Trump Revealed

by Michael Kranish

  So Trump had some repair work to do. He took no chances. Though he’d said that teleprompters should be banned on the campaign trail, he now used one, his eyes darting from one screen to the other. This time, he was squarely on Israel’s side. He railed against the Palestinians’ demonization of Jews. He reminded the crowd that he’d lent his personal jet to New York mayor Rudy Giuliani when he visited Israel weeks after the 9/11 attacks and that he’d been grand marshal of the Israel Parade in New York in 2004, at the height of violence in the Gaza Strip. He made sure everyone noted that Ivanka would soon give birth to a “beautiful Jewish baby.”

  But before Trump’s speech won repeated standing ovations, at the start of his remarks, six rows from the stage, one rabbi wearing a Jewish prayer shawl stood up and shouted in solitary protest, “This man is wicked. He inspires racists and bigots. He encourages violence. Do not listen to him.” Rabbi Shmuel Herzfeld, who leads an Orthodox congregation in Washington, did not rise out of any passion of the moment. He had wrestled with this decision for days. He consulted with his own mentor rabbi, with his lawyer, with his wife and seven children. He told his kids that he felt obliged to say something, “to say ‘we know who you are, we see through you.’ ” His children asked him not to stage his protest because he might get hurt, but Herzfeld concluded that he had no choice. He knew he would lose members of his synagogue (and he did). He knew he would be accused of taking an inappropriately political stance (and he was). But he had concluded that Trump posed “an existential threat to our country. I’ve never seen this type of political figure in my life. He’s shameless in inspiring violence. He used vile language about people from other countries. He’s opened a space for ugliness to come out of the shadows.”

  Herzfeld was immediately ushered out of the arena and Trump continued speaking without incident. But the next day, AIPAC’s president, choking back tears, apologized for the Trump speech, saying that it had violated the group’s rules against personal attacks. Trump had been unusually restrained in his language, but he had called President Obama “maybe the worst thing to happen to Israel,” and he’d slipped an unscripted “Yeah!” into the part of his address in which he noted that Obama was in his final year in the White House. He could appear in presidential settings, but he was still Trump being Trump.

  Indeed, the only appearance that day where Trump looked and sounded like the plain-speaking billionaire of the people that he’d been on the campaign trail—by turns playful, angry, passionate, persuasive—was a wholly different kind of event, a sales pitch at the ornate old post office building on Pennsylvania Avenue that he was rapidly transforming into the Trump International Hotel. An hour before Trump was to appear, the queue for media credentials to cover the event stretched around the block. A couple of hundred reporters showed up, and only maybe a handful of them had any interest in the renovation of a nineteenth-century federal office building into a luxury hotel five blocks from the White House. The bait was the chance to toss questions at Trump.

  The ringing of hammers on steel and the whir of power tools sounded until just before Trump was due to appear. Then the men in hard hats and orange vests melted away, leaving only placid piano music, a striking departure from the aggressive, pulse-pumping playlists Trump deployed to amp crowds at his rallies. Trump’s motorcade arrived, two gleaming black SUVs preceded by four DC police squad cars and several motorcycle cops. Trump—followed by more than a dozen aides in dark suits, a rotund man in chef’s whites, two construction workers, and lots of hotel executives—stepped into the atrium over a pathway of plywood and settled in front of two American flags. The hotel, he promised, would be “incredible, with beautiful marble from different parts of the world . . . I think it’s a great thing for the country, it’s a great thing for Washington.”

  For forty minutes, reporters peppered Trump with questions, none of which had to do with the post office project. They wanted to talk, instead, about delegate counts, Middle East policy, NATO, violence at Trump rallies. Trump took all comers, then asked if anyone might like to see that great, great ballroom. A throbbing clot of reporters and camera people, a mass bristling with boom mics and cameras held aloft, squeezed through a doorway, surrounding Trump like amoebas. Trump seemed not to notice. He stopped, peered up the building’s Romanesque Revival exterior, and pointed: “That window is from 1880. Hard to believe, right? It’s special glass. It has a kind of patina.” Building materials weren’t what this crowd had come to study, but this was what he knew. This was where he lived. The rest of this—the throngs, the people chanting his name, the politics of the nation gone topsy-turvy—was all new and exciting, and unsettling, too. He was the front-runner now, and for his next act, some people told him he should be presidential, and yet he knew he would be what he’d always been.

  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 n
ear 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.