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On the 21st of September 1966 an infamous demolition party was thrown by the New York real-estate magnate, Fred Trump, to demolish Steeplechase Park at Coney Island in Brooklyn. The publicity event was meant to mark the beginning of a new development by Trump, but the project was abandoned after it ran into local resistance. This was a pivotal moment for Trump's son, Fred Jr., who had been placed in charge of the project and whose alcoholism worsened afterwards. Did the debacle at Steeplechase lead to Freddy's drinking
problem, which ultimately led to his death, or was his drinking already out of control by 1966? This is the story of Fred Trump Jr. The man known to history as Fred Trump Jr. or Freddy Trump was born on the 14th of October 1938 in Queens in New York City. His full baptismal name was Frederick Christ Trump, Crist being a version of his paternal grandmother's maiden name. Fred's father was Fred Trump Sr., a rising New York real-estate magnate, whose father, Frederick or Friedrich Trump, had immigrated to America from Germany back in 1885. Fred Jr.
was the eldest son from Fred Trump Sr.'s marriage to Mary Anne MacLeod, a Scottish woman who had migrated to the US in the early 1930s and who married Fred Sr. in 1936. They had five children in all. The eldest was Maryanne, who was born a year and a half before Fred Jr., followed by Elizabeth in 1942, Donald in 1946, who would go on to become the 45th and 47th President of the United States, and a third son, Robert, in 1948. Fred Jr. was known to everyone in the Trump family as Freddy. Jr. and why his life played out in the way which it ultimately did is a difficult task. Freddy was
not a person who lived in the public eye and there are not many historical records that can be used to develop a coherent picture of the events that unfolded around him, at least not in the same way that would be the case when studying an American president, like his younger brother, Donald, or a major American businessman or intellectual of some kind. As will become evident, despite coming from a prominent New York real-estate family, Freddy wanted to live a fairly private life as an airline pilot. This lack of documentary evidence means that our view of Freddy has been almost completely
shaped by the oral testimony of people who knew him between his childhood years in the 1940s and his death in 1981. Things like his date of birth, education, marriage and family can be objectively determined, but everything else is reliant on what has been written or stated by people who knew him. The problem with this is that there are competing and biased interpretations. In particular, the two most detailed accounts of Freddy's life are found in books written by his son and daughter, Fred Trump III or Fred C. and Mary Trump, the latter of whom has penned two different memoirs. Their
books cast Freddy as the victim of a dysfunctional family and portray their grandfather, Fred Sr., as a nefarious character who undermined Freddy psychologically. As revealing as their accounts are about Freddy's life, the potential bias inherent in these books needs to be taken into account, given that Freddy's children became embroiled in a bitter inheritance dispute with their wider family after the death of Freddy's father in 1999. Nonetheless, their portrayal of Freddy's position within the family is actually supported in many ways by other accounts such as
Gwenda Blair's study of the Trump family going back to the days of Freddy's grandfather. While there are competing narratives about Freddy's later life, there's no disputing the financial background of the family and how they came to prominence in America. Freddy's grandfather, Frederick or Friedrich Trump, was born in the town of Kallstadt in Germany in 1869. He joined the nineteenth-century exodus of millions of Germans to the Americas when he left for New York City in 1885. In 1891 he headed out west to Seattle and over the next ten years he
became a moderately wealthy man after running a number of establishments in the Pacific Northwest and British Columbia that served overlapping functions as hotels, restaurants and brothels. He spent the early 1900s traversing the Atlantic again, unsure whether to return to live in Germany, before he and his wife, Elisabeth Christ, settled permanently in New York right around the time that Freddy's father was born in 1905. There Frederick worked partly as a hairdresser, the profession he had apprenticed in as a teenager, but he also began investing his
savings into building homes in Queens, a borough of New York that was experiencing a surge in settlement as tens of thousands of migrants moved out of an overcrowded Manhattan following the completion of the Queensboro Bridge in 1909. Frederick died in May 1918, most likely as an early victim of the Spanish Flu pandemic. The Trumps were certainly not wealthy when he died, but he left enough property and wealth behind that Fred was able to enter the real-estate market in Queens himself in the mid-1920s. The onset of the Great Depression in 1929 was a serious setback,
however, in the 1930s Fred availed of the incentives being provided by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal to become a major home builder. His father's rise over the next thirty years to become a wildly successful real-estate magnate would shape Freddy's life. Freddy's earliest years were spent moving around the East Coast. When he was born his father was scaling up his construction business rapidly. The entry of the United States into the Second World War provided a further opportunity which Fred Sr. grabbed. The government was offering
construction magnates like him large incentives to build residential units for military personnel and Fred was given contracts to build large-scale developments to house marines and soldiers in and around the US Navy bases at Norfolk in Virginia, the largest US naval base on the Atlantic coast. These came with the added advantage that Fred would be allowed to keep the apartment blocks once the war ended, something that created a huge long-term opportunity. His building work there meant that the Trumps spent a large part of the years between 1942 and 1945 living in Virginia.
