The nut doesn’t fall far from the bush.

 

“The Trump family’s deep roots in Germany stretch back to the war-ravaged seventeenth century, when the family name was Drumpf. In 1648, they simplified the name to one that would prove to be a powerful brand for their latter-day descendants.

“Looking back from the twenty-first century, it turns out to have been an interesting choice. Donald no doubt enjoys the bridge player’s definition of trump: a winning play by a card that outranks all others. But other definitions include “a thing of small value, trifle” and “to deceive or cheat” as well as “to blow or sound a trumpet.” As a verb, trump means “to devise in an unscrupulous way” and “to forge, fabricate or invent,” as in “trumped-up” charges.”

– David Cay Johnston, “The Making of Donald Trump”, 2016 (p. 3)

*****

Origins Of Trump Family Values Explain Much About Donald Today

By Mark L. Taylor
The Commoner Call (5/29/17)

David Cay Johnston has been chronicling and reporting on the unsavory personal and professional history of Donald Trump for decades. His new book, The Making of Donald Trump, is a fascinating and often tawdry read. There is something about the family history that may help explain Donald’s “pussy grabbing” ethos.

Donald’s grandfather, Freidrich, came to America as a way to dodge the military draft. The old man “cast a century-long shadow over the Trump family with his passion for money and the flouting of legal niceties – such as erecting buildings on land he did not own.” (p. 3-4)

After arriving in America, Johnston reports, Freidrich wound up in Seattle where he opened The Dairy Restaurant. The establishment also had a “curtained off area that most likely served as a low-rent whorehouse”. He then moved 30 miles north and built a “hotel of sorts – one intended mostly for, shall we say, active short stays, not overnight visits”.

That effort fizzled out so Freidrich headed to the Klondike to cash in on the Gold Rush, not as a hardworking miner, mind you but as the owner of a kind of bar and grill joint called The Arctic. “He offered hard liquor and ‘sporting ladies’, as the prostitutes were called.” He headed back across the border just before the Royal Mounted Police arrived and began to clean things up.

Freidrich tried to return to Germany but was bounced back to America because of his draft dodging. He started up another business in New York City that had a bit of a shady reputation. He died in the 1918 influenza epidemic.

While he died young, his grandson has carried on the Trump family name, and their original corrupt and tawdry values.