TRUMP FAMILY VALUES

Nancy Benac There’s something about bulldozers and hard hats that brings a family together.

It worked for Donald Trump and his father. And it worked for Donald Trump and his children.

Long before Donald Trump was a presidential candidate, New York real estate mogul and reality TV star, he was Fred Trump’s kid, sitting at his dad’s knee playing with blocks as his father developed homes and post-war apartment buildings in Brooklyn and Queens.

Fast forward six decades, and Donald Trump’s three oldest children, all thirtysomethings, are vice presidents in his real estate empire as well as top advocates for their father in his presidential campaign.

Handed down across the generations was a clear set of Trump family values: work hard, talk big, sell luxury and leave your mark.

Like dad, Don Jr., Ivanka and Eric Trump were the boss’s kids before they were business executives and campaign adjuncts. They tagged along on their father’s visits to Trump construction sites and built Lego skyscrapers on the floor of their dad’s office as he negotiated hardball real estate deals.

“This is the third generation of builders,” Don Jr. once said. “I think we’ve been programmed genetically with too much ambition to sit back and collect rent for the rest of our lives.”

It’s not just a love for brick and mortar that runs in the family.

Fred Trump built his real estate business by dangling dreams of luxury living to the middle class and showcasing champagne-sipping “bikinied beauties” in the scoop of a bulldozer, as one old news clip recounted.

A Trump real estate ad from 1949 describes Fred as “acting as a free and rugged individualist to meet the basic need for shelter”. Many of his ads end with the tagline “another luxury achievement by Fred C. Trump”. Old news articles show him extolling the impressive lobbies of his buildings, the popularity of new space-saving efficiency units and special features of Trump properties such as free supervised day camp services for tenants.

Behind the glamorous veneer was a business model that ag- gressively worked the system. Fred Trump used tax breaks and subsidies to make his projects profitable, a strategy his son has embraced as well.

Donald Trump worked with his father even before he completed college and in no time leapfrogged his dad in the arts of both deal-making and self-promotion. Manhattan beckoned, and the younger Trump answered, against the advice of his more cautious father.

“He was from Brooklyn and Queens, where we did smaller things,” Trump said of his father during a town hall in New Hampshire last year. “He said, ‘Don’t go to Manhattan. That’s not our territory.’ But he was very proud of me.”

One of Donald Trump’s first big projects: Armed with guaranteed loans from his father and generous tax abatements, Trump transformed the defunct Commodore Hotel into a glimmering Grand Hyatt adjoining Grand Central Station that opened in 1980.

Trump’s three oldest children – there are two more from his second and third marriages – clearly inherited their father’s and grandfather’s love of the deal. They’re all executive vice presidents, directing development and acquisitions as a team.

At 38, Don Jr.’s recent work includes hotel and commercial projects in Vancouver, Rio de Janeiro and India. Ivanka, 34, has been overseeing conversion of the Old Post Office Building in Washington into a luxury hotel. Eric, 32, has focused on expanding the Trump collection of golf courses and created the Eric Trump Foundation to benefit St Jude Children’s Research Hospital.

The kids are expected to keep managing the Trump Organization should their father win the White House.

One of the big head-scratchers about Trump is how the candidate so prone to hype, bluster and insult managed to produce children who seem so even tempered.

Trump offered this explanation during a 2004 interview with CNN’s Larry King: “I worked at it. I was tough. I was firm with them. I didn’t give them too much money.” His children largely agree. Don Jr. once said: “We weren’t spoon fed and handed anything we wanted. If we