Donald Trump Holds the Scissors (or does he?)

(Note* This writing is 100% inspired by the 2024 book “Lucky Loser” by Russ Buettner and Susanne Craig, I will quote heavily throughout with attribution)

Trump got to office by creating a fear of immigration and the promise of punishing immigrants. So…I am going to start this article with my US immigration story. It began on the MayFlower in the year 1620. November 11, 1620, to be exact.

On my mother’s side of the family we started off with Francis Cooke and his 13 yr old son John Cooke, Separatists who came over on that journey. Later after getting settled, Francis Cooke’s wife came over with their other children. One of those children, Hester — is my direct descendent. Then there is John Howland, a 13 year old boy and manservant to John Carver. On the Mayflower were passengers John and Joan Tilley and 13 yr old daughter, Elizabeth Tilley. John Howland and Elizabeth Tilley would marry later in life and give birth to another direct descendant of mine.

On my dad’s side of the family two of my relatives are named Rosalia Palermo and Ramon Del Valle. Rosalia was born in Santo Stefano Quisquina, Italy. She arrived here in 1891. Ramon’s family was originally from Spain, moved to Cuba where he was born, before he came to the US in 1899. The parents raised kids in Miami, Florida for 41 years before they applied for citizenship. But their children didn’t have to apply for naturalization because birthright citizenship gave all of their many children citizenship upon birth. That process is literally how this experiment called the USA, came into being. In terms of being populated with non native people’s…If you try to talk about the USA without talking about immigrants and immigration there isn’t a conversation at all. Put another way…if you are reading this and you live in the USA and you are not Native American by descent, then you are an, in fact, an immigrant or related to very recent immigrants. In the long march of time, the USA is still so new, that we are all non-native newcomers here. If we work off the most recent evidence, that people have been coming here since about 30,000 years ago, to the North American continent (source: https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2020-07-22-earliest-americans-arrived-new-world-30000-years-ago) then how long has immigration (since 1620) to the USA been a thing if this is expressed in time…say a 24 hour day? Less than 20 minutes (Or it could be viewed as 1.35% of a 24 hour day). And in case you are wondering, it’s about 12 generations from now back to the Mayflower days. But from now til 30,000 years ago…that’s about 1200 generations. Yeah. I am one of the newcomers to this place called the United States of America. So are we all non native folks. It’s about context. And now in 2025 we are 405 years into this experiment where we have made all the same mistakes that all societies make…but we’ve also done a lot of good and made huge progress in terms of realizing the value of life and liberty. It hasn’t been perfect but it hasn’t all been awful either. I feel that if you are a student of history then it’s easy to see that the thread of effort leading from 1620 til now is being cut. Any good that has come out of this government structure is abruptly halting. And the world is so interconnected now through commerce and communication, treaties-that this cut thread is a threat to worldwide stability. Donald Trump is the person with the scissors.

Since I began with my immigration story it feels like we should start with Donald Trump’s immigration story. His maternal grandfather was named Friedrich Trump. He left Germany in 1885 to come to the USA while fleeing Germany’s military conscription and draft. Friedrich amassed a small fortune in the West and in NYC running restaurants, a hotel and successfully running smaller real estate deals. He actually returned to Germany and planned to stay there with his wife Elizabeth…but the draft dodging caught up with him and he was stripped of his Bavarian citizenship. This was penned by Bavarian authorities February of 1905 “The American citizen and pensioner Friedrich Trump, currently residing in Kallstadt, is hereby informed that he is to depart the state of Bavaria, or face deportation” (source: https://www.dw.com/en/report-trumps-grandfather-pleaded-to-stay-in-germany/a-36465868 )

Elizabeth and Friedrich returned to the USA for good in 1905. In 1918 Friedrich died from the Spanish Flu. “Friedrich left his wife an estate valued at $36,000, the equivalent of more than $800,000 today (in 2024), mostly in the form of money due on loans he had made to builders and the value of a few vacant lots.” (source: Lucky Loser-Penguin Press). Elizabeth’s son, then a 12 year old son named Fred, would later help his mother turn this fortune into his real estate dreams.

