Becoming Trump: Family Secrets, Roy Cohn and How to Be A Killer

0:00Anthony Wells:Hi guys, Anthony and Katty here. We're jumping on to tell you about something very exciting, which drops today.

0:08Katty Hayward:That's right. Anthony and I are releasing a four-part series all about how Donald Trump became, well, frankly, how he became Donald Trump. We're winding back the clock on Donald's early life. We're looking at his family, his mentors, the battles and the decisions that shaped the man who would go on to upend American politics and all of our lives, this series is going to lay out the world that built him and the worldview that still drives him.

0:35Anthony Wells:And guys, me and Cady spoke for a while about which series to make, but this is the one we landed on because it really gives you an understanding of Donald Trump and to understand the world that made him. This is Roy Cohn, Cady. This is Fred Trump. This is Roger Stone, but it's also the fight with Ed Koch, and it's also the fight with the tabloid media.

0:58Katty Hayward:And it's all of the marriages too. The series stretches all the way from his childhood, his years in military school, his building years in New York City, all of the women, the affairs, the scandals, right up to his attacks on Barack Obama and the birtherism conspiracy. And finally, his decision to run for president in 2015. So here's a taster for you, and to hear the whole story, sign up at the rest is politics us.com.

1:31Anthony Wells:Be a killer, work hard and under no circumstances do not be weak. Now, whose words are those? Well, actually those are the words of Fred Trump. It does sound like Donald Trump, but that is Fred Trump, Donald Trump's father. And he's the only man that Donald Trump truly feared to understand someone as polarizing as Donald Trump, you have to start with the people around him and you have to start with his origin story. Those are the ones that raised him. Those are the ones that showed him the ropes and then stood back as he rewrote the rules of business, imagery, public relations, and ultimately politics.

2:13Anthony Wells:Let's face it, Donald Trump has reordered the world in the process, but it's important for us to understand how he became who he is.

2:24Katty Hayward:And that's exactly what we're going to do for all of you. We're going to rewind the clock to a time before Donald Trump's name demanded global headlines, before it sparked outrage, devotion, back to the moments that shaped the man who would become this global phenomenon. Anthony and I, over the course of the next couple of episodes, We're going to take you through the life of Donald Trump, from his earliest lessons in power and performance to that famous 2015 moment where he descended the golden escalator with his hired crowd cheering him on, a script in hand that he would almost immediately abandon, and a nation glued to their screens, all watching history in the making.

3:08Katty Hayward:So in this series, we're going to cover how Donald Trump became Donald Trump, how that child grew up, learned all of the things that he learned that would make him the most extraordinary president of modern times, how he had his first encounters with anti-establishmentism, how he took on New York State and authorities and lost but claimed he'd won, how he learned these lessons of never backing down, of never apologizing, of always saying he had won. All of those things that you saw, Antony, when you worked with him, which had actually been formed in his childhood and in his early 20s, right?

3:54Anthony Wells:Yeah, but even I think even earlier than that, because remember, Caddy, he got sent to a military school for some of his wayward status as a youth. And so it all fits in. And also we're going to have to talk about his older brother, Fred, who was plagued with alcoholism, who probably got hit the hardest by the father in terms of the physical and mental abuse and was in many ways a shield for Donald Trump and some of the younger siblings. And so there's a fascinating, complex story here. It's rooted in racism. We're just being honest with everybody. It's rooted in anti-establishmentarianism. There's a hostility to government and the state.

4:33Anthony Wells:And I don't mean New York State. I mean anything that you would think of as a state. And then, of course, never apologize and the obsession with building the brand and becoming a politician that would shake up the traditional political playbook. So it's all of that. Everything is here. And since we love founding members, Cady and I sat down and said, what kind of special can we bring to people where they would be like, okay, guys, I now understand the full machinations of Donald Trump. And so we thought we would put this together for you.

5:11Katty Hayward:He's the man you think you know everything about. Billionaire Donald Trump. Donald Trump.

5:15Anthony Wells:Donald Trump.

5:16Katty Hayward:But most people only met him halfway through his story.

5:19Anthony Wells:I am officially running for president of the United States. The manifestation of Donald Trump's personality comes with a lot of complexity. A parent like Fred Trump,

5:32Katty Hayward:it's my way or the highway. There were two paths, work hard, go into the family business or the path of his brother who was an alcoholic. He goes to this military school,

5:41Anthony Wells:but he takes none of the community stuff because he's a selfish dude.

5:46Katty Hayward:He had this whole carousing playboy background, which in a way was a bit of a sham. He leaves early and he doesn't drink anything.

5:52Anthony Wells:What Trump learns is that self-image is going to work for him throughout his career.

