Quote:
Originally Posted by The Dad Fisherman
Well, sometimes timing backfires
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Some people are told stories in their childhood that are believed to be true, others are taught to lie.
It seems the Trump family has been lying about their ancestry for a couple of generations. Donald Trump himself claimed in his book Trump: The Art of the Deal from 1987 that his father came to America as a boy, having emigrated from Sweden.
But it's not true. At least not according to the biographies The Trumps: Three Generations That Built An Empire by Gwenda Blair, and The lost tycoon by Henry Hurt.
In their research into the Trump family, both author's have come to the conclusion that the Swedish origins was just a story invented by Trump's father. During the middle of the 19th century, Trump's true descent - German - was simply bad for business.
“In the 1940s, people, especially in the real estate industry in New York, didn't want to hear that somebody was German — so let's get rid of that. Let's be Swedish,” Gwenda Blair said in an inteview with Inside Edition.
According to the New York Times, Donald Trump even asked his father why he had to keep the lie going at the time of writing Trump: the Art of the Deal.
Henry Hurt writes that the reason for continuing the story was to not upset the Jewish tenants of Trump real estate, reports Aftonbladet.
The true story is that Trump's grandparents on his father's side came to America from the German town of Kallstadt in 1905. On his mother's side, Trump's ancestry is Scottish.
"I don't believe there's any Swedish ancestry whatsoever," biographer Gwenda Blair said.