Book review by Alexander Nazaryan.
How it all began:
It’s a strength of “Lucky Loser” that the biographical details deepen the portrait as much as they foreshadow the plot.
The book is a multigenerational saga that begins with the former president’s grandparents, Frederick and Elizabeth Trump, migrating from Germany at the turn of the century and settling in Queens, where they got into real estate, buying up vacant lots.
Their middle child, Fred, joined the business and took advantage of the newly established Federal Housing Administration, which supercharged the market in the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s. Creative only in his dishonesties — his buildings were dull boxes — Fred inflated his construction costs to secure generous F.H.A. loans and then skimped on construction expenses, pocketing the difference and setting high rents based on the original, fictitious projections.Federal investigators eventually caught on. So did the local press. A 1954 article in The Brooklyn Daily Eagle described Fred Trump, in Buettner and Craig’s words, as “a pariah feeding on government largesse and gouging his tenants.” Having to trudge down to Washington to answer questions from U.S. senators proved humiliating, but Fred never faced serious consequences.
The elder Trump made his family prosperous and comfortable enough to join the Atlantic Beach Club, where Donald, the fourth of five children, “would wait by the pool for arriving families to pass by in their street clothes and then soak them with a monster cannonball off the high diving board,” Buettner and Craig write. The authors track down a club member from that era who laments Trump’s antics, since he always found a way to pass off the blame.
By the early ’70s, Fred had settled into tending the fortune he had created, while Donald, as the favorite son, played with his father’s money. Bolstered by millions of dollars from Fred, Donald bought the decrepit Commodore Hotel on East 42nd Street in 1976, replacing it with the boxy, unimaginative Grand Hyatt. It was his first building in Manhattan.
Never quit reading.
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