Donald Had Started Branding All of His Buildings in Manhattan, My Feelings About My Name Became More Complicated

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Where dialogue appears, my intention was to re-create the essence of conversations rather than provide verbatim quotes. I have also relied on legal documents, bank statements, tax returns, private journals, family documents, correspondence, emails, texts, photographs, and other records. For general background, I relied on the New York Times, in particular the investigative article by David Barstow, Susanne Craig, and Russ Buettner that was published on October 2, 2018; the Washington Post; Vanity Fair; Politico; the TWA Museum website; and Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking. For background on Steeplechase Park, I thank the Coney Island History Project website, Brooklyn Paper, and a May 14, 2018, article on 6sqft.com by Dana Schulz. For his insights into “the episodic man,” thank you to Dan P. McAdams. For family history and information regarding Trump family businesses and alleged crimes, I am grateful for the reporting of the late Wayne Barrett, David Corn, Michael D’Antonio, David Cay Johnston, Tim O’Brien, Charles P. Pierce, and Adam Serwer. Thanks also to Gwenda Blair, and Michael Kranish and Marc Fisher—but my dad was forty-two, not forty-three, when he died. Prologue I’d always liked my name. As a kid at sailing camp in the 1970s, everybody called me Trump. It was a source of pride, not because the name was associated with power and real estate (back then my family was unknown outside of Brooklyn and Queens) but because something about the sound of it suited me, a tough six-year-old, afraid of nothing. In the 1980s, when I was in college and my uncle Donald had started branding all of his buildings in Manhattan, my feelings about my name became more complicated. Thirty years later, on April 4, 2017, I was in the quiet car of an Amtrak train headed to Washington, DC, for a family dinner at the White House. Ten days earlier I had received an email inviting me to a birthday celebration for my aunts Maryanne, turning eighty, and Elizabeth, turning seventy-five. Their younger brother Donald had occupied the Oval Office since January. After I emerged into Union Station, with its vaulted ceilings and black- and-white marble floors, I passed a vendor who had set up an easel with buttons for sale: my name in a red circle with a red slash through it, “DEPORT TRUMP,” “DUMP TRUMP,” and “TRUMP IS A WITCH.” I put on my sunglasses and picked up my pace. I took a cab to the Trump International Hotel, which was comping my family for one night. After checking in, I walked through the atrium and looked up at the glass ceiling and the blue sky beyond. The three-tiered crystal chandeliers that hung from the central beam of interconnected girders arching overhead cast a soft light. On one side, armchairs, settees, and couches—royal blue, robin’s-egg blue, ivory—were arranged in small groups; on the other, tables and chairs circled a large bar where I was later scheduled to meet my brother. I had expected the hotel to be vulgar and gilded. It wasn’t. My room was also tasteful. But my name was plastered everywhere, on everything: TRUMP shampoo, TRUMP conditioner, TRUMP slippers, TRUMP shower cap, TRUMP shoe polish, TRUMP sewing kit, and TRUMP bathrobe. I opened the refrigerator, grabbed a split of TRUMP white wine, and poured it down my Trump throat so it could course through my Trump bloodstream and hit the pleasure center of my Trump brain. An hour later I met my brother, Frederick Crist Trump, III, whom I’ve called Fritz since we were kids, and his wife, Lisa. Soon we were joined by the rest of our party: my aunt Maryanne, the eldest of Fred and Mary Trump’s five children and a respected federal appeals court judge; my uncle Robert, the baby of the family, who for a short time had been one of Donald’s employees in Atlantic City before leaving on bad terms in the early 1990s, and his girlfriend; my aunt Elizabeth, the middle Trump child, and her husband, Jim; my cousin David Desmond (Maryanne’s only child and the oldest Trump grandchild) and his wife; and a few of my aunts’ closest friends. The only Trump sibling who would be missing from the celebration was my father, Frederick Crist Trump, Jr., the oldest son, whom everybody had called Freddy. He had died more than thirty-five years before. When we were finally all together, we checked in with the White House security agents outside, then piled haphazardly into the two White House vans like a JV lacrosse team. Some of the older guests had trouble negotiating the steps. Nobody was comfortable squeezing onto the bench seats. I wondered why the White House hadn’t thought to send at least one limo for my aunts. As we pulled into the South Lawn driveway ten minutes later, two guards came out of the security hut to inspect the underside of the van before we drove through the front gate. After a short drive we stopped at a small security building adjacent to the East Wing and disembarked. We went inside one by one as our names were called, handed over our phones and bags, and walked through a metal detector. Once inside the White House, we walked in twos and threes through the long corridors, past windows looking out on gardens and lawns, past life- sized paintings of former first ladies. I stopped in front of Hillary Clinton’s portrait and stood silently for a minute. I wondered again how this could have happened. There was no reason for me ever to have imagined that I’d visit the White House, certainly not under these circumstances. The whole thing felt surreal. I looked around. The White House was elegant, grand, and stately, and I was about to see my uncle, the man who lived here, for the first time in eight years. We emerged from the shadows of the hallway onto the portico surrounding the Rose Garden and stopped outside the Oval Office. Through the French doors, I could see that a meeting was still in progress. Vice President Mike Pence stood off to the side, but Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, Senator Chuck Schumer, and a dozen other congresspeople and staffers were gathered around Donald, who sat behind the Resolute Desk. The tableau reminded me of one of my grandfather’s tactics: he always made his supplicants come to him, either at his Brooklyn office or his house in Queens, and he remained seated while they stood. In late autumn 1985, a year after I had taken a leave of absence from Tufts University, I took my place in front of him and asked his permission to return to school. He looked up at me and said, “That’s stupid. What do you want to do that for? Just go to trade school and become a receptionist.” “Because I want to get my degree.” I must have said it with a hint of annoyance, because my grandfather narrowed his eyes and looked at me for a second as if reevaluating me. The corner of his mouth lifted in a sneer, and he laughed. “That’s nasty,” he said. A few minutes later, the meeting broke up. The Oval Office was both smaller and less intimate than I’d imagined. My cousin Eric and his wife, Lara, whom I’d never met, were standing right by the door, so I said, “Hi, Eric. It’s your cousin Mary.” “Of course I know who you are,” he said. “Well, it’s been a while,” I said. “I think the last time we saw each other, you were still in high school.” He shrugged and said, “That’s probably true.” He and Lara walked away without his introducing us. I looked around. Melania, Ivanka, Jared, and Donny had arrived and were standing next to Donald, who remained seated. Mike Pence continued to lurk on the other side of the room with a half-dead smile on his face, like the chaperone everybody wanted to avoid. I stared at him, hoping to make eye contact, but he never looked my way. “Excuse me, everyone,” the White House photographer, a petite young woman in a dark pantsuit, announced in an upbeat voice. “Let’s get you all together so I can take some pictures before we go upstairs.” She instructed us to surround Donald, who still had not gotten up from the desk. The photographer raised her camera. “One, two, three, smile,” she said. After the pictures had been taken, Donald stood up and pointed to a framed black-and-white photograph of my grandfather, which was propped up on a table behind the desk.

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