After graduating in 1968, Donald Trump took on a three year apprenticeship at his father’s company. It was brutal, with him and his brother, Fred, having to manage projects that were about to go bust in low to medium income housing areas. However, he soon became the President of the company in 1971.
Meanwhile, the Civil Rights Act and Fair Housing Act had just been passed and the Department of Justice would check many buildings and apartment complexes to see if they discriminated against people based on the colour of their skin, which had been made illegal due to the act. Eventually, the DOJ arrived at the Trump apartments and began to notice a pattern.
The DOJ would send in an undercover black or hispanic member of the department, asking for a type of apartment. They would be denied, being told that there were no availabilities. Right afterwards, they would send in a white undercover member of the department, asking for the same type of apartment, and they would be welcomed with open arms. They repeated this process over and over again on multiple different Trump complexes, until they had enough evidence to file a civil lawsuit, titled “United States v. Fred C. Trump, Donald Trump, and Trump Management, Inc.”
The DOJ found that many apartments would be filed with a “C” for apartments listed under people of colour, the C possibly standing for coloured. Not only that but doormen were told to tell black applicants that the rent was twice as high as it actually was. One man was asked why he denied a black applicant, he claimed he was told by his boss to not rent to black families.
Trump was infuriated but instead of settling with the DOJ, he decided to fight back and fight back hard. It was around this time that Trump was not too unfamiliar with partying at high end nightclubs with a beautiful woman at his side. At one of these nightclubs he met Roy Cohn.
Roy Cohn was notoriously cutthroat and ruthless. He was the chief counsel to Joseph McCarthy during the McCarthy Trials, trials that sent hundreds to prison of the suspicion of being a communist. He also prosecuted Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were suspected of being Soviet spies. This was the kind of man Trump needed.
They attempted a counter-suit against the DOJ for $100 million dollars, citing false allegations. The judge immediately dismissed this. However, the DOJ’s case did not end with Trump’s company being sued. He instead managed to strike a deal in which he would admit no responsibility in exchange for changing his company’s policies on applicants with different race or skin. This made Roy Trump’s top lawyer, whilst also teaching Trump something. To always fight and never admit defeat.
However, after this, Trump was no longer satisfied with the low income housing market. After all, he had grown up with the glitz and glamour of a small mansion in Queens, and all Queens had to offer was the low income housing. He turned his eyes to the former height of civilisation, Manhattan.
Manhattan was once a prospering metropolis. However, since prohibition, it had become a hive of scum and villainy. Many gangs had been set up by immigrants forced to live in slums who had to commit crime to get by, such as the Five Points Gang made up of Irish Immigrants. The mob made a rise there too, exporting illegal alcohol, the most notable mobsters being Lucky Luciano of the Italian Mafia and Meyer Lansky of the Jewish Mob. Since the war, crime in the borough had sky rocketed. In 1929, 425 murders were committed in New York. By 1973, that number had rose to 1680. The amount of crime committed was so high that it inspired the fictional city of Gotham in the Batman Comic Books, a city well known for its large supervillain presence and mafia activity. However, Trump saw past the crime and saw an opportunity.
New York is either going to get much better or much worse and I think it will get better
Donald Trump speaking to the New York Times
Donald Trump, using his father’s many political and business connections, managed to buy up the Commodore Hotel, which was facing foreclosure, and renovate it into the Grand Hyatt Hotel. Many city planners considered the renovation to be ludicrous, due to its placement on 42nd Street, very well known for its adult movie theatres, drug dealers and hookers at the time. However, the plan went ahead thanks to a very large and controversial tax break and the hotel finished renovation by September of 1980.
He then set his eyes on an old dilapidated department store on Fifth Avenue. He had the building demolished and the plot was turned into the now famous 58-storey Trump Tower. Here were the operations of the Trump Organisation, whilst Trump would live with his new wife, a Czech model named Ivana Zelníčková, in a vast penthouse on the top floor.
Eventually, Trump’s memory of the designer of the bridge came back to his mind. He decided he wasn’t going to be some guy who designed one of the tallest buildings in the city. He wanted to make Donald Trump a household name. And his first step in the plan was to sell the fantasy. Trump could not say that he came from a rich background and his empire was built on connections and tax breaks. That won’t sell. Trump instead told a story of hard work and perseverance, a tactic used by many billionaires today, despite many already having a rich family. However, Trump took it a step further.
Trump would use his fame to keep up his persona of a ladies man party animal, who was never spotted without a beautiful woman or another celebrity at his side. This caught the attention of the tabloids. One time, for 22 days in a row, Trump appeared on a cover of a tabloid, due to his persona. He decided to use his tabloid fame to his advantage.
He would often use fake aliases to report to notable tabloids, exaggerating his achievements. On one notable occasion, he called up Forbes under the alias of John Baron, claiming that his, Donald Trump’s, net worth was $100 million, when at the time it was more around $5 million. By 1984, he had met actress Marla Maples, with whom he had began an affair, leading to a tumultuous relationship with Ivana, ending in a nasty divorce in 1990. However, Trump used this to fuel the tabloids, building up his celebrity factor even more than before, with a tug of war between Ivana and Donald over who had the favour of which tabloids. Due to his exploitation of the tabloids, Trump was on the cover of a newspaper 87 times in the span of 15 years.
Trump had established a grand empire of real estate, fame and journalism, and it was only going to get better from here.