Page 82 - Too Much and Never Enough - Mary L. Trump

of economic collapse, the federal government was cutting back on the FHA (in large part because of the cost of the Vietnam War), so no more FHA funding was available to Fred. Mitchell-Lama, a New York State–sponsored program to provide affordable housing that funded Trump Village, also ground to a halt.
As a business move, promoting Donald was pointless. What exactly was he being promoted to do? My grandfather had no development projects, the political power structure he’d depended on for decades was unraveling, and New York City was in dire financial straits. The main purpose of the promotion was to punish and shame Freddy. It was the latest in a long line of such punishments, but it was almost certainly the worst, especially given the context in which it happened.
Fred was determined to find a role for Donald. He had begun to realize that although his middle son didn’t have the temperament for the day-to-day attention to detail that was required to run his business, he had something more valuable: bold ideas and the chutzpah to realize them. Fred had long harbored aspirations to expand his empire across the river into Manhattan, the Holy Grail of New York City real estate developers. His early career had demonstrated that he had a knack for self-promotion, dissembling, and hyperbole. But as the first-generation son of German immigrants, Fred had English as his second language and he needed to improve his communication skills—he had taken the Dale Carnegie course for a reason, and it wasn’t to boost his self-confidence. But the course had been a failure. And there was another obstacle, perhaps even more difficult to overcome: Fred’s mother, as forward thinking as she had been in some ways, was generally very austere and traditional. It was okay for her son to be successful and rich. It was not okay for him to show off.
Donald had no such restraint. He hated Brooklyn as much as Freddy did but for very different reasons—the bleak working-class smallness of it, the lack of “potential.” He couldn’t get out of there fast enough. Trump Management was located on Avenue Z, right in the middle of Beach Haven in South Brooklyn, one of my grandfather’s largest apartment complexes. He hadn’t made many alterations. The narrow outer office was crammed with too many desks, and the small windows admitted little light. If Donald had thought of the surrounding buildings and complexes in terms of number of units, the value of the ground leases, and the sheer volume of income that poured into Trump Management every month, he would have recognized