A big boost for Fred happened in 1934 when the Fair Housing Act (FHA) was passed. President Roosevelt felt that housing just wasn’t coming back from the Great Depression quickly enough. The FHA made it easier for people of lower incomes to finally be able to buy a home. For the first time in US history it was possible for a borrower to take as long as 30 years to pay off a home loan and buy a home with only 20% down. The way we all buy homes today, began with FHA and Roosevelt triggered a housing ownership and building boom that Fred Trump was perfectly positioned to take advantage of. “City newspapers began calling Fred “the Henry Ford of the building industry”, for his assembly-line approach…”(source: Lucky Loser-Penguin Press). Fred created numerous methods of speeding up the way homes were built to great effect. He was featured in a building magazine in 1938 for building 150 homes in a single year.

When WWII came along in 1941 Norfolk VA was experiencing a housing crisis for all the tradespeople required to supply the war effort. “After years of basing his business model on building a home, or row of homes, and selling them for profit, Fred would now own large rental complexes on which he could collect rent every month. (source: Lucky Loser-Penguin Press)” By 1945 “Trump had built more than 1400 apartments as part of the war effort”(source: Lucky Loser-Penguin Press). How did he afford to build 1400 units in 4 years? Fred went down to Norfolk after he realized that the FHA program had loopholes that could be taken advantage of because what if you could make money without spending money? “The rules of the FHA program would unintentionally benefit builders…the new program-known as Title VI, Section 608-offered low-interest loans that would cover 90 percent of estimated construction costs. The mortgage amounts would be based on cost estimates supplied by the builder. But the law did not require developers to later document how much had been spent, or to pay back any portion of the mortgage not spent on construction, leaving open the possibility of cash in the pocket…using little or none of their own cash, developers could build-and own-vast apartment complexes” (source: Lucky Loser-Penguin Press).

The result for Fred Trump was that if he could drive down building costs (how much he would pay workers or pay for materials) while simultaneously inflating his cost estimates to the government, there would be no repercussions or oversight for pocketed profit. For anyone willing to stretch the truth, it was a financial bonanza. It happened again when the war ended. A housing crisis for returning soldiers and their new families loomed in NYC and the government again passed new regulations that favored Fred Trump. “Three weeks before Donald Trump was born, President Truman signed the Veteran’s Emergency Housing Program, yet another amendment to the 1934 housing act (FHA), with the goal of “rapidly and adequately housing our veterans.” …the amendment sweetened the pot for developers even further, lowering interest rates to 4 percent.” (source: Lucky Loser-Penguin Press). With these additional favorable developer friendly programs Fred Trump was able to build Shore Haven and Beach Haven in NYC. “Beach Haven would hold 1,860 families, exceeding Shore Haven by more than five hundred apartments”(source: Lucky Loser-Penguin Press). When you scale the implications of FHA loopholes, over that much construction, it multiplies the legal money theft that Fred Trump was able to put into his pocket. I think of it like wage theft-clocking in before your shift has started without telling your boss. Just because the government didn’t close the loophole doesn’t make it ethical.

As a reminder, you have the son of a draft dodger whose father was ejected from their own country, already wealthy from an inheritance, now becoming wildly wealthy off the back of a government program when he recognized the blind spots in FHA policy to help build housing for Americans in need. By 1948 Fred Trump had five young children and he was about to secure their financial future for the next 99 years.

“He did so by creating a business artifice that served no business purpose whatsoever: making his children into his landlords at Shore Haven and Beach Haven…to a trust in his children’s names and signed ninety nine year leases with them…he would pay the trusts rent every month…the only cost to Fred or his children was a gift tax of $15,525. In exchange, his new young landlords would each receive $13,928 a year in rent, an amount that he would periodically increase in the decades ahead. Donald Trump and his siblings did nothing for the money…Fred also began giving each of his children $6000 as a gift each year at Christmas, the maximum at the time for a couple without facing a gift tax…that roughly $20,000 a year paid to each of his children was the equivalent of about $256,000 in 2024…At the time, only 3 percent of American families earned $10,000 or more a year. Physicians earned an average of $11,058”(source: Lucky Loser-Penguin Press).

