Bavaria, where his parents wished to re-establish residency, but Friedrich was banished for dodging the draft. Fred's younger brother, John G. All three children were raised speaking German. In September 1908, the family moved to Woodhaven, Queens.
Many details of Trump's childhood come from autobiographical accounts and emphasize independence, learning and especially hard work – to the point of being somewhat fictionalized. At the age of 10, Trump worked as a delivery boy for a butcher. About two years later, on Memorial Day, his father died in the 1918 flu pandemic, according to Fred quite suddenly. From 1918 to 1923, Fred attended Richmond Hill High School in Queens, while working as a caddy, curb whitewasher, delivery boy, and newspaper hawker. Meanwhile, his mother continued the real-estate business Friedrich had begun. Interested in becoming a builder, Fred put up a garage for a neighbor and took night classes in carpentry and reading blueprints; he reputedly studied plumbing, masonry, and electrical wiring via correspondence courses, although other biographical sources limit his construction education to the period after high school when he was also working in the field.
After graduating in January 1923, Trump obtained full-time work pulling lumber to construction sites. He studied carpentry and became a carpenter's assistant. Trump's mother held the business in her name until he reached 21, the age of majority. The company name "E. Trump & Son" appeared in advertising by 1924, by which year Trump ostensibly used an $800 loan from his mother to complete and sell his first house. Public records, however, do not support him building until 1927, the year the company was incorporated (and following Trump's 21st birthday). Trump purportedly built 19 more homes by 1926 in Hollis, Queens, selling some before they were finished to finance others. Investigative journalist Wayne Barrett posits that Trump exaggerated the length of his career in 1934 while arguing in federal court why he should deserve a dissolved company's mortgage servicer. In 1927, Trump was arrested at a Ku Klux Klan demonstration, although there is no conclusive evidence that he supported the organization.
Trump made use of loan subsidies created by the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) not long after the program was initiated via the National Housing Act of 1934, which also enabled the discriminatory practice of redlining. By 1936, Trump had 400 workers digging foundations for houses that would be sold at prices ranging from $3,000 to $6,250. Trump used his father's psychological tactic of listing properties at prices ending in "... 9.99". In the late 1930s, he used a boat to advertise off Coney Island's shore; it played patriotic music and floated out swordfish-shaped balloons which could be redeemed for $25 or $250 towards one of his properties. In 1938, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle referred to Trump as "the Henry Ford of the home building industry". During this period, Trump predicted that he would profit from World War II. By 1942, he had built 2,000 homes in Brooklyn using FHA funds.
Decades after hiring PR man Howard Rubenstein to generate press about his life story mirroring the rags-to-riches novels of 19th-century author Horatio Alger, in 1985, Fred was awarded the Horatio Alger Award (for "distinguished Americans"). Radio and television personality Art Linkletter introduced Trump at the ceremony, with Peale's wife (and previous award recipient), Ruth Peale, presenting him the award. During his speech, Trump stated that the key to his success was enthusiasm for his work and that he "used to watch other successful people ... that did good and that did bad and ... followed the good qualities that they had". He then (apparently erroneously) attributed to William Shakespeare the saying "Never follow an empty wagon because", pointing to his cranium, "nothing ever falls off". He went on to introduce his surviving nuclear family.
Fred's son Donald joined his father's real-estate business around 1968, initially working in Brooklyn. That year, Fred reputedly secured Donald a deferment from the Vietnam War by prioritizing maintenance for a tenant who (ostensibly in exchange) diagnosed Donald with bone spurs. In 1971, Donald became president of the company, with Fred becoming chairman. Donald began calling the company 'the Trump Organization' around 1973. The younger Trump entered the real-estate business in Manhattan, while his father operated primarily in Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island. Donald stated, "It was good for me. You know, being the son of somebody, it could have been competition to me. This way, I got Manhattan all to myself." Fred reputedly said, "I gave Donald free rein. He has great vision and everything he touches seems to turn to gold. ... [He] is the smartest person I know."
In the mid-1970s, Donald received loans from his father exceeding $14 million. In 2015–16, during his campaign for U.S. president, Donald claimed that his father had given him "a small loan of a million dollars" which he used to build "a company that's worth more than $10 billion". An October 2018 New York Times exposé on Fred and Donald Trump's finances revealed that Fred created 295 income streams for Donald and concludes that the latter "was a millionaire by age 8", receiving $413 million (adjusted for inflation; $483.6 million in 2023 currency) from Fred's business empire over his lifetime, including over $60.7 million (unadjusted for inflation; $163.9 million in 2023 currency) in loans, which were largely unreimbursed.
