Donald Trump Received A Ton Of Money From His Late Father Fred
Donald Trump has freely talked about receiving money from his father, Fred Trump, but when it comes to the actual amount — let's just say the former president tends to leave off a few zeros.
While on the campaign trail in 2015, Donald spoke about the seed money his father gave him to start a business. "I started off in Brooklyn, my father gave me a small loan of a million dollars ... I had to pay him back, I had to pay him back with interest," he said during a "Today" show event. Donald stuck to that narrative even as evidence to the contrary surfaced. "The president's father gave him an initial $1 million loan, which he paid back," White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told The New York Times in 2018, adding that Donald parlayed that money into a fortune. That said, the Times published a report alleging the then-president had received far more than the $1 million he claimed.
According to the bombshell 2018 report, Donald actually received $413 million from Fred over the years. Not only had he been given a fortune, but the outlet claimed Trump and his family committed tax fraud by setting up sham corporations for money they inherited following Fred's death in 1999. Tax records showed Fred left his children $41 million in property, but the actual value was closer to $1 billion. A statement from Donald's lawyer vehemently denied the Times's report, but prior evidence showed that Fred had repeatedly given money to Donald.
Donald Trump received massive loans from his dad early in his career
According to the damaging report The New York Times published in October 2018, the initial loan that Donald Trump received from his father, Fred Trump, was at least $60.7 million, which would have been around $140 million in 2018. In addition to the sizable loan, the Times claimed that Donald was making an astronomical salary when he was only 3 years old, to the tune of $200,000 in modern dollars. By the time the "Art of the Deal" author was in college, that salary had skyrocketed to around $1 million per year.
A couple of years earlier, in 2016, Newsweek published a piece that divulged how much Donald actually received from his father in the early stages of his career. Donald had spent $38 million on a line of credit set up by his dad in 1978. By 1980, Fred bailed his son out of financial ruin by sending him loans that totaled $7.5 million. In addition to that money, Donald was given a loan of over $976,000 by the Trump Village Construction Corporation. Perhaps that was the amount Donald referenced when mentioning the "small" million-dollar loan his dad had given him.
As reported by Newsweek, those loans could be paid back by Donald at his own convenience, and despite his earlier claims, no interest was running on them. Once again, in the '90s, Fred bailed his son out of financial trouble to help save Donald's casino.
Fred Trump's creative way of loaning money to Donald Trump
Donald Trump's Trump Castle Casino Resort was in a serious fiscal hole in 1991, and Fred Trump came up with a clever way of lending his son money while keeping it off the books. Fred sent a lawyer to the casino with a certified check for $3.35 million, according to a piece published by The Washington Post in 1991. The lawyer used the entire amount to buy chips for the casino floor. Of course, Fred was not buying in for that amount to try and break his son's casino but rather left the chips in a secured bag. This was simply an ingenious way of loaning Donald the money to pay off an exorbitant interest payment the casino owed.
Circumventing the proper channels to make the loan did not go unnoticed by authorities. Later that year, the Trump Castle Casino Resort was fined $30,000 by New Jersey's Division of Gaming Enforcement, per the Los Angeles Times. The casino was, however, allowed to keep the loan from Fred, who applied for a license to make other loans in the future, but through the proper channels.
A few years later, Donald spoke about how his father came through for him when the casino had neared bankruptcy and how Fred's faith in him never wavered. "When the s**t hit the fan ... my father would tell people, 'Do yourself a favor. Go to the bookie and put a lot of money on Donald's head,'" he told Vanity Fair in 1994.