Meanwhile on the Beach Haven project, FHA programs allowed for 5% of the total mortgage to cover an architect’s fee. In the case of Beach Haven, Fred Trump was looking at a mortgage of $1.3 million. Instead of paying 5% to the actual architects that did that specialized work, he gave them only $111,000 and then Fred pocketed 1.2 million himself, reasoning that he had earned that money. On Shore Haven he had worked prices down so far below his estimates that he was able to pocket 1.5 million dollars. He then also engineered via his IRS connections, a way to not pay the full taxes on his windfall amount.

Through manipulating systems Fred Trump was able to become incredibly wealthy while spending the government’s money. It’s not realistic to say he made it himself. When you start off with hundreds of thousands of dollars inherited from your father…I mean…is that really starting from scratch? Later when, among other things, he would face suits brought by the Dept of Justice, he always found the legal loopholes. There is much more to learn about him and his deception, outright fraud…but I just wanted readers to get a sense of the man that raised Donald Trump and the world made of money that Donald was raised in. Suffice it to say that Fred Trump’s children never knew financial stress. Young Donald Trump never knew what it is like to work with his hands or to earn his way. He was raised in a world fully funded by his father, complete with limousines and housing servants. Before Donald could drive a car he was wealthy enough to buy multiple homes. Just calling him “privileged” doesn’t cover it. He napped in the concave bend of a silver spoon. I think that a lot of us are trying to grasp why he is the way he is…how he came to be so self serving and full of himself to a nearly comical level. I believe we have to understand how he got this way. I personally hold the idea that the simple act of being able to amass that much wealth and hoarding it, makes people weird. I know that’s very simplistic of me to say. But we have normalized being exceedingly wealthy and cheered on the wealthy as “winners”…but here we are now, losing to their benefit. It’s time we learned a hard lesson: Nobody gets rich without taking advantage of others. Nobody.

Fast forward to the 1970’s: “Thanks to his father’s wealth and reputation, newspapers conferred an air of credibility on Donald’s every utterance. Those stories, and those that followed, began to establish an image of Donald Trump as a man of consequence and big ideas, and few took notice that most of his proposals went nowhere”(source: Lucky Loser-Penguin Press).

In 1973, “Donald took a New York Times reporter on a tour…his silver Cadillac limousine pulled up, the one with a rare custom license plate bearing his initials…and were driven away by Donald’s full-time chauffeur and bodyguard…they toured what Donald called “his jobs”…he said, grinning “…but so far, I’ve never made a bad deal” The article describes him as “tall, lean and blond, with dazzling white teeth and he looks ever so much like Robert Redford…he dates slinky fashion models, belongs to the most elegant clubs and, at only 30 years of age, estimates that he is worth ‘more than $200 million’”(source: Lucky Loser-Penguin Press).

So put that on a post it note and up on the wall for now. Up next to that one put up another one with these words on it “Donald J Trump has an alias named Mr. Baron”. During the same time that DJT was telling the New York Times reporter about his net worth, this was also happening:

“Donald Trump did not publicize the smaller scale work he occasionally continued to do for his father. He especially went out of his way to distance himself from anything not big, not new, and not in Manhattan. He had recently used his pseudonym, Mr Baron, in classified (common newspaper ads of that era) ads seeking to hire an air-conditioning mechanic and to rent out office space in his father’s buildings — ”PRIME FLUSHING LOCATION…BARGAIN RENT…Call Mr. Baron.” As Mr. Baron he also advertised for a rental manager and then a superintendent for two luxury apartment towers Fred (Trump’s dad) had bought in Norfolk, VA.”(source: Lucky Loser-Penguin Press). The facts of that day were that DJT didn’t have wealth. True he had his untouched trust account no doubt. But his own wealth? His father had those kinds of assets, and DJT was naming those assets and wealth as his own successes. In 1976 DJT had a taxable income of only $24, 594…” As 1976 ended, Fred Trump gave Donald another $1 million in a new trust fund, an amount that Donald was not required to report on his income tax form” (source: Lucky Loser-Penguin Press).

“Much like his father in the 1930s and 1940s Donald Trump had benefited from government responses to economic downturns. But unlike his father, Donald did not need to start small. His father gave him access to large loans and powerful officials, as well as a presumption of competency no first-time developer could reasonably expect. Even having not yet put a shovel in the ground, he had carved out a place for himself in the public life of the nation’s biggest city”(source: Lucky Loser-Penguin Press).