In 1987, when Donald's loan debt to his father exceeded $11 million, Fred invested $15.5 million in Trump Palace Condominiums; in 1991, he sold these shares to his son for $10,000, thus appearing to evade millions of dollars in gift taxes by masking a hidden donation, and also benefiting from a legally questionable write-off. In late 1990, when an $18.4 million bond payment for Atlantic City's Trump's Castle was due, Fred sent a bookkeeper to buy $3.5 million in casino chips, which were not used. Trump's Castle quickly made its bond payment. The state's Casino Control Commission found the transaction to constitute an illegal loan and fined the casino $65,000.
In December 1990, Donald Trump sought to amend his father's will, which according to Fred's daughter Maryanne Trump Barry, "was basically taking the whole estate and giving it to Donald", allowing him to "sell, do anything he wants ... with the properties". The Washington Post wrote that this "was designed to protect Donald Trump's inheritance from efforts to seize it by creditors and Ivana", whom he divorced that month. Fred rejected the proposal, and in 1991, composed his own final will, which made Donald, Maryanne, and Robert Trump co-executors of his estate. Trump's lawyer noted that Fred Jr.'s children, Fred III and Mary L. Trump, would be treated unequally because they would not receive their deceased father's share, and wrote to Trump that "Given the size of your estate, this is tantamount to disinheriting them. You may wish to increase their participation in your estate to avoid ill will in the future." In October 1991, Trump was diagnosed with "mild senile dementia", with his physician citing symptoms of "obvious memory decline in recent years" and "significant memory impairment". A few months later, another physician reported that Trump "did not know his birth date [or] age", amongst other difficulties. Mary L. Trump recounted that as her grandfather's dementia progressed, he failed to recognize people he had known for decades, including her and Donald. According to Fred III, his grandfather needed to be reminded why he was at Donald's 1993 wedding (to Marla Maples) despite being designated the best man. Donald claimed that he first noticed his father exhibit symptoms of Alzheimer's in the mid-1990s.
In 1993, the anticipated shares of Trump's estate amounted to $35 million for each surviving child. Most of his buildings were transferred to two grantor-retained annuity trusts under his and his wife's names, which were used to give about two-thirds of the assets to their four surviving children, who bought the remaining third via annuity payments between 1995 and November 1997. The collective assets were valued at $41.4 million and in 2004 were sold for over 16 times this value, avoiding hundreds of millions of dollars in gift taxes.
Trump met his future wife, Mary Anne MacLeod, an immigrant from Tong, Lewis, Scotland, at a dance party in the early to mid-1930s. Trump told his mother the same evening that he had met his future wife. Trump, a Lutheran, married Mary, a Presbyterian, on January 11, 1936, at the Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church with George Arthur Buttrick officiating. A wedding reception was held at the Carlyle Hotel in Manhattan, and they had a single-night honeymoon in Atlantic City. The couple settled in Jamaica, Queens, and had five children: Maryanne Trump Barry (1937–2023), Fred Trump Jr. (1938–1981; an airline pilot with Trans World Airlines), Elizabeth Trump Grau (born 1942; a retired executive of Chase Manhattan Bank), Donald Trump (born 1946), and Robert Trump (1948–2020; a top executive of his father's property management company until his retirement).
Trump was a teetotaler and an authoritarian parent, imposing strict table manners and curfews, as well as forbidding cursing, lipstick, and snacking between meals. At the end of his day, Trump would receive a report from Mary on the children's actions and, if necessary, decide upon disciplinary actions. Additionally, the mansion featured a surveillance system and an intercom, which Trump used to censure his children. He took his children to building sites to collect empty bottles to return for the deposits. The boys had paper routes, and when weather conditions were poor, their father would let them make their deliveries in a limousine. According to Fred Jr.'s daughter, Mary L. Trump, Fred Sr. wanted his oldest son to be "invulnerable" in personality so he could take over the family business, but Fred Jr. was the opposite. Trump instead elevated Donald to become his business heir, teaching him to "be a killer", and telling him, "You are a king." Mary L. Trump states that Fred Sr. "dismantled [Fred Jr.] by devaluing and degrading every aspect of his personality" and mocked him for his decision to become an airline pilot. In 1981, Fred Jr. died at age 42 from complications due to his alcoholism.