After the war they returned to live in a large mansion on Midland Parkway in the Jamaica Estates in Queens. Freddy began attending public school before moving on to St Paul's, an Episcopalian preparatory school in Garden City on Long Island. During his graduation year from St Paul's in 1956, Freddy's father donated money to have the playing field re-developed and named Trump Field, a sign of how wealthy he had become by then. The US government had helped him even further after the war by putting in place a new subsidy system whereby construction magnates were issued with
sizeable contracts to develop residential units for veterans of the war. By the end of the 1950s, Freddy's father was one of the largest real-estate developers on the East Coast and a billionaire when all of his assets are taken into account and adjusting for inflation. While Fred Sr.'s success certainly meant that the Trump's didn't want for anything, their family life was austere and tough. Fred Sr. was a domineering father who had his wife report in the evenings on the children's activities while he was away working in the day just gone. He then scolded
then for their failings, but was very short on praise. This view is generally verified by the other Trumps and those who knew them and is not a skewed perception that Freddy mistakenly imparted to his children. Fred Sr. was also especially tough on Freddy. As his eldest son, one who was eight years older than Donald and ten years older than Robert, he viewed him as the natural heir to the family business, and Fred wanted to ensure that he had the steely determination to succeed in what he believed was a ruthless business world requiring a gritty personality.
He was disdainful of the idea that Freddy would study towards a career outside of business and Fred Sr. mocked his own brother, John, claiming that his job as a professor of engineering at MIT did not pay enough, even though John was the founder of the Voltage Engineering Corporation, a successful engineering business. The message would have been clear for Freddy from a young age. He was expected to focus on becoming the successor to the real-estate business that his father expected him to be and to not let other frivolous concerns get in the way. This would soon
place the son at odds with his father. Freddy had been well-liked in school and was a decent athlete, but his academic performance was not especially good. He was therefore rejected by the Wharton School of Business after leaving St Paul's and instead had to attend Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, where he studied business. By now Freddy had emerged as a tall young man with nervous energy. He was handsome, affable bordering on charismatic, and also carried his wealthy background loosely. Freddy didn't trade on the Trump name and accounts of those who knew him in
the late 1950s and early 1960s are unanimous that he didn't display any upper-class snobbery. This was reflected in his friendship circles at Lehigh. He turned down the opportunity to join the older fraternities that were associated with the WASPs, the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant dimension within East Coast society, instead joining Sigma Alpha Mu, a fraternity with a large Jewish dimension. Freddy's son and daughter, in their respective memoirs, both present this as an attempt by young Freddy to break away from the prejudices of their father, who has frequently been
depicted as someone who discriminated against his many tenants based on race, religion and socio-economic factors, though these are a point of dispute in accounts of Fred Sr. Freddy was not a heavy drinker at Lehigh. Within Sigma Alpha Mu he was in charge of bookkeeping and other important responsibilities, not the kind of thing one would place a heavy drinker in charge of. Those who knew him during these years later remarked that while he drank beer and the occasional glass of wine, there was no sign of a major alcohol problem. Instead,
he was an energetic, outgoing college student who enjoyed fishing and other pursuits. He was also noticeably interested in flying small planes, and this was gradually morphing into a desire to become a pilot. It should be kept in mind that the 1950s and early 1960s were the golden age of the airline industry, when commercial airlines were taking off and being a pilot was viewed as a glamorous job. Freddy obtained both a personal and professional pilot's licence while he was at Lehigh. After graduating, he returned to New York and started working as an assistant to his father,
playing a prominent role in the management of Trump Village, a series of seven 23-storey high apartment blocks in Coney Island, but Freddy's real desire was to become a professional pilot. And he decided to pursue that before long, over the objections of Fred Sr. There are conflicting dates about his career as a pilot. What is agreed on is that he trained with Trans World Airlines in Kansas City and Florida and was accepted as a pilot by the airline, which was one of the most prestigious in the world in the early 1960s and was owned by Howard Hughes.
