The nephew of former US president Donald Trump tries to set himself aside from his notorious clan in this history of the family, but their vicious and venal conduct is apparent at every turn
Forget about the sanctity of the human family or its sticky glue of love. If you’re a Trump, the institution is a convenient mechanism for ensuring inheritance, whether of gilded financial assets or brazen moral defects. Trumps are branded merchandise, and their dynastic DNA is a double helix of greed, graft and feuding malice.
Since numbers on ledgers are what matter to this mercenary dynasty, they advance arithmetically. In All in the Family, the last in a series of Fred Trumps identifies his great-grandfather – who absconded from Germany to avoid military service and founded a property empire by establishing a chain of brothels in Canada – as Fred Zero. His son Fred I, a rack-renting landlord in the New York suburbs, then begat Fred II, who defied the family by preferring a career as an airline pilot; then, after being reduced to a “second-tier Trump”, he drank himself to an early death, which made his younger brother Donald the heir apparent. Fred III, the author of this memoir, aspires to be “a different kind of Trump” but coyly trades on his tainted surname, describing himself on LinkedIn as “a third-generation member of a prominent New York real estate family”.
