Page 69 - Too Much and Never Enough - Mary L. Trump

The entire spectacle was a disaster. Sentiment, nostalgia, and community were concepts my grandfather didn’t understand, but when those windows were broken, even he must have conceded to himself that he’d gone too far. Due to local rebellion against his project, he was unable to secure the zoning change he needed and was forced to back out of the Steeplechase development.
The venture exposed his waning ability to move the ball down the field. Fred’s power was largely derived from his connections. In the early to mid- 1960s, there was a significant changing of the guard in New York City politics, and, as many of his old connections and cronies were losing their own power and places, Fred was being passed by. He would never again pursue an original construction project. Trump Village, completed in 1964, would be the last complex ever built by Trump Management.
Unable to accept responsibility, much as Donald would later be, Fred blamed Freddy for the failure of Steeplechase. Eventually, Freddy blamed himself.
It didn’t help that Donald drove back to the House from Philadelphia almost every weekend. It turned out that he wasn’t any more comfortable at Penn than he had been at Fordham. The work didn’t interest him, and it’s possible that he suddenly found himself a small fish in a big pond. In the 1960s, NYMA had been at the height of its enrollment—a little over five hundred students in grades eight through twelve—but Penn had several thousand when he attended. At the military academy, Donald had survived the first couple of years as an underclassman by using the considerable skills he’d acquired growing up in the family house: his ability to feign indifference in the face of pain and disappointment, to withstand the abuse of the bigger, older boys. He hadn’t been a great student, but he’d had a certain charm, a way of getting others to go along with him that, back then, wasn’t entirely grounded in cruelty. In high school Donald had been a decent athlete, a guy some people found attractive with his blue eyes and blond hair and his swagger. He had all the confidence of a bully who knows he’s always going to get what he wants and never has to fight for it. By the time he was a senior, he had enough cachet with his fellow students that they chose him to lead the NYMA contingent in the New York City Columbus Day Parade. He didn’t foresee any such success at Penn and saw no reason to spend any more time there than he had to. The prestige of the degree was what really mattered anyway.