How Trump’s mother was “an outsider in her own family”
The German side of Donald Trump’s family “buried” the back story of his Lewis-born mother because they “didn’t think she measured up to their social class”.
This is recalled in a new book by Fred Trump, nephew of Donald and grandson of Fred Trump senior and Mary Ann Macleod, which portrays a deeply dysfunctional family in which his grandfather was the dominant figure.
He says that his grandmother, like himself, “always felt like an outsider in her own family”.
The younger Fred Trump writes: “For years, people on my grandfather’s side of the family would bury the true story of my grandmother’s arrival in America, trying to make her sound like something more than a poor immigrant who’d disembarked in a new country with little more than a battered suitcase and her dreams.
“The way they chose to tell the story, Scottish lass Mary Anne was ‘on holiday’ from her happy life across the ocean when she met her Prince Charming, conveniently skipping the part where she fled grinding poverty and the five years she had worked as a maid in Queens and in Long Island in other people’s homes”.
By doing so, writes Mr Trump, they were concealing “an amazing story, that brought my grandmother to America – and they wanted to skip the most inspiring parts”.
He says that in 1935, Mary Anne and her sister Catherine – who had preceded her to America – “went to a house party in Queen’s where they met a couple of American guys. Mary hit it off with the one who said he owned a construction company and built things in the New York area”. They married the following January.
The marriage was briefly reported in the Stornoway Gazette under the heading: “Tong girl weds abroad” and the bride wore “a princess gown of white satin and a tulle cap and veil” … “They honeymooned for a night on the boardwalk in Atlantic City, New Jersey. They would have stayed longer but the groom said he had to get back to work. An assertion he would make over and over again, almost to the day he died”.
Mr Trump writes that his grandparents “had a division of labour that seemed to suit them both perfectly … Only rarely did either of them step outside their lanes. My grandmother would ride around to Trump apartment buildings and collect coins from the laundry machines”.
Mr Trump says that he “always had a special connection with my grandmother and she with me. Like my father and like me, she’d always felt like an outsider in her own family”
For many years, both Donald Trump and his father pretended that the family was Swedish in origin rather than German, initially in order not to attract the ire of Fred Trump’s Jewish and black tenants.
Fred Trump’s own father, also Fred, was “the charming black-sheep first son, whose free-spirited rejection of the family business was taken as a character flaw almost as severe as his self-destructive impulses and his alcoholism”.
“The Trumps and how we got this way” is published by Simon and Schuster.