The Making of Donald Trump Read Online Free Page A

cost of these secretive extras was built into the contract cost when it could be passed on to Uncle Sam or tenants. Otherwise it reduced the profit the contractor made. This was, and remains today, a widespread but illegal practice unless the cash payments are reported on income tax returns—which of course would defeat the purpose of the inducements. It’s a low-risk crime: Unless the party handing over the envelope is a government agent and the bills are marked, who’s to know? The practice also meant there was little need to withdraw cash from bank accounts, thereby leaving no records for tax authorities to discover during an audit.
    As first-born, Fred Jr. was first in line to rise in dad’s business. Neither the work nor his father’s methods appealed, apparently. Fred Sr. was a no-nonsense businessman who watched every penny, kept regular hours, and, after dinner at home each night, resumed doing business on the telephone. Fred Jr. was more of a free, albeit troubled, spirit. He went off in a Corvette to Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and learned to fly airplanes. Although he was not Jewish, he said he was in order to join the Jewish fraternity.
    When Fred Jr. tried working for his namesake early on, the father and son did not see the landlord business the same way. For example, when Fred Jr. bought new windows for one of the Trump apartment houses instead of having the old ones repaired, his father upbraided him for wasting money. In recounting this episode years later, Donald said his father freely dispensed criticism, but rarely praise. Donald said that was just fine with him, but not his older brother.
    Donald was what school counselors might call “maladjusted.” In his first book,
The Art of the Deal
, he boasts aboutslugging his music teacher in second grade because he didn’t think the teacher knew the subject, although the story might be apocryphal. Neighbors have told stories over the years, including to me, of a child Donald throwing rocks at little children in playpens and provoking disputes with other kids. By his own account, Donald got into lots of trouble—so much that his father shipped him off to the New York Military Academy in upstate New York to develop discipline when he was a teenager.
    Donald turned eighteen in 1964, when the death toll in Vietnam was rising fast. He got four student deferments and one medical deferment after his doctor wrote that he had a bone spur in his foot. Which foot? a journalist asked years later. Trump said he could not recall. He was accepted into a Catholic school in New York City, Fordham College, but in his junior year transferred to an Ivy League school, the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Penn has a famous and highly regarded graduate business school that Trump often invokes. He did not in fact study there. He was enrolled as an undergraduate and received a bachelor of science in economics.
    While in college, Donald also started doing real estate deals, including one with his father in Cincinnati. He later wrote that his net worth upon graduating from college was $200,000, a figure that seems modest given the amount of money that had been flowing into his trust fund since before he learned how to walk.
    Meanwhile, Fred Jr. had become a pilot for TWA. He married a flight attendant whom family members describe simultaneously as being a knockout in the looks department and yet someone whom Fred Sr. couldn’t stand—just as his paternal grandmother couldn’t stand Elizabeth Christ Trump, the woman his father, Friedrich, had married. Fred Jr. and hiswife, Linda, subsequently had two children and divorced. Afterward, Fred Jr. gave up flying when he couldn’t manage his alcoholism.
    With the way now open to becoming next in line in the family business, Donald, even before graduating from college, started modeling himself more directly after his father. He drove a Cadillac with the license plate “DJT.” He took a flashy Penn