According to Donald Trump, while his mother was watching the 1953 coronation of Elizabeth II on television, Fred said while pacing around, "For Christ's sake, Mary. Enough is enough, turn it off. They're all a bunch of con artists." Also in the 1950s, Fred became an admirer of Protestant minister Norman Vincent Peale, the author of The Power of Positive Thinking (1952), due to his businesslike approach to life and Christianity. Trump and his family attended sermons by Peale at Manhattan's Marble Collegiate Church. Trump was also a supporter of Southern Baptist evangelist Billy Graham, whom he took his family to see speak at Yankee Stadium (c. 1957).
The New York Post repeated the latter claim in its eulogy for Fred. As U.S. According to a 2021 book about Donald's last year as president, he once spoke disparagingly of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, stating, "I know the fucking krauts," and pointing to his father's portrait, continued, "I was raised by the biggest kraut of them all." Kraut is an ethnic slur for a German (particularly a soldier of either world war).
In his 1993 biography of Donald Trump, Harry Hurt III asserts that Fred was a philanderer, with his alleged Floridian affairs leading him to be known as the "King of Miami Beach". In 1989 (while Donald was married to Ivana but tabloids had begun reporting about his affair with future wife Marla Maples), Fred reputedly lectured Donald that he could "have a thousand mistresses" but not to get caught in a single specific extramarital affair. According to Hurt, after Donald decided to accompany Ivana to her father's funeral in Czechoslovakia (amid their pending divorce), Fred told a longtime secretary and personal confidant, "I hope their plane crashes. Then all my problems will be solved."
During Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign, his father's 1927 arrest at a KKK march resurfaced. In mid-February 2017, a liberal Israeli newspaper asserted that both Donald Trump (who had called Fred his only 'hero') and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had learned racism from their fathers, Trump against brown people and Netanyahu against Arabs. Three days later, the FBI declassified 389 pages from its early 1970s investigation of alleged racial discrimination by the Trump Organization. In his 2018 psychological profile of Donald, Justin A. Frank asserts that Fred was anti-Semitic. In 2020, Mary L. Trump supported this claim and said Fred could have been sympathetic to the KKK.
In May 2016, in an article about Donald Trump's pseudonyms, Fortune reported that his father had used the false name "Mr. Green" to anonymously inquire about property values. In October 2016, in response to numerous Freedom of Information Act requests, the FBI released a small file it had on Fred; it includes a 1986 news article concerning political donations by Trump Management, an amply redacted 1991 memo implying the bureau received intel regarding ties to organized crime, and a background report on Trump Construction Corp. In 2018, writing for New York magazine in response to the New York Times exposé, Jonathan Chait opined that many of Fred's contributions to Donald were by definition criminal in nature.
In mid-2020, liberal political action committee (PAC) MeidasTouch cited the "empty wagon" quote from Trump's Horatio Alger Association speech in arguing that Trump both squandered the fortune he inherited from his father and the "booming economy" left to him by the Obama administration. Mary L. Trump, in her 2020 book, Too Much and Never Enough, claims that "Donald, Fred Trump's favorite son, dismissed and derided him when he began to succumb to Alzheimer's". In the book, Mary, a clinical psychologist, asserts that Fred was a high-functioning sociopath. A 2024 article in the psychohistorical journal Clio's Psyche claims that the "cruel" and "mendacious" Fred denied Donald of "basic, life-affirming emotional nourishment" (while repeating that he was a "killer" and a "king"), resulting in Donald's "absence of moral responsibility".
In the 2011 Comedy Central Roast of Donald Trump, the American comedian Seth MacFarlane credited Donald's fortune to his father, mocking the former's "self-starter bullshit" and comparing their relationship to that of Jaden and Will Smith.
In 2019, the American journalist and conspiracy theorist Wayne Madsen accused Fred of being a Nazi sympathizer on the basis of the German American Bund's presence in New York. In mid-2020, fact-checking company Logically concluded that there was a lack of clear evidence that Trump was a Nazi supporter. During his 2024 U.S. presidential campaign, Donald Trump said that his father had told him never to say the word "Nazi" or mention Adolf Hitler.
