- President Donald Trump opened up about his relationship with his late brother Fred Trump Jr. and expressed regret over how he treated Fred Jr. and his struggle with alcoholism in a new interview with the Washington Post.
- Fred Jr., named for their father Fred, died in 1982 at the age of 41 after a long battle with alcoholism. Trump told the Post, “I do regret having put pressure on him” to run the family business.
- Fred died of a heart attack in 1982, but Trump has said that his brother’s memory still shapes his life to this day, and had a huge impact on the trajectory of Trump’s own business career and life.
- “He was so handsome, and I saw what alcohol did to him even physically…and that had an impact on me, too,” Trump recalled from Fred Jr.’s final days. “I saw people really taking advantage of Fred and the lesson I learned was always to keep up my guard 100%.”
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President Donald Trump opened up about his relationship with his late brother Fred Trump Jr. and expressed regret over how he treated Fred Jr. and his struggle with alcoholism in a new interview with the Washington Post.
Fred Jr., named for their father Fred Trump Sr., died in 1982 at the age of 41 after a long battle with alcoholism. Trump told the Post, “I do regret having put pressure on him” to run the family business, adding, “I think the mistake that we made was we assumed that everybody would like it. That would be the biggest mistake,” he said of both he and his father.
Trump has invoked Fred Jr.’s story before in advocating for solutions to the opioid crisis, but gave the most detailed recounting of his brother’s life yet in the Post interview.
Fred, who went by “Freddy,” was Trump’s oldest sibling and had dreams of being a pilot. “I remember being at the house and other pilots from TWA would come to the house and they’d come to work with Fred because he was a very natural talent,” Trump said.
But Fred Jr.'s struggle with alcoholism got in the way of his talent and passion for flying. After Fred Jr. was fired from the TWA over his drinking problem, Trump and their father, Fred Trump Sr., began to pressure him to join the family real estate business.
"His drinking got in the way of his flying, and they couldn't afford that," an official from the TWA Retired Pilots Association told the Post.
Trump told the Post that being witness to Fred Jr.'s struggles with drinking both made him not want to drink alcohol himself, and taught him how to stand up to their overbearing father.
"Let's say I started drinking, it's very possible I wouldn't be talking to you right now," Trump told the Post, suggesting it was possible that alcoholism ran in their family and he could have been prone to alcohol abuse too.
Annamaria Forcier, a neighbor of the Trumps in the Jamaica Estates neighborhood of Queens, recalled seeing many tense confrontations between Fred, Fred Jr., and Donald Trump in the 1960s over the family business, remembering one instance where "[Donald] was yelling at him. He was a finger pointer, and he put his finger in his brother's face."
Trump told the Post, "I actually don't know if I ever argued with [Fred Jr.], other than to sort of tell him, 'Gee, you should love this, this business; we can do something great here."
Fred eventually gave in to the pressure from his father and brother to join the Trump Organization, helping promote a development in Coney Island that the family was trying to turn into a zoo.
As Trump was becoming a highly successful real estate developer in New York City in the 1970s and 80s, Fred's alcoholism deteriorated to the point where he was too sick to work at all.
Trump recalled visiting Fred Jr. when he was so ill from years of excessive drinking that he needed to be hospitalized for extended periods of time and even have part of his stomach removed.
"He was so handsome, and I saw what alcohol did to him even physically... and that had an impact on me, too," Trump recalled from Fred Jr.'s final days, saying that he traveled from Manhattan to Queens to visit and have dinner with his brother, telling the Post that Fred Jr. "actually lived a long time longer than you would expect."
Fred died of a heart attack in 1982, but Trump has said that his brother's memory still shapes his life to this day, and had a huge impact on the trajectory of Trump's own business career and life.
Most importantly, Trump said that watching his successful older brother suffer so much from alcoholism and not be able to stand up to their father helped instill in Trump his reputation for being tough and never backing down.
"I saw people really taking advantage of Fred and the lesson I learned was always to keep up my guard 100%, whereas he didn't," Trump recalled in an interview with Playboy in 1990 cited by the Post. "He didn't feel that there was really reason for that, which is a fatal mistake in life."