Whose Father Do You Think Would Be Madder?
Back in the days before political correctness was the necessity it is today, I heard my redneck Chairman (RIP) comment about a married couple who worked for us that came from different ethnic backgrounds. It is one of the funnier yet most biting comments I have ever heard that effectively denigrated two ethnicities all at once. I am hesitant these days to repeat the comment except in the most generic and finger-wagging manner like I am herein. But I think I have found another good use for the expression.
I am getting sick listening to the impeachment hearings. We lived through two dramatic weeks of the impeachment hearings in the Intelligence Committee under the direction of the expert prosecutorial hand of Representative Adam Schiff, the Chairman of the Committee. Now we are passing through the impeachment hearings in the Judiciary Committee, chaired by Representative Jerrold Nadler, the Chairman of that Committee. Jerry Nadler is a smart man with lots of legislative experience, but he is simply not the commanding presence in the Chairman’s seat that Schiff represented. Whether it’s his command of the intricacies of Robert’s Rules of Order or just his lack of unflappability, Nadler has the Republican dogs at his heels more than Schiff did. In his first day of hearings last Wednesday when the constitutional law scholars were witnesses to the Committee, the Republican members pushed him around to the point of distraction, which was exactly their objective. Today I see that the minority Republican members of the Committee are yapping like mad dogs and Englishmen (to mix metaphors).
Donald Trump’s father was Frederick Christ Trump and he was born in 1905 and lived to the ripe age of 94. He was a real-estate developer in New York City and set the stage for son Donald’s ongoing career in that realm. His specialty was residential construction and sales beginning when he was only twenty-two years old, building single-family houses in Queens and then barracks apartments for the U.S. Navy and then, finally, building 27,000 apartments in New York City. In 1927 Fred was arrested for being a part of a Klu Klux Klan march against Catholics. He was actually arrested while being described in the report as “derobed”. He was investigated by the U.S. Senate for profiteering on the backs of veterans and the military in 1954, and again by the State of New York in 1966. He was eventually sued by the U.S. Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division for violating the Fair Housing Act in 1973, while little Donny sat as President of the company. Fred seemed to set the stage for teaching his son to throw any and everybody in front of the bus to save himself.
During WWII, Fred Trump denied his German heritage and claimed Swedish descent because he thought it would hurt his apartment rental business with the Jewish community. Donald perpetuated the lie in his book, The Art of the Deal. I think the more I read about Fred Trump and how he ran his life, from his business practices to his stern disciplinarian ways with his children, I find it less and less a mystery as to why Donald Trump has the characteristics that he has. Fred’s oldest son, Fred Jr. died at age forty-two of alcoholism. Donald is a teetotaler for understandable reasons. Fred demanded high discipline of his children including curfews and high work ethic initiatives. The funny part about that was that the mandatory newspaper routes would get an assist in inclement weather by the chauffer being put into service to have the limousine drive the route for the boys. Didn’t we all have that sort of help with our paper routes?
Fred Trump was certainly a big influence on Donald’s life. In addition to the early discipline and the young company authority vested in him, Fred purportedly gave Donald as much as $400 million to get him started in his real estate development career. We know that Donald exhibits much of the same business practices and biases espoused by Fred and Donald keeps a portrait of dear old Dad on his credenza in the Oval Office.
This all makes me wonder what Fred (at least the Fred before he slipped into the grip of Alzheimer’s disease in his later years) would have thought of Donald the man and the President. Our first President, George Washington, also had a father who never knew the extent of his son’s accomplishments. Augustin Washington died at age Forty-eight, but not before fathering a full array of children including George. Like Donald, George was a second son to his father. Also like Fred, Augustin was in the business of land speculation and accumulation and he willed a great deal of it to his sons to launch their careers.
So, here we have a tough old real estate bird of a dad raising George and dying at the age of 48, leaving George to set his own compass in the world. George goes out to become an educated man, becoming a certified surveyor. He grows up as a high-integrity man, so much so that there is a biographical myth that he told his dad about chopping down his cherry tree when he was only six. And then there’s another tough old real estate bird named Fred who fathers a bunch of kids (two hundred years later) and then rides them into all sorts of psychological distress and bad habits and ethics by living so long that he micro-manages their lives such that they are (at least in the case of poor little Donny) left in a perpetual childlike state of wanting desperately to please Daddy, but unable to do the substantive things, learn the substantive things and put high value on integrity. Maybe Donald would have been better off with less Fred in his life.
Now we are transported back to the hearing room of the Judiciary Committee, where Jerry Nadler is trying to lay the groundwork intended by George Washington’s pals, the framers of the U.S. Constitution. There is much invocation of the intentions of the framers and what they felt was worthy of consideration in an impeachment process. It was clear that they all felt it was a necessary precaution because they certainly spent enough time and effort laying it all out for us. Republicans have no patience for it this time around (unlike twenty years ago with Bill Clinton). Democrats are adamant that they know exactly what the framers wanted to protect against and it all looks a lot like Donald Trump to them.
What I want to ask is whose father do you think would be madder, George’s or Donald’s? Augustin might have been angry with George for “wasting” twenty-five years on military and political life when there were riches to be had in the early colonies. He would certainly have been angered by his son so easily handing over the reins of power in 1997 at the end of his second term as President. And then there is Fred, who died never suspecting that Donald would realize his political goals. If he heard what the Democrats were saying about his baby boy would he be proud or displeased. I suspect that full hindsight tells the tale best. Augustin, with the fullness of history would surely say that his son did well with his time and efforts and created a lasting legacy for the name Washington. Fred would probably be MUCH madder to realize Donald has gotten caught and that Donald has probably forever debased the Trump name so much so that more building are removing the name than are adding it for its branding excellence. I have no problem putting this all at Fred’s feet. If he had taught his son better lessons than to put himself and the almighty dollar first and foremost in his thinking, he may have raised a better son.
