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"Former President Donald Trump falsely claimed Wednesday that his 2024 Democratic rival, Vice President Kamala Harris, “happened to turn Black” a few years ago, saying that “all of a sudden, she made a turn” in her identity." (CNN 2017)
In a bad case of the pot calling the kettle black, it turns out that it has been Trump and his father Fred who actually have a history of instrumentalizing their ethnic backgrounds to suit historical vicissitudes.
"In his book, “The Art of the Deal,” Donald Trump reaffirmed the myth of his family’s origins, writing that his father’s father came to America “from Sweden as a child.” (CNN 2024)
Trump’s repeated attacks on (Senator Elizabeth) Warren come despite his own family’s past efforts to hide their heritage. According to multiple reports from The New York Times and the Boston Globe and a biography, Trump’s father repeatedly sought to conceal the fact that he was the son of German immigrants.
Fred Trump sought to pass himself off as Swedish amid anti-German sentiment sparked by World War II. According to the biography “The Trumps: Three Generations that Built an Empire” by Gwenda Blair, Fred Trump denied knowing German and did not teach it to his children.
John Walter, a Trump family historian and one of Donald Trump’s cousins, said this was an effort to not offend his Jewish customers.
“He said, ‘You don’t sell apartments after the war if you’re German,’ ” Walter said in the Boston Globe article. “So he’s Swedish, no problem.”
Even after World War II, Fred Trump continued to claim he was Swedish, according to Walter...
In reality, Fred Trump’s father, Friedrich Trump, immigrated to the United States from the German city of Kallstadt as a teenager in 1885. Blair writes in her biography that Friedrich Trump went on to establish several saloons and hotels that doubled as brothels.
One German historian alleges that the Trump patriarch was kicked out of Germany for failing to complete mandatory military service and as such was not able to reclaim his German citizenship.
Donald Trump eventually acknowledged and embraced his German heritage, serving as the grand marshal of the annual German-American Steuben Parade in New York City in 1999. In a video message for the 2011 event, Trump touted his grandfather’s immigration story and recalled the earlier parade.
“We passed Trump Tower, 69 stories. I looked up and I said, ‘This is a long way from Kallstadt,’” he said, referring to his grandfather’s hometown.
“I’m a proud German-American,” Donald Trump added.
Continuing his rant against Harris, the former president said "So I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black?”
“I respect either one, but she obviously doesn’t, because she was Indian all the way, and then all of a sudden she made a turn and she went – she became a Black person,” he said at the National Association of Black Journalists convention. “I think somebody should look into that too.”
The question we now all want to have answered from Trump is which is it, German, Scottish or Swedish? While his paternal line is purely German (both paternal grandparents were German immigrants) and his mother was a Scottish immigrant, his Swedish roots are purely fantastical, intended to deceive Fred Trump's Jewish customers during and after WWII.
So the opportunism accusation and ethnic confusion is purely in Trump's court. Harris has never made any secret of her Indian (maternal) and Black (paternal) ethnicity, nor has she ever claimed to be Swedish, American Indian, or anything else.