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| Husband | Mary Anne MacLeod (m. January 1936) |
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Net Worth and Salary
At the time of Fred Trump's death, his estate was estimated to be worth between $250 million and $300 million by his family. This wealth was largely derived from his successful real estate ventures.
Following the war, Trump expanded into middle-income housing for the families of returning veterans. From 1947 to 1949, he built Shore Haven in Bensonhurst, which included 32 six-story buildings and a shopping center, covering some 30 acre and procuring him $9 million in FHA funding. In 1950, he built the 23-building Beach Haven Apartments over 40 acre near Coney Island, procuring him $16 million in FHA funds. The total number of apartments included in these projects exceeded 2,700.
In 1961, Trump donated $2,500 to the re-election campaign of New York mayor Robert F. Wagner Jr., helping him gain favor for the construction of Trump Village, a large apartment complex in Coney Island. The project was constructed in 1963–64 for $70 million. It was one of Trump's biggest and last major projects, and the only one to bear his name. He built more than 27,000 low-income apartments and row houses in the New York area altogether, including Brooklyn (in Coney Island, Bensonhurst, Sheepshead Bay, Flatbush, and Brighton Beach) and Queens (in Flushing and Jamaica Estates).
The FBI interviewed about three dozen former Trump employees. Some testified that they had no knowledge of any racial profiling practices and that a small percentage of their apartments were rented to blacks or Puerto Ricans. A former doorman testified that his supervisor had instructed him to tell prospective black tenants that the rent was double its actual amount. Four landlords or rental agents confirmed that applications sent to the Trump organization's head office for approval were coded by the race of the applicant. One former employee testified that a code – which he believed was used throughout the Brooklyn branch of the company – referred to "low lifes" such as "blacks, Puerto Ricans, apparent drug users, or any other type of undesirable applicant", and nine times out of ten it meant the applicant was black; blacks were also falsely told there were no vacancies. A rental agent who had worked with the company for two weeks said that when he asked Fred Trump if he should rent to blacks, he was told that it was "absolutely against the law to discriminate", but after asking again, he was instructed "not to rent to blacks", and was further advised to: "get rid of the blacks that were in the building by telling them cheap housing was available for them at only $500 down payment, which Trump would offer to pay himself. Trump didn't tell me where this housing was located. He advised me not to rent to persons on welfare."
In 1992, Fred and Donald set up a subsidiary company in which each of Fred's living children owned a 20% stake. As detailed in 2018 by The New York Times, the business entity had no apparent legitimate purpose and was evidently used to conduct tax fraud by funneling millions of dollars of Fred's wealth to his progeny without paying gift taxes. This was accomplished by billing Fred much more than the actual cost of maintenance work and goods such as boilers.
In December 2003, it was reported that Trump's four surviving children would sell the apartments they acquired in 1997 to an investment group led by Rubin Schron, priced at $600 million; the sale occurred in May 2004. The 2016 leak of Donald Trump's tax information from 2005, which showed an income of $153 million, prompted The New York Times to investigate, leading to the 2018 exposé. The Times reported that the properties sold in 2004 were valued over 16 times their previously declared worth. Fred and Mary reportedly provided their children with over $1 billion altogether, which should have been taxed at the rate of 55% for gifts and inheritances (over $550 million), but records show that a total of only $52.2 million (about 5%) was paid. According to New York State law, individuals can be prosecuted on the basis of intentional tax evasion if a fraudulent return form can be produced as evidence; the statute of limitations does not apply in such cases. By February 1, 2019, Maryanne Trump Barry was being investigated for possible judicial misconduct regarding the schemes, but this was mooted later in the month due to her retirement.
Career, Business, and Investments
Fred Trump's career in real estate began in the 1920s, where he started by building single-family homes in Queens. He expanded his business significantly during World War II, constructing apartments and houses for returning veterans. His company, Elizabeth Trump & Son, which he founded with his mother, became a major player in New York City's real estate market. Fred Trump's business acumen and strategic investments contributed significantly to his wealth and legacy.
In federal court in 1934, Trump and a partner acquired the mortgage-servicing subsidiary of Brooklyn's J. Lehrenkrauss Corporation, which had gone bankrupt and had subsequently been broken up. This gave Trump access to the titles of many properties nearing foreclosure, which he bought at low cost and sold at a profit. This and similar real-estate ventures quickly brought him fame as one of New York City's most successful businessmen.
