Category: Donald Trump

Due to the Reagan Era, Trumps wealth expanded beyond his wildest imaginations. Many business adventures were set up. He made Trump Magazine, which explored real estate. He bought up an airline and renamed it to Trump Shuttle, an airline company which had planes with faux marble panelling, gold plated sinks and carpets so thick that the snack cart could not be pushed down them, to which Trump responded by telling them to push harder. He made Trump: The Game, a board game based on Monopoly featuring parts of his real life. He opened a large number of casinos in Atlantic City, most notably the Taj Mahal in 1990. However, many of these casinos were used as fronts for money laundering.

He started the United States Football League to compete with the NFL. He launched a vodka brand, despite not being a drinker himself. He bought up major beauty pageants and began selling clothing, most notably the Trump Tie. There was also the Trump Winery, Trump Steaks, Trump Fragrance, Trump Mortgage, even the Trump Urine Test Kit. Anything you can think of, Trump probably owned it in the 90s. And if he owned it, his name was definitely on it.

However, dear reader, I would like to pose a question to you, that is if you were born this side of 9/11. Have any of you, who are not well versed with the pre-politics career of Donald Trump ever heard of any of these products. Of course not. Many of these businesses were absolute, undeniable failures. Trump Airlines went out of business only 3 years after its establishment, after a massive net loss and a very serious incident in 1989. The United States Football League only played 3 seasons and went caput in 1986. Trump: The Game didn’t even sell half of it’s expected sales, and was only revitalised in 2004 after Trump’s appearance hosting the US Apprentice, an even then the game still performed awfully, with the only copies being found on eBay now. Donald actually lost money running the casinos, maybe one of the few people to ever do that in history. However, not many of these adventures were actually his. With the exception of a handful, these products paid a licensing fee in order to use his name for a sense of prestige. When the businesses went under, he would pocket the money and move to the next one and the cycle would repeat. Trump’s true asset was being able to market himself, not being an actual businessman.

Not only that but during his time running the beauty pageants, many cases of sexual harassment were claimed against Trump. At least 2 dozen named women have come forward against Trump, citing sexual harassment or even assault committed against them by Trump, including his own wife, Ivana, who cited sexual assault before retracting after legal action was threatened. One of these incidents ended up going to court, as Trump publicly denied sexually assaulting and abusing E. Jean Carroll in 1995, to which she sued him for defamation, once in 2019 and again in 2022 citing battery, and won $88.3 million in damages. He has also been seen multiple times associating with notorious child sex trafficker, Jeffrey Epstein, who was arrested for his crimes

Epstein was utterly preoccupied with Trump, and I think, frankly, afraid of him. […] Here are these two guys both driven by a need to do anything they wanted with women: dominance and submission and entertainment. And one of them ends up in the darkest prison in the country and the other in the White House.

Michael Wolff, author of 3 books on Trump, speaking on their relationship in a podcast

A Jane Doe who was a victim of Epstein came forward and testified that Epstein had introduced her to Trump when she was only 14. After being caught with tapes of high profile figures engaging in sexual acts with minors intended as blackmail, Epstein allegedly killed himself in prison in 2019. During his apparent suicide, he had a cellmate and a guard who would check his cell every 30 minutes. This guard check was not going ahead on the night of his death and his cellmate was transferred out and not replaced. Not only that but the cameras watching his cell also malfunctioned.

Trump also allegedly expressed concern when Ghislaine Maxwell, one of Epstein’s partners in crime, was arrested for sex trafficking of minors in 2020. However, this concern was not expressed for the victims of the families thereof, but more for himself, when he asked campaign advisors if “She [said] anything about [him]?”

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.

Donald John Trump was born on June 14th, 1946 to Fred and Mary Anne Trump. His father, Fred, had started off making a successful carpentry business. However, during the Great Depression, this business was on the verge of bankruptcy, until he built one of the largest self serve supermarkets in New York and sold it for a large profit. He used the money to buy up a subsidiary of a bankrupt real estate company for pennies on the dollar, giving them access to a large number of properties that were bordering foreclosure. Fred bought them for a fraction of the price that he sold them at, making his company one of the most profitable and famous real estate companies in the city.

Donald was the fourth child of five. He had three older siblings, Maryanne, Fred Jr and Elizabeth, and had one younger brother, Robert. The Trump House was enormous, with 23 rooms in prime Queens Real Estate and a Chauffeur that drove the children to school every morning.

However, despite this lavish lifestyle, Fred was very tough on his children. Despite his vast wealth, Fred still forced Donald to do his local paper round. Donald became a notorious bully at school and with his younger brother.

I was a very assertive, aggressive kid. In the second grade I actually gave a teacher a black eye—I punched my music teacher because I didn’t think he knew anything about music and I almost got expelled. […] As an adolescent I was mostly interested in creating mischief, because for some reason I liked to stir things up, and I liked to test people. I’d throw water balloons, shoot spitballs, and make a ruckus in the schoolyard and at birthday parties. It wasn’t malicious so much as it was aggressive.

Donald Trump’s writing in “The Art of the Deal”

Due to his unruly behaviour, Donald was sent, by his father, to New York Military Academy. NYMA was notorious for being incredibly tense, with physical and verbal abuse being actively encouraged, often times with hazing new students and physical assaults from teachers. However, Donald quickly learnt discipline and was Captain in his class, whilst being dubbed the Ladies Man of his yearbook. He was very well known in his school as being the baseball champion, often being incredibly successful in first base. Many teachers began to notice that Trump always had to be number one, and would do anything to be so. He then graduated the University of Pennsylvania with a Bachelor of Science in economics.

The Verrazano Narrows Bridge connected Brooklyn to Staten Island and had finished construction in 1964, being the longest suspension bridge in the world at the time. Fred had invited Donald down to the opening and was in the crowd during the ceremony. He later told the New York Times that no-one mentioned the designer of the bridge, not even once.

I realised then and there that if you let people treat you how they want, you’ll be made a fool, […] I don’t want to be anyone’s sucker.

Donald Trump speaking to the New York Times

Due to him being in college, he managed to avoid the Vietnam draft 4 separate times. Once he left college, he was called up once again but it was claimed that he had a problem with his heel bone so could not be called up. It is worth noting however that the doctors who told this to the draft office either lived or worked in Trump Properties.