President-elect Donald J. Trump is a master at crafting his own narrative, and ensuring that his “tell it like it is” mentality hits the news cycle. A one-man band marching against the orders of the Republican Party, Trump used his history in business and nationalist pride to systematically replace the GOP’s donor-driven agenda with one of his own.
Make America Great Again.
That’s what he was elected to do. Just how he got here, however, is as interesting as anything he will do. Here are five interesting things you might not have known about the global icon as he prepares to “drain the swamp,” and attempt to bring blue-collar jobs back home to the United States:
He was born to a family of hardworking Germans
A portrait of Donald Trump while in military school (Wikimedia Commons)
Fred Trump, the family patriarch, is certainly responsible for Donald’s head start in life — but he also instilled a strong work ethic in his son early on, true to the family’s German roots. At age 15, his father went into the real estate business and never looked back — his desire to succeed and become very rich drove him to become a workaholic, something that rubbed off on Donald.
Trump’s self-portrayal of his younger self is also often along the lines of a hard working overachiever able to get things done, true to Germanic stereotypes. He has called himself a “product of military school,” a “fighter “willing to engage in any battle, and “the best athlete” of his school. As if his manliness were ever in question, Trump has also told his biographer of having the highest testosterone in the room.
His business career started in the ’70s with a Broadway comedy
Donald Trump and David Letterman (YouTube/Screen grab)
Although it ran for just ten weeks, Trump’s business career — and subsequent love affair with showbusiness and how his name ties into it — began in 1970 as a producer of the Broadway play, “Paris Is Out!” It was with help from his father that he was able to do so, and fresh out of Wharton Business School, the young Donald was looking to put his name on.
After the play failed to garner commercial success, he began purchasing properties in Manhattan, and his career thus began to take off.
Trump believes nepotism played no part in his success, and that he built his empire himself. “The working man likes me because he knows I didn’t inherit what I’ve built,” he has claimed, according to The New Yorker. In his best-selling book, he chastises moneyed elite as members of “the Lucky Sperm Club,” and throughout the course of the political campaign turned himself into a champion of the working-class.
His celebrity apparently sees no limits
Donald Trump meets with President Ronald Reagan (Wikimedia Commons)
In addition to getting rich beyond imagination just like his father, Trump has always sought fame — whether it be a product line bearing his name, a real-estate acquisition that makes it into the papers, or television programming that features him in a light preconceived by himself.
With his rebuilding of the Commodore Hotel, Trump’s celebrity first started to gain traction in the New York area. And as his “Art of the Deal” ghostwriter explains, his inherent vice of calling attention to himself would only increase over the next 40 years — you’d be hard pressed to find another celebrity from the 1970s whose name shines half as brightly as the president-elect’s.
“After he’d spent decades as a tabloid titan,” says ghostwriter Tony Schwartz, “the only thing left was running for President. If he could run for emperor of the world, he would.”
He claims to have always wanted five children
Trump’s children (Associated Press)
As the rebellious second son with the biggest personality, Trump was one of five children — his older brother, Fred Jr., died at age 43 from after failing to live up to the reputations of his father and younger brother. According to a 1990 profile by Vanity Fair, Trump always wanted a large family himself.
That way, the thinking goes, he’s guaranteed a son just like him.
“I want five children, like in my own family, because with five, then I will know that one will be guaranteed to turn out like me,” he once told a friend. According to the story, Trump was willing to give first wife Ivana a “cash bonus” of $250,000 for each child. They had three together: Donald Jr., Eric, and of course Ivanka.
He would go on to remarry twice more and have a child with each consecutive wife, eventually settling atop Trump Tower with a Czech model nearly 25 years his junior. Of his more positive traits, even election opponent Hillary Clinton claimed that he did well as a father.
His presidency is guaranteed to be one of a kind
Trump takes a victory tour (Associated Press)
Although many of his business ventures have failed — the USFL football team in Las Vegas, Trump casinos in Atlantic City, a 62-story luxury hotel in the United Arab Emirates — he has always been able to rebound big league; the art of the comeback. Indeed, it appears as if he has capitalized more on his name than anything else.
Riding into Washington against the trade winds of the political establishment during the 2015 GOP nomination process, he bet on himself again. And as he did it, nobody knew it yet but he was already thinking several steps ahead with gamesmanship required by the top one-tenth of 1%.
As has happened so many times before, on Nov.8 he was announced winner.
Never before had a total political outsider won, on a message of populist proposals, self-financing his campaign, while promising abrupt culture change in Washington, D.C. And already, he is shaking things up — only time will tell whether or not his one of a kind election will benefit the rest of the country, or was yet another savvy act of self-promotion.