Report: Letter reveals Donald Trump’s grandfather fought expulsion from Germany
BERLIN - A handwritten letter has been found in a German archive in which President-elect Donald Trump’s grandfather unsuccessfully fought his expulsion from the country for failing to perform mandatory military service.
Bild newspaper on Monday printed the 1905 letter located by an historian, in which Friedrich Trump wrote Bavarian Prince Luitpold begging the “well-loved, noble, wise and just” leader not to deport him. Luitpold rejected the “most subservient request.”
Trump’s grandfather was born in Kallstadt, then part of Bavaria, and immigrated to the U.S. as a teenager without performing his military service. It was after he’d made his fortune there and tried to resettle in Germany that he was ordered expelled, and returned to the U.S.
Rhineland-Palatinate state archive spokeswoman Isabell Weisbrod says Friedrich Trump’s birth certificate’s also in the archive.
Politico reports Friedrich Trump changed his name to Frederick Trump shortly after arriving in the U.S. for the first time at the age of 16. He reportedly got his start in Seattle and the Yukon, running brothels for gold miners.
Trump biographer Gwenda Blair wrote in the Politico piece about the president-elect’s grandfather that the junior Trump very much follows the path to success laid out by his German-born patriarch.
“I found when I wrote a book about Donald, his father, and his grandfather, what has defined the current candidate for president more than anything else is a family culture of doing whatever it takes to come out on top and never giving up,” Blair wrote. “As I retraced the route taken by his immigrant grandfather, an epic journey that started in Kallstadt and went all the way to the Yukon gold fields, I saw that he was carving a path not just for himself but for generations of Trumps to come. A century later, Donald would use basically the same MO as Friedrich—nabbing the best locations and offering customers an almost cartoon-like version of their heart’s desire—to become a billionaire.”