5:58Katty Hayward:He meets Ivana Marie Zelinkova.

6:01Anthony Wells:Ultimately, Ivana does exactly as I tell her to do.

6:04Katty Hayward:The way that Donald Trump sees the world today. This is liberation day. You can see where it comes from. We let Japan come in and dump everything right into our markets and everything. It's not free trade. We'll explore the events.

6:19Anthony Wells:Trump has been saying that he will run it as a Republican, which is surprising since I just assumed he was running as a Joe. And the people. He happened to meet Roy Cohn. The ultimate dirty trickster. Who made Donald Trump into the man we see today. I alone can fix it.

6:41Katty Hayward:So in today's episode, we're going to start with where Donald Trump came from and go back to his childhood and his family and his origin story. He was born in 1946. 46. He was the fourth child of a New York real estate tycoon, Fred Trump. And his mother was Scottish, Marianne. Of his dad, he liked to say, he taught me everything I knew. He's a master builder and a very hard worker. And I think it was Fred, as that clip right at the beginning suggests, that instilled in Donald Trump that killer instinct, that there are basically winners and losers. It's zero sum. And that there isn't room for everybody to win.

7:23Katty Hayward:If somebody else is winning, you're losing. If you're winning, somebody else is losing. And I think that zero-sum view of the world is so important to understanding Donald Trump's view of power and how he's implementing the presidency. But it really comes from his dad, where he got that killer instinct. He would describe how his dad never took a day off. And even on a Sunday, instead of taking Donald and his brother Fred around to play baseball in the park or something, he would take them to the building sites, his own building sites, and they would go around scrabbling on the ground looking for unused nails.

7:55Katty Hayward:His mother was more emotionally reserved. Mary Ann, she loved the British royal family again, Anthony. We see Donald Trump's love of the British royal family that Keir Starmer played on so successfully when he came to try and negotiate a better tariff deal. What did he do? He knew that Donald Trump loved the royal family because his mother had loved the royal family and he played on that. Donald himself credits Marianne with being the one that gave a kind of central casting facade of life, that kind of was obsessed with things looking great, like the royal family looked great, like the royal family was straight out of central casting.

8:35Katty Hayward:And again, you see it when Donald Trump is making an announcement. He just did it about his, literally just did it in the last few weeks about his nomination for the Federal Reserve Board, Kevin Walsh, who he said looked out of central casting. I think we see Mary Ann in that side of Donald Trump, who likes to look at television and see people that look the part like his mother saw the royal family and saw that they looked the part. So those are his mom and dad. But then, of course, there's his brother, as you mentioned, Fred Jr. Not quite the golden sheep of the family.

9:05Anthony Wells:Well, interesting. So, you know, obviously, I've lived in New York my whole life. I guess Donald Trump came into my field of vision when I was in high school. He was building the Trump Tower, and this was a cause celeb for all the tabloids. And if you were a sports reader like me, and I'm sure in the British tabloids, we always started at the back page, Caddy. I would get out my bowl of checks or life cereal, and you'd go from the back to the front. But as you got towards the urban part of the tabloids, there was always Donald Trump. Donald Trump knocking down the Bomba Teller building. He's going to build the Trump Tower.

9:44Anthony Wells:Donald Trump taking over the hotel site by Grand Central Station, knocking it down, renovating it, his first project in New York City, creating the Grand Hyatt. But I want to step back because there's a lot of complexity to this story that most people don't fully understand. And I'm going to talk to you now as a New Yorker. Donald Trump's father was a very cautious, conservative guy, and he was generally well liked by the community of people that he was in, and he was a quiet philanthropist. And so I'm talking to you from my home in my studio, but about a mile from here is the Presbyterian church that his sister was a member of.

10:32Anthony Wells:And Fred Trump, if you go into that church, into the congregation center, it's called the Fred Trump Congregation Center. Why is that? In the 1960s, he made a quiet donation to build that. And so it's 60 years on, Caddy, and the church is still being used by the congregationalists. I can go down the block to Spinney Hill, which is a urban housing development. Guess what? Fred Trump made a donation there to help that lower income housing project go off. If you go down into the Jamaica Estates area, which is down by John F. Kennedy Airport, Fred Trump owned what I would call blue collar, lower middle income, working class housing, ever he wanted to find it for our UK listeners.

11:21Anthony Wells:He owned a whole big batch of that, and he used to send Donald Trump to collect coins from the laundry facilities in those buildings. And so imagine the 16, 17-year-old Donald Trump with the key, the master key going into the coin boxes of the laundries, collecting them and bringing them back to the house, putting them in little rolls and sending them to the bank. Fred Trump was a brass knuckled sort of a guy. He was a tough guy, but he had a heart. And I'm going to tell a story that I have never told, but I'll share with you. One of my friends who I went to college with grew up in a Fred Trump apartment in the Jamaica Plains area, and his father lost his job.

