Trump Takes Control of Father's Real Estate Empire

From Brooklyn to Manhattan

In 1971, Donald Trump took over the management of his father Fred Trump’s real estate company, Elizabeth Trump & Son. The firm, which Fred had built into a major outer-borough housing developer over several decades, owned and managed roughly 14,000 apartments across Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island. Donald, then just 25 years old and fresh from the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania, wasted little time rebranding the operation. He renamed it the Trump Organization, signaling a new direction and a new ambition.

While Fred Trump had built his fortune on middle-class and affordable housing projects in New York’s outer boroughs, his son had far grander aspirations. Donald set his sights on Manhattan, the most competitive and prestigious real estate market in the world. He would use his father’s established wealth and political connections as a launchpad.

The Foundation of Wealth

The transfer of power was not simply a matter of talent and ambition. A landmark 2018 New York Times investigation found that Donald Trump received at least $413 million in today’s dollars from his father’s real estate empire, much of it through tax dodges and outright fraud. This included sham corporations used to disguise millions of dollars in gifts, and instances where Fred Trump lent money to his son’s projects, sometimes without expectation of repayment.

Trump would later claim on the campaign trail that he built his empire starting with “a small loan of a million dollars” from his father. But financial records show the support was far more extensive, including loan guarantees, bailouts of failing ventures, and direct infusions of cash at critical moments throughout the 1970s and 1980s.

Setting the Stage

The takeover of the family business gave Trump a critical advantage that most young developers could only dream of: an established portfolio generating reliable income, a network of political connections cultivated by his father over decades, and access to credit backed by real assets. Fred Trump’s deep relationships with Brooklyn’s Democratic political machine and New York’s banking community opened doors that would have been firmly shut to an unknown developer.

Armed with these resources, Donald Trump began scouting opportunities in Manhattan, eventually zeroing in on the decrepit Commodore Hotel next to Grand Central Terminal. The family company he inherited would serve as the financial foundation for everything that followed.