What I would add to this though is a change of perspective that I feel is notable. What we see here is the public’s desire to see their dreams of wealth made real. Trump appeared to be a success story that possibly made others believe that they could also lift themselves out of the workaday life…to one of riches and ease. After all, he has long made the claim: “My whole life really has been a ‘no,’ and I fought through it. It has not been easy for me. It has not been easy for me. And you know, I started off in Brooklyn, my father gave me a small loan of a million dollars.”(Source https://foreignpolicy.com/2015/10/26/trump-started-his-business-with-small-million-dollar-loan-from-his-father/ ) The reality is that he fooled the public so easily with the help of the public…with our willingness to accept at face value what a person verifies. That doesn’t make us wrong. Acceptance that someone isn’t lying should be our default mode. But with Trump, it really was all smoke and mirrors. At the same time that we believed it all…what about Trump himself? In the book, Lucky Loser, the authors take great pains to point out just how many times DJT’s own father goes out of his way to convince others that his son is the real deal. Even when Fred knows that he is financially propping up DJT to the tune of millions of dollars…he doesn’t ever stop to correct his son, he too hides the fact that Donald is still running errands for him. What does that do to a son? When you are never faced with the reality of your endeavors? Example…during the refit of the Commodore Hotel, in conjunction with Hyatt Hotels (between the years 1978–1980) “Though it was not known at the time, Fred Trump gave Donald a personal line of credit during the Hyatt construction. Donald received as many as four checks a month, with the total coming to $4.7 million. Fred loaned Donald another $8 million during that period.” (source: Lucky Loser-Penguin Press). It points a finger, or rather, puts a finger on the pulse of what might circulate within Trump’s heart and mind. How would he ever learn to recognize his complete lack of success when his father would never allow him to work for it himself? “Fred also connected Donald with Conrad Stephenson, his personal banker at Chase Manhattan. Stephenson arranged a $35 million personal line of credit for Donald” (source: Lucky Loser-Penguin Press). Who can walk into a bank and get a line of credit worth $35 million dollars without signing a single form or offering any collateral for payback? Well, those are the terms that Trump was given. In a world of people saying YES, how else was Trump going to turn out? At this point in his life, some point between 1978–1980 Trump still had yet to make his own money. In 1979 just before completion of the Commodore Hotel, Trump’s assets were being touted as being over a billion dollars. But on his tax returns for that year he reported a taxable income of -$3.4 million dollars and paid zero income taxes. The Commodore completed only with the aid of about $15 million from his father “in the language of the tax code, Fred had given his son taxable gifts masquerading a loans, a likely fraud that went unnoticed” (source: Lucky Loser-Penguin Press).

In 1979 Trump did finally begin to make money off the Commodore. Once finished making money from his father’s millions he turned his attention to a new development, the Bonwit Teller store. He needed to hire a crew to tear down the existing structure. And this, to me, is such a telling example of Trump’s unfortunate character development. He avoided paying union wages and chose a different crew… “far cheaper than union members, and they did not have legal immigration status.” (source: Lucky Loser-Penguin Press). This was a hard working Polish crew of about 40 workers. Soon things devolved. Trump’s manager on site wasn’t paying the workers on time…then the local union found out about the job-bad news for Trump. Then there was a section of bas-relief sculpture on the building that the Metropolitan Museum of Art wished to have given to them. Trump agreed, “It is our pleasure to donate the two stone sculptures and the iron grille work that are on the front of 721 Fifth Avenue…(the contractor) has been instructed to save these artifacts” (source: Lucky Loser-Penguin Press). But then Trump allowed it to be destroyed. Now take down that post it note about Mr. Baron again. “A reporter called Trump’s office for a response. Donald chose to hide behind his alter ego, John Baron, who claimed to be a vice president of the Trump Organization and said the company had decided that the “merit of these stones was not great enough to justify the effort to save them.” He said an appraiser had found the sculptures to be “without artistic merit,” a dramatic departure from the experts with the Metropolitan (Museum of Art)” On the fourth day of news stories expressing shock that Trump had broken his promise, he finally emerged from behind his John Baron shield. Donald was quoted saying he had been out of town, and that this Baron fellow had it wrong…the issue, Donald said, was that the delay would have cost him hundreds of thousands of dollars”(source: Lucky Loser-Penguin Press). The Polish workers eventually hired a lawyer to deal with not being paid correctly and mechanic’s liens of $100,000 were placed on the project. Their lawyer, Mr. Szabo called the Trump Organization to work things out. Guess who answered? “Within an hour, Szabo received a call from a man who identified himself as John Baron, a lawyer within the Trump Organization…This John Baron threatened Szabo with a $100 million lawsuit, an amount that had been Donald Trump’s go-to threat ever since his failed $100 million lawsuit against the federal government…”(source: Lucky Loser-Penguin Press). For clarification there…Trump tried to go after the Fed in 1973 during a discrimination case. Later on Szabo would receive a call from a new Trump alias, a Mr. Irwin Durben. This is actually a real person who had worked in the past for Fred Trump. However he was not the one who made the call to Szabo “I suspect whoever spoke to Szabo may have used my name. I don’t go around threatening people. As far as being an immigration lawyer, I never handled an immigration case a day in my life.” (source: Lucky Loser-Penguin Press).