In 1964 he graduated and began flying as a pilot with TWA, a decision that appears to have infuriated his father. Freddy's flying career, though, would not last long. Freddy was a married man when he started flying for TWA. Back in 1958, he had met Linda Clapp while he was holidaying at the British Colonial hotel in Nassau in the Bahamas. She was originally from Michigan and had moved to Florida. Once they got talking they realised that they both had an interest in aviation. They reconnected in New York two years later,
by which stage Linda was working as an air stewardess and Freddy had his pilot's licence. He helped her to acquire an apartment in the city in one of his father's large apartment blocks and the pair began seeing each other, travelling out to Long Island on weekends to fly seaplanes. Freddy proposed in the summer of 1961 and they were married in Florida the following January, as her parents couldn't afford a New York wedding and this was still an age in which the parents of the bride were expected to pick up the bill according to East Coast society traditions. Their
first child, a boy who they named Fred after his father and grandfather, was born in November 1962, followed by Mary in 1965. Yet the marriage was far from idyllic. From the earliest days, Freddy and Linda fought. There were multiple causes of these clashes. Linda was looked down on by the rest of the Trump family and thought of unfairly as a suspected gold-digger, something which strained the marriage, while Freddy was starting to drink more as he came in for sustained criticism for his decision to abandon the family business and become an airline pilot. Linda was also possibly
not an easy woman to be married to. Mary Trump's memoirs paint a picture of a difficult mother who, for instance, refused to take her to the hospital when she was a child when she was suffering from severe asthma attacks. Everything started to take a toll on Freddy in 1965. His relationship with his wife was already strained and now there were two infants in the mix. On top of this, his family looked down on his marriage, believing he had married below the family's wealth and newfound social status. Finally, probably the most significant issue of
all for him was that his father ridiculed his decision to leave the real-estate business to become a pilot. If Fred C. and Mary Trump's accounts are to be taken at face value, Fred Sr. belittled Freddy about this at every available opportunity, on one occasion stating that Freddy was no more than a, quote, "chauffeur in the sky." With these pressures building on him, Freddy began drinking more and more, and this compounded the problems he and Linda were having. The very nature of being a pilot didn't help matters. As a job it involved long periods of waiting around in
foreign cities in between jobs and Freddy started drinking during these spells. It soon led to him losing his job and then he had to return home to New York and start working again for his father, a capitulation which must have been humiliating after trying to go his own way in life. This marked the beginning of Freddy's descent into full alcoholism in the second half of the 1960s, becoming a drinker of heavy spirits. 1966 was a critical year in Freddy's life, one that brought his relationship with his father and his place within the family hierarchy to a
head. Fred Sr. had acquired Steeplechase Park in Brooklyn, one of three large amusement parks that had been built at Coney Island right at the end of the nineteenth century. These were rundown and no longer profitable by the 1960s, as people travelled longer distances out of New York to holiday elsewhere in an era of growing air travel. Fred bought Steeplechase for around $2.3 million dollars and planned to redevelop the site as a series of large apartment blocks, creating thousands of housing units. Freddy was given a prominent role in managing the project,
which kicked off with fanfare in September 1966 when Fred held a public demolition wherein people were supplied with bricks and urged to aid in the destruction while a bulldozer got to work on the main site. Opposition was already growing towards the proposed project, though, as locals perceived that the area was being over-developed with high-rise apartment blocks. As the objections grew, Freddy was charged with defending the project to the press. It was no use. Local interest groups became determined to block the project and it was stopped. Fred
