Meet the Trumps: From Immigrant to President review – a warning from history
Matt Frei looks at the generations of Trump past, who built their legacy on illegal emigration, tres..
Matt Frei looks at the generations of Trump past, who built their legacy on illegal emigration, trespass and prostitution
He is going to be hard to avoid this week. This programme – Meet the Trumps: From Immigrant to President (Channel 4) – is sort of Who Do You Think You Are? It only goes back a couple of generations, but that’s all it takes to unearth lots of interesting stuff. Forewarnings, you might say. It’s a shame it doesn’t reveal that Donald was actually born in Mexico, but it’s still pretty good.
We start with grandad Friedrich Trump, who arrived on a boat from Germany in 1885 aged 16, and worked as a barber in New York before going west to seek his fortune. After running a restaurant in Seattle for a while, he went north to follow the gold rush, because young Friedrich dreamed that one day his grandson would have hair of spun gold and ride a golden elevator in a gold tower … possibly. For now, Freidrich opened another restaurant, a pop-up this time – on the infamous Dead Horse Trail, Friedrich made burgers out of the dead horses and sold them to the starving prospectors. “Literally flogging a dead horse,” presenter Matt Frei can’t help saying.