12:18Anthony Wells:And on a Saturday, Fred Trump was knocking on the door, and standing behind him was Donald Trump, who was very much taller than Fred Trump. The door opened. My father answered the door. And by the way, I heard this story in the 1980s. This is not a revisionist story or any of that nonsense. and Fred Trump opened the door and my friend's father looked at him and said, I'm out of work. I know I'm behind on the rent. And Fred looked at him and said, hey man, you've been here for 15 years. I'm going to give you two months to catch up. I'm not going to bother you for two months. Go out and find a job.

12:58Anthony Wells:Focus on your family. Him and Donald Trump shook my friend's father's hand and closed the door. And the reason I'm saying this, Caddy, because we're going to get into a lot of different things, okay? They blocked the African-American community in those projects. They had racial discrimination lawsuits going related to that.

13:17Katty Hayward:We're going to talk about how he was arrested during a Ku Klux Klan rally in Queens.

13:21Anthony Wells:We're going to talk about that. We're going to talk about the grandfather of Donald Trump. We're going to talk about all of this stuff. But I want people to understand the complexity of this. There's good parts and bad parts. And it's very, very important to understand that because the manifestation of Donald Trump's personality comes with a lot of complexity. There are dark parts of the story. There are bright parts of the story. And when you step back from that mosaic, okay, you can see a lot of different things. And I want to tell people this. If you're a detractor of Donald Trump's, by the way, which I am, if you are somebody that supports him, by the way, which I once did, when you step back from that mosaic, you pick and choose what you like in the mosaic, which suits your narrative, if you will.

14:12Katty Hayward:And I think also that different parts of our backgrounds come out at different moments of our life. And you also had Marianne, his mother, who was a mitigating factor against some of the harshness of his father. And I think the story you tell about Fred Trump giving two months reprieve to somebody who couldn't pay their rent, that is one story. But it's also true that Fred Trump was known to be very tough on his tenants. He was the one, because he had a lot of Jewish tenants, who actually pretended that his ancestors came from Sweden. They didn't. They came from Germany. His father, Friedrich, came from what was then the Kingdom of Bavaria back in Germany.

14:51Katty Hayward:and he pretended they were Swedish because he didn't want to put off the Jewish tenants that he had. And there is this incident where he was at a Ku Klux Klan rally in Queens in 1927. The event was a protest against the Roman Catholic Church, interestingly. They were accused of assaulting native-born Protestant Americans. Fred was amongst several people who were rounded up with the police and were told to disperse, and they didn't disperse, and so they were rounded up and charged. It's not exactly clear what role Fred Trump played in the brawl, but he didn't always have the image of somebody who was particularly open to minorities, whether they were Jewish people, whether they were people of color, whether they were Catholics.

15:37Katty Hayward:And he didn't always have the reputation of being touchy-feely. Clearly, when it came to his own son, he was and could be very tough. And when it came to his other son, Fred Trump Jr., who was an alcoholic, he was pretty dismissive of him. He didn't hide the fact that he was disappointed in him, right? Fred Trump Jr., I think, is an important figure in Donald Trump's life. And we talk about the influences on Donald today. This is the reason Donald Trump doesn't drink. I mean, he had this whole carousing playboy background, which in a way was a bit of a sham because he would go to these New York nightclubs, but actually he didn't touch a drop of drink.

16:14Katty Hayward:And I think that was because in the effort to please his own father, you don't have to be a pop psychologist to see this, in the effort to choose his own father, there were two paths. You could go the Donald Trump path, work hard, go into the family business, try and be tough like your dad is, or you could go the path of his brother who was an alcoholic and died at the age of 42. And I think that made a huge impact on Donald Trump.

16:38Anthony Wells:Yeah. So I want you to see the complexity of this, right? So humanity was I just represented, but I want you to also see what Donald Trump has told people privately, which is out in the public domain, so this is not stuff that I'm just saying, okay? Fred Trump was criticized and demeaned by his father, okay? And he was also teased, and Trump regretted this himself. Donald Trump has told people privately that one of his regrets in life is that he joined in the teasing of his older brother for choosing to be a pilot as opposed to going into the family business. His father used to call the older brother a bus driver.

17:24Anthony Wells:Here's my son, a bus driver in the sky. And so you have to think of the pain that that was. And there was a dynamic in the family where you're going to do exactly what I say. And if you don't do exactly what I say, well, then guess what's going to happen? I'm going to label you as the black sheep.