During the war, the federal Office of Production Management (established in 1941) allowed the use of FHA funding for defense housing in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, owing to the proximity of the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Trump planned to build 700 houses there, which would have been both his and the state FHA office's biggest project to date, but following the attack on Pearl Harbor and the United States's declaration of war on Japan, the project was dissolved in favor of defense housing at the East Coast's naval nexus, Hampton Roads's Norfolk, Virginia, where Trump was already working on an apartment complex. Congress added a provision to the National Housing Act generating mortgage insurance for defense apartments, through which Trump was allowed to own the properties he built for war workers. By 1944, he had constructed 1,360 wartime apartments, almost 10% of the total created in Norfolk. He also built barracks and garden apartments for U.S. Navy personnel near major shipyards in Norfolk and Newport News, Virginia, as well as Chester, Pennsylvania.
In early 1954, President Dwight D. Eisenhower and other federal leaders began denouncing real-estate profiteers. That June, The New York Times included Trump on a list of 35 city builders accused of profiteering from government contracts. He and others were investigated by a U.S. Senate banking committee for windfall gains. Trump and his partner William Tomasello were cited as examples of how profits were made by builders using the FHA. The two paid $34,200 for a piece of land which they rented to their corporation for $76,960 annually in a 99-year lease, so that if the apartment they built on it ever defaulted, the FHA would owe them $1.924 million. Trump and Tomasello evidently obtained loans for $3.5 million more than Beach Haven Apartments had cost. Trump argued that because he had not withdrawn the money, he had not literally pocketed the profits. He further argued that due to rising costs, he would have had to invest more than the 10% of the mortgage loan not provided by the FHA, and therefore suffer a loss if he built under those conditions.
According to Trump construction vice president Barbara Res, Fred seated business guests in an off-balance chair and advised Donald to arrange his office so that adversaries could be forced to face the sun.
After Elizabeth's birth, and with the U.S. becoming more involved in the war, Trump moved his family to Hampton Roads's Virginia Beach. In 1944, as Trump's FHA funding lulled, they returned to Jamaica Estates, Queens, where Mary suffered a miscarriage. By 1946, they were living in a five-bedroom Tudor-style house Trump built in Jamaica Estates, and Trump purchased a neighboring 0.5 acre lot, where he built a 23-room, 9-bathroom mansion. The family moved in during 1950–1951, and Fred and Mary remained there until their deaths. The couple was also given an apartment on the 55th (labelled the 63rd) floor of Donald's Trump Tower (c. 1983), which they rarely if ever used.
Social Network
Fred Trump was not known for his presence on social media, as these platforms did not exist during his lifetime.
In 2018, Nylon.com invoked a photograph of the elderly Trump with a pronounced depression behind one cheek (from a mandibulectomy) to opine that the New York Times exposé "led people to know, perhaps for the first time, what Fred Trump looks like—and it turns out he bears resemblance to no shortage of fictional villains". Since 2018, Trump has been portrayed in various media.
Education
There is limited information available on Fred Trump's formal education. However, his practical experience and entrepreneurial spirit played a crucial role in his success in the real estate industry.
In summary, Fred Trump's legacy as a pioneering real estate developer continues to influence the industry, and his family, including Donald Trump, has carried on his business traditions. Despite his passing, Fred Trump's contributions remain significant, and his estate's value reflects his successful career and business ventures.
Minority applicants turned away from renting apartments complained to the New York City Commission on Human Rights and the Urban League, leading these groups to send test applicants to Trump-owned complexes in July 1972. They found that white people were offered apartments, while black people were generally turned away (by being told there were no vacancies); according to the superintendent of Beach Haven Apartments, this was at the direction of his boss. Both of the aforementioned advocacy organizations then raised the issue with the Justice Department. In October 1973, the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) filed a civil rights lawsuit against the Trump Organization (Fred Trump, chair, and Donald Trump, president) for infringing the Fair Housing Act of 1968. In response, Trump attorney Roy Cohn countersued for $100 million in damages, accusing the DoJ of false accusations.
Fred supported the private Kew-Forest School, where his children attended and he served on the board of directors. The Trumps were active in The Salvation Army, the Boy Scouts of America, and the Lighthouse for the Blind. Fred reportedly also supported the Long Island Jewish Hospital and Manhattan's Hospital for Special Surgery; at the latter, he was a patient of orthopedist Philip D. Wilson Jr., the hospital's lead surgeon from 1972 to 1989.
