Only the most dedicated optimist could have lived in Sunnyside Towers without losing hope. There was no doorman, and the plastic plants and flowers that filled the two large planters on either side of the plexiglass front door were perpetually coated in a thin film of dust. Our sixth-floor hallway reeked of stale cigarette smoke. The dank carpet was a soulless shade of seal grey. The indifferent overhead lighting hid nothing.

The height of my father’s lifestyle had been when he and my mom had lived in their one-bedroom near Sutton Place right after they were married. During that year, they had spent their evenings going to the Copacabana with friends and flying to Bimini on weekends. It had been all downhill from there, a trajectory that mirrored that of Donald, whose own lifestyle became more extravagant as the years passed. Donald had already been living in Manhattan when he married Ivana. After the wedding, they lived in a two-bedroom apartment on Fifth Avenue, then in an eight-bedroom apartment also on Fifth Avenue. Within five years they were living in the $10 million penthouse triplex in Trump Tower, all while Donald was still effectively on my grandfather’s payroll.

My grandfather created Midland Associates in the 1960s to benefit his children, each of whom was given 15 percent ownership in eight buildings, one of which was Sunnyside Towers. The express purpose of this apparently quasi-legal, if not outright fraudulent, transfer of wealth was to avoid paying the lion’s share of the gift taxes that would have been assessed if it had been an aboveboard transaction. I don’t know if Dad knew that he owned part of the building he now lived in, but in 1973 his share of it would have been worth about $380,000, or $2.2 million in today’s dollars. He seemed to have no apparent access to any of the money—his boats and planes were gone; his Mustang and Jaguar were gone. He still had his FCT vanity plates, but now they were attached to a beat-up Ford LTD. Whatever wealth my father had was by then entirely theoretical. Either his access to his trust funds had been blocked, or he had stopped thinking he had any right to his own money. Thwarted one way or the other, he was at his father’s mercy.

Dad and I were watching a Mets game on television when the intercom buzzed. Dad looked surprised and went to answer. I didn’t hear who was calling from the lobby, but I heard my father say “Shit” under his breath. We’d been having a laid-back afternoon, but Dad seemed tense now. “Donald’s coming up for a couple of minutes,” he told me.

“Why?”

“No idea.” He seemed annoyed, which was unusual for him.

Dad tucked his shirt in and opened the door as soon as the bell rang. He took a couple of steps back to let his brother pass. Donald was wearing a three-piece suit and shiny shoes and carrying a thick manila envelope wrapped with several wide rubber bands. He walked into the living room. “Hi, Honeybunch,” he said when he saw me.

I waved at him.

Donald turned back to my dad and said, “Jesus, Freddy,” as he looked around disdainfully. My father let it slide. Donald tossed the envelope onto the coffee table and said, “Dad needs you to sign these and then bring them to Brooklyn.”

“Today?”

“Yeah. Why? You busy?”

“You take it to him.”

“I can’t. I’m on my way to the city to look at some properties that are in foreclosure. It’s a fantastic time to take advantage of losers who bought at the height of the market.”

Freddy never would have dared develop his own projects outside of Brooklyn. A few years earlier on a weekend trip to the Poconos, as he and Linda had driven past row after row of condemned buildings on either side of the Cross Bronx Expressway, she’d pointed out that he could start his own business and renovate buildings in the Bronx.

“No way I could go against Dad,” Freddy had said. “It’s all about Brooklyn for him. He’d never go for it.”

Now Donald looked out the window and said, “Dad’s going to need somebody in Brooklyn. