Donald John Trump was born on June 14, 1946, at Jamaica Hospital in Queens, New York City. He was the fourth of five children of real estate developer Fred Trump and Mary Anne MacLeod Trump, a Scottish immigrant from the Isle of Lewis. The family lived in Jamaica Estates, an affluent neighborhood his father helped build. Trump later described it as “very serene and very beautiful.”
A Demanding Father
Fred Trump made his fortune building housing in Brooklyn and Queens, and he ran his home much like his business. Author Gwenda Blair says he took his children to construction sites on Sundays and reportedly told his sons to be “killers” and to win. Donald absorbed the lesson most. Tony Schwartz, who co-wrote The Art of the Deal with him, believes that relationship “accounts for a lot of what he became.”
His older brother Fred Jr. felt the pressure differently. He skipped the family business to become an airline pilot, struggled with alcoholism, and died in 1981 at age 42. Trump has said the experience kept him from drinking, adding, “I have never had a glass of alcohol in my life.”
Trouble, Then Discipline
At the Kew-Forest School, Trump was a disruptive student. He later explained his pranks this way: “I liked to stir things up, I liked to test people.” After his behavior worsened, his parents sent him at age 13 to the New York Military Academy, where he stayed from 1959 to 1964.
He did well there. He excelled in sports including baseball, soccer, wrestling, and football, and rose through the ranks of the cadet corps. Not every classmate remembers him fondly. Biographer Marc Fisher says he “ruled dormitory life with an iron fist.”
College and the Family Firm
Trump spent two years at Fordham University before transferring to the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned an economics degree in 1968. He received several student draft deferments during the Vietnam War, followed by a medical deferment for bone spurs in his heels, a claim that later drew scrutiny.
After graduating, he joined his father’s company. With Fred’s financial backing and connections, he took more control of the business, became its president in 1971, and renamed it the Trump Organization. That set the stage for his push into Manhattan real estate in the years that followed.
Happy Reading From Tia
Leave a Reply