How did this all play out? “Szabo dropped the liens and reported the matter to the federal labor department, which set in motion several legal disputes that would linger for fifteen years. Donald eventually paid $1.375 million to settle a claim for unpaid health and pension funds on behalf of the Polish workers. But he successfully fought to keep the terms of the settlement secret for decades and continued to claim he never settled lawsuits” (source: Lucky Loser-Penguin Press).

If you are wondering, just how many lawsuits DJT been involved with in his life…as of 2016 it was 4,095. If the number wasn’t so staggering it would be funny. I found this infographic quite useful, even though it’s a bit dated. https://www.usatoday.com/pages/interactives/trump-lawsuits/

Let’s jump forward to 1987, to the publishing of “The Art of the Deal”, Donald J Trump’s first book. This is one of the moments that placed DJT in the public mind. By 1987 Donald was seen as…well…as someone who should be writing a book about how to masterfully craft any kind of business deal. Trump, in 1987, was viewed as a genius and business savant. I was 16 years old at the time and I certainly thought so too. After all, he was insanely wealthy and owned so much property and had the wealth to prove it…right? Everyone was saying so.

I think I even watched the 1985 “60 Minutes” report on Trump with my parents on the floor of our den as Mike Wallace stated: “In a world where mere millionaires have become a dime a dozen…there’s a new billionaire in town. Trump’s the name. Donald Trump”. The Lucky Loser book points out: “the most serious news program on national television had just crowned Donald Trump a billionaire, nearly double the level of wealth Forbes assigned to him based on his lies” (source: Lucky Loser-Penguin Press). I feel the significance of this moment is what it says about all of us. We aren’t as different from Trump as we might want to believe. Our tendency to not reflect is the same as his. Our blind belief that we are totally correct without questioning our motives, is the same as his. I would say though that the main difference I see with Trump is that he doesn’t just have moments where he fails the ethics and moral standards. It’s been present for what seems to be most of his life. Most people, we have times in our lives which we regret not being our best, the times we were strangers to ourselves and failed others that we loved. In this case, with Trump, it’s radically different though. For the second time in recorded human history, we have a person in an elected position who has a proven record of never correcting his course. He is unfailing in his ability to push onward without regard to the rights of others, uncaring of their welfare, and willing to do whatever it takes so that he has more and anyone else has less.

There is so much more to say…as we all know, Trump keeps us busy. Keeping up with all the wrong things he is doing, it keeps any person of moral character busy wondering how to react. I just want to close with one more immigration story of sorts to remind us of what’s at stake. If you are going to try to talk about America without talking about immigration, then you have nothing to talk about. The story ends rather abruptly. And when one person like Trump wins an election by turning people of the same nation against one another, and can make them forget that we are all immigrants…well that’s a very dangerous reality that needs to be considered. Not just because Trump is dangerous in fostering division. But because it means we are at a critical stage where many people have elected to suspend their higher morals and principles also.

I’m nearly done. Still reading?

On my mother’s side of my family line, my third Great Grandfather came to America from Bavaria Germany…the same region where Donald Trump’s Grandfather was deported from for avoiding the draft. In 1863 he volunteered and fought on the side of the Union with the 5th Regiment in the Maryland Infantry. So you have this brand new “American” here fighting to try to keep the new nation together. He retired to Wisconsin and died in 1888. Then 82 years later his great great grandson… my mother’s dad- would post this letter from Germany where he was fighting with the US 9th Army in WWII. (Victory Mail letter that I have transcribed):

April 26, 1945

Pfc H.J. Smith 36970573

HQ 19th AAA Group-APO 463

“Somewhere In Germany”

Hello Darling,

We stopped off at one place that I’ll remember for a long time. It was the site of one of the atrocities that you read about and wonder whether it was only propaganda. I now have first hand evidence that such things actually do occur. A few days before we over ran this particular place the Germans rounded up about 1,000 Jewish Polish and Russian refugees and crowded them all in a small barn that had previously been bedded down with straw soaked with gasoline.

When they had all these refugees packed in, they set fire to the straw. You can imagine what a horrible death this must have been. When we arrived there they had just finished burying the last of the bodies. We did look over the barn and the stench was overpowering. We found out that the authorities made the civilians in the town nearby, come out and personally bury one body each. I think they got off too easy. They should have to offer much more than that.”

Less than a month later, on May 7th 1945- Germany surrendered. It’s an interesting story I think to end on. We have this complicated history don’t we? Between slavery and the fact the entire land mass was stolen from the indigenous people through broken treaties…it’s really fricking complicated. And then there are worse things, like a dictatorship that ended with Hitler essentially wanting to take over everything, irreverent to how many would die so that he could have his way. Like I said, there’s a whole lotta bad and yet there’s also a whole lot of good that still manages to happen. The reason I spent all this time writing this is because we haven’t arrived yet. Making peace with where we are, how we can do better, it all takes time. But war, takes time away from peace. Trump, however much compassion I might feel for him as a lost person…he can’t be given the chance to remain in charge. People need to wake up to what is actually unfolding in front of us. I have one grandparent that fought to keep the country together in the Civil War. One grandfather that helped fight to stop Hitler…and now I live in a nation that is making all the same mistakes that Germany and the world made leading up to WWII.

How many times did the people of Germany and of the world say no to Hitler before he came to power? Not enough. In The Gathering Storm (one of my favorite all time reads), Winston Churchill included his letters which he wrote to countrymen and world leaders, warning of the impending threat Hitler posed. Nobody took Churchill seriously. Ignoring someone like Hitler, led to the combined deaths of 15 million soldiers and 38 million civilians. And then there is this staggering number: “An estimated 17 million people were murdered by the German Nazi regime and their collaborators between 1933 and 1945, (source:according to data published by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM).)

These numbers are not only attributable to the work of one madman. They also represent the combined agreement of every single person who agreed to carry out his wishes and orders. Every person that didn’t think it would get as bad as it got. All people have to do is realize that this isn’t a partisan issue with regard to Trump. It’s as non partisan as WWII. Donald Trump made a habit out of building his real estate empire out of using people and then not delivering what he promised. Here in 2025 we can already see that he is doing whatever he wishes. He will only do deals where he wins…not when his voters win. He will win favors for his personal friends, as long as they are loyal to him. Again…not his voters, but his billionaire and millionaire friends. You don’t have involvement with 4095 lawsuits when you’re an honest person. When someone finishes a construction project they stand out in front to cut the red ribbon. Right now the USA and the world order is Trump’s new construction project and instead of lawsuits to come, he is encoding new orders that make himself the law. He is standing there with the big old scissors. For the first time in his life he won’t have to worry about being sued by anyone or by taking anyone to court. He is like a contractor who is also the building inspector, the bank, the check writer, the landlord, the lumber supplier. He can fire anyone he wants. He can write himself checks from other’s accounts. No one’s meant to have this much control over others. But it all only works…Trump is only where he is right now, IF people keep saying yes to him. All I know is that if you want to stop a dictator (peacefully), you will have to say no to them. And everyone has to say it at the same time. If we don’t do it now, it’s going to be a lot worse than any of his 4095 lawsuits.

*Again huge thanks to Russ Buettner and Susanne Craig for their brilliant book Lucky Loser. You should read it!