Sr. ended up renting out the property, somewhat ironically, to a tenant who developed it into a temporary amusement park, the very thing that had been demolished on that rainy day in September 1966. In the end he sold the site to the municipal government for four million dollars, realising a tidy profit on the whole enterprise, despite the failure of the apartment complex project. Regardless, Fred Sr. distilled his anger over the whole course of events towards Freddy. His prominent role in the Steeplechase project, and the fact that his drinking made him an easy person to blame, ensured that he was scapegoated for the failure of it,
even though the real reason was the staunch resistance of the Coney Island locals. Fred Sr.'s diminishing view of his eldest son happened to coincide with Donald's emergence as an alternative potential heir. Unlike Freddy, Donald was genuinely anxious to move into the family business and wanted to succeed their father. He graduated from the Wharton School of Business in 1968 and began working more closely with Fred Sr. There was a sense here of the survival of the fittest. Freddy had, in their father's eyes, failed, and now he began
turning to Donald as he sought to have the two boys compete with each other. This is a dynamic which was openly admitted to by other members of the family. In an interview which he gave in 1990, Donald stated about his older brother that, "our family environment, the competitiveness, was a negative for Fred … he was the first Trump boy out there, and I subconsciously watched his moves." Donald, coming up several years after Freddy, saw what he had done wrong in their father's eyes and avoided repeating any of these mistakes. In this way, as the 1960s gave way to the 1970s,
he established himself as the heir apparent, while Freddy was increasingly demoted to the role of a rent collector and handyman, while intermittently considering trying to resume his career as a pilot. The latter route was a dead end as long as his drinking continued, though, and the drinking was only getting worse after the Steeplechase disaster. By the end of the 1960s, Freddy's psychological state was deteriorating as he drank more. This was impacting too on his marriage and family life, as both his daughter and son have recollected
in their memoirs. As his Scotch intake increased, he and Linda began fighting more, often about the very subject of how much he was drinking. The disorder of the Trump household was so intense that Freddy's son later remembered being struck by how serene the environment was when he stayed over at his neighbours, the Gelusos' house. There was no shouting, nobody drinking and no chaos. This contrasted sharply with how things were faring at home. Both Fred and Mary Trump recall a specific event involving their father, mother and a gun which occurred around this time. As Freddy's
son put it, "One night, my mom and dad were having another one of their arguments. My dad was drunk. Again. My mom was expressing her displeasure at that. Again. By this point in their marriage, neither one of them was showing much restraint. My parents were in their bedroom. Mary and I were in my bedroom with the door open. We could hear the rising argument. This one sounded extra serious, like my mother was trying to contain the situation and not succeeding. Then, my mother came into my bedroom and announced firmly, 'Come on, we're leaving.' Apparently, at some point in the
argument, my father was cleaning his old military rifle. I had no idea if the gun was loaded or not, or any other details. But I could see the fear in my mother's eyes. When Mary and I delayed a moment, not sure what was happening, she said firmly: 'Come on.' The three of us went down to the garage, got in the car, and drove to the house of one of my mother's friends, where we all spent the night. And when we went back home the next morning, my mother never mentioned any of that again." Mary, seemingly remembering the same incident, apparently had a more direct view
of what had happened. She recalled seeing her father inebriated and laughing as he pointed his rifle directly at their mother. This being said, Mary would only have been four or five years old then at most, so it seems strange that her recollection of the event would be so vivid. Unsurprisingly, it was not long after this that Freddy and Linda agreed to separate. Young Fred, who was seven years old then, was sent off to Cape Cod for part of the summer of 1970. When he came back his mother informed him that she and his father had decided to get a divorce and that
Freddy would be moving out. This was, apparently, not out of the blue. They had first discussed divorcing as early as 1964, but then Linda had become pregnant with Mary and they had decided to stay together. Now they were separating nearly six years later. Freddy would move out and Linda would continue living in their apartment with the kids. A peculiar family dynamic developed thereafter whereby Linda continued to attend family gatherings, with Mary Trump later claiming that her mother was coerced into presenting an air of family normality in an age when divorce
continued to be considered a problematic event in a wider family rather than something that just happened very regularly. Beyond this the family split apart. There is no indicating in any of the memoirs available that Linda and Freddy ever considered trying to reconcile. Indeed, she appears to have asked her father-in-law, Fred Trump Sr., to have the locks changed on the door to the apartment after Freddy left, presumably to ensure that he did not attempt to enter uninvited while intoxicated. This was not a trial separation that morphed into a divorce. When Freddy and Linda
split in 1970 it was a definite end to their marriage after years of chaos and violence. The years that followed in the 1970s are very poorly documented for Freddy's life. His marriage was over. He would not remarry and there is no evidence of any serious relationships after he and Linda divorced, while his flying career also never resumed in any meaningful way. The best account of what he was doing in these years comes from his son, albeit with the caveat that Fred C. was quite young at the time and was writing nearly half a century after the events he describes in
his memoir. He indicates that he and Mary would occasionally spend weekends with their father, who lived initially in an apartment on the edge of Brooklyn, a small place where he kept some chickens out the back. Freddy soon moved from there to a nicer apartment in a complex that Fred Sr. owned in Sunnyside in Queens. At first his drinking was heavier after splitting from Linda and Fred C. describes a situation where he and Mary would often visit on a weekend only to have their father fall asleep in the afternoon, presumably from too much Scotch. Gradually things
changed though and he seemed to recover some of his energy. Then they would frequently go on trips to go fishing or to watch wrestling matches during their weekend visits. Nevertheless, these were not visits that were without tension and Fred C. remembers being anxious about both the mood their father would be in and whether or not arguments would occur between Freddy and Linda during their brief interactions when they met. Professionally, things were getting worse for Freddy. He did some handiwork for the family business and was provided with a roof over his
head, but he was now firmly established as the black sheep of the family. Worse still, Donald's rise as the heir to the family business became clear for all to see in the second half of the 1970s. Where Fred Sr. had been content to be a real-estate developer in Queens and Brooklyn, Donald was determined to make a name for himself and wanted to break into the Manhattan real-estate market, which carried prestige, yet which also came with additional risks. Property was more expensive and the Manhattan market had been notoriously difficult since the
end of the skyscraper boom of the 1920s, especially owing to the rise in post-war crime levels. That was all about to change in the late 1970s and early 1980s, as a period of urban regeneration began in New York. Although he would later run into difficulties and then multiple bankruptcies, Donald at first had several successes in Manhattan, notably the renovation of the old Commodore Hotel into the Grand Hyatt Hotel on East 42nd Street. The New York Times feted Freddy's younger brother, running a story which stated that "Donald is the second youngest
of five children … and the only one of them to display an interest in real estate." With Donald on the ascent, Freddy's sense of self-worth declined further and his drinking continued. It is difficult to be sure of the actual family dynamics that were at work here. Mary and Fred C. have portrayed Freddy as a victim of the wider family's politics and hierarchy, but at the same time, it is not as though he was entirely ostracised. When Donald married his first wife, Ivana, over the Easter holidays in 1977, Freddy acted as best man for his younger brother. Donald later stated that
he asked him to do so in an attempt to snap his brother out of his destructive behaviour. Freddy's son, Fred C., began attending Rollins College in Florida in 1980. He recounted in his memoir that his father's physical health really began to deteriorate around then, even though Freddy was only just entering his forties. As described in Fred C.'s book, All in the Family, Freddy "was sick a lot, in and out of the hospital, and not feeling too well even when he was back at his apartment. When he felt a little better, he did small maintenance chores at some of the family apartment buildings, but as the year rolled on,
that became even more sporadic." His son visited him when he came back to New York from Florida on long weekends or for the holidays. Although his father was happy to see him, he always seemed to be lacking in energy and looked pale. Nor did he show any motivation to change his behaviour and he was still drinking very heavily. The impression his son had from these sporadic visits back to Queens was that Freddy was increasingly isolated from the rest of the family and rarely saw them. He would ask about other family members and how they were doing, as though his son would
know more than he did, despite being away at college in Florida. In the months that followed, Freddy was in and out of Jamaica Hospital in Queens as his health deteriorated further. When not there he began spending time at his parents' house where he stayed in the attic sleeping in a small bed that his son described as being like an army cot. When Fred C. returned home from Florida in January 1981, his father was back in the hospital. When he visited him there, Freddy sent him on a mission to buy a new Polaroid camera as a gift for a girl down the corridor of
the hospital who was terminally ill with cancer. It was one of his son's last memories of him. Freddy's health was spiralling by the summer of 1981. There had been one attempt to get him to go to rehab, however he checked himself out of the facility after just one day. Nevertheless, it came as a shock to everyone when the news spread on the 27th of September 1981 that he had suffered a massive heart attack the previous night and had died three weeks short of his 43rd birthday. Freddy had been at his parents' house when the heart attack had begun.
Fred Sr. had called an ambulance, which took him to Queens Hospital, where he was pronounced dead around 9.20pm. The heart attack was officially judged to be a result of his chronic alcoholism. At the funeral in Queens, Fred C. claims that he delivered the only eulogy and that there was a dispute over how Freddy's remains were to be disposed of. He had, apparently, indicated a wish to be cremated and for his ashes to be spread over the ocean, but he was buried instead in the Trump family crypt at All Faiths Cemetery in Queens alongside his grandparents,
who were born in Germany all the way back in 1869 and 1880. Freddy left behind an ex-wife and two children. It has been mistakenly claimed in many media reports that Linda Clapp died in 2001. This was a case of mistaken identity with another Linda Clapp who died that year in California. In reality Freddy's former wife lived a quiet life through the early twenty-first century and into the 2020s. In her second memoir, Who Could Ever Love You, published in 2024, Mary Trump noted that her mother had recently been diagnosed with and treated for cancer. Mother and daughter had
a contentious relationship after Freddy's death and Mary has spoken about them being estranged for long periods. Mary trained as a psychologist and has become prominent in recent times as a media critic of her uncle and the wider Trump family, while Fred C. moved into the real-estate sector. His work for Cushman & Wakefield involved the leasing out of Trump Organisation properties in New York, but Fred C. has never worked directly for the Trump family business. Freddy's death cast a long shadow over the lives of his children. In order to understand how this
played out, one has to have a view of how the Trump Organisation's business fared between the early 1980s and the mid-1990s. When Freddy died in 1981, Donald's ascent as Fred Sr.'s heir was going well. The move into the more glamorous Manhattan market had started excellently and Donald was benefiting from the wider move to revitalise Manhattan and stamp out crime there in the 1980s. This was reflected in the huge success of Trump Tower, a 58-storey skyscraper which Donald led the construction of and which was completed on Fifth Avenue in Midtown Manhattan late in 1983.
The upmarket condominium apartments that made up most of the upper half of the building, which was advertised as being 68 stories high by skipping ten numbers on the elevator, sold out within a few months of being completed. Then the Trump fairytale in Manhattan began to sour. Donald over-extended his investments there as the market overheated in the second half of the 1980s. Then he disastrously invested in multiple casinos in Atlantic City, effectively going into business against himself by owning multiple gambling venues in the same area. A financial downturn
in the early 1990s after the boom of the 1980s plunged Donald's casinos into crisis. He declared the first of several bankruptcies for one of his businesses, the Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City, in 1991 after Fred Sr.'s attempt to bail him out using some rather dubious methods led to fines being imposed for attempted tax avoidance. This was followed by three further bankruptcies in 1992 for the Trump Castle and Trump Plaza and Casino in Atlantic City and the Trump Plaza in Manhattan. Donald subsequently reinvented himself as a TV show host with The Apprentice
and developed the Trump family as more of a brand than a real-estate empire per se, but his first career as a New York and New Jersey real-estate developer between the late 1970s and early 1990s ultimately ended in a slew of bankruptcies. Two more bankruptcies ensued in the 2000s. All of this had implications for Freddy's children. While Donald had been designated as Fred Sr.'s heir since the 1970s, his intention was to divide his estate up between his children in such a way that others received a significant proportion of his wealth and property. This included a portion for Fred C. and Mary as Freddy's surviving children. At least,
Fred and Mary have always maintained that they were included in a meaningful way in the will, though these matters have been before the courts and remain a point of legal dispute to this day. Their version of events is that after Fred Sr. developed dementia in 1991, and especially so when he died in June 1999, Fred Sr.'s will was changed so as to effectively cut them out of the inheritance. They received a small percentage, what most people would still consider a sizeable windfall, but nothing near the kind of proportion which their father might have expected to inherit
had he been alive and well. Mary, for instance, signed an agreement in 2001 whereby she settled her claim to the estate for $2.7 million. While she has disputed this in court in recent years, and continues to do so, the legal ruling has generally been that in signing the agreement in 2001 she forfeited her ability to dispute the will. In Fred C.'s case the dispute between 1999 and 2001 was especially jarring, as it involved his medical insurance being stopped right after his youngest son, William, was born, who was quickly revealed to have a genetic condition
which left him needing round-the-clock medical care. Hence, the dispute over Freddy's portion of the Trump family property empire has left a bitter rift within the family. It is difficult to disentangle fact from fiction when it comes to the life of Fred Trump Jr. There are elements of Freddy's story which are indisputable. Nobody denies that he was a troubled man with a serious alcohol problem, or that he was ill-suited to succeed his father at the head of the Trump real-estate business. Instead, he developed a desire early in
life to become a pilot and worked towards that ambition much to the dismay of Fred Trump Sr. Later everything came crumbling down around him as he successively lost his job as a pilot, then his position within the family business, and finally his wife and family in the course of a difficult seven-year period between around 1963 and 1970. He never recovered from this and his drinking continued through the 1970s until he died from a heart attack at 42 years of age in 1981. While these are clear facts, what is much less certain is why Freddy's life collapsed in this way.
If we read the memoirs of both his son and daughter, Fred C. and Mary, we come across two children who are convinced that their father was the victim of an unhealthy family dynamic in which Freddy was pitted against Donald by Fred Sr., an overbearing father who damaged Freddy. Freddy was then supplanted as the heir to the family business, an indignity which was compounded for Fred C. and Mary when they were almost entirely cut out of their grandfather's will and the vast Trump family inheritance in 1999. And this view is somewhat corroborated by more neutral observers.
For instance, while there is no doubt at all that Freddy already had a serious drinking problem by then, Gwenda Blair's account of the Trump family, first written long before Donald became president and the family's history became a politically charged issue, also suggests that the period around 1966 and 1967, when Fred Sr. began to blame Freddy for the failure of the Steeplechase project, was a definite turning point in Freddy's life. It will always be difficult to know for sure, as too many of those whose statements we have to rely on for details of Freddy's life were
far too close emotionally to him to be entirely neutral or objective in their versions of events. Moreover, everything that involves Donald is now skewed by his later time as president. The reality might well be that Freddy was partly a victim of a dysfunctional family, but there seems to be little doubt that he was also his own worst enemy. What do you think of Fred Trump Jr.? Was he a victim of a dysfunctional family and an ambitious younger brother who supplanted him as heir to a real-estate empire, or was he responsible for his own demise? Please let us know in the comment section, and in the meantime, thank you very much for watching.
