History Channel The Trump Family's Immigrant St
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The Trump Family's Immigrant Story
For decades, they denied their German roots, claiming to be of Scandinavian!origin.
Trump denied this German heritage altogether, instead claiming that his grandfather’s roots lay further north, in Scandinavia. “[He] came here from Sweden as a child,” Trump asserted in his co-written book The Art of the Deal. In fact, his cousin and family historian John Walter told The New York Times, Trump maintained the ruse at the request of his own realtor father, Fred Trump, who had obfuscated his German ancestry to avoid upsetting Jewish friends and clients. “After the war,” Walter told the Times, “he’s still Swedish. [The lie] was just going, going, going.”
Trump is the son, and grandson, of immigrants: German on his father’s side, and Scottish on his mother’s. None of his grandparents, and only one of his parents, was born in the United States or spoke English as their mother tongue. (His mother’s parents, from the remote Scottish Outer Hebrides, lived in a majority Gaelic-speaking community.)
Friedrich Trump came to the United States amid a flood of Germans—that year alone, an estimated 1 million made the journey to settle in America. It was, the Times reported, “the start of an adventurous life as a barber, restaurateur, saloonkeeper, hotelier, entrepreneur, gold rush prospector, shipwreck survivor and New York real-estate investor.”
None of his international roots extends to Sweden.
TAGSIMMIGRATION
BY NATASHA FROST
https://www.history.com/news/donald-trump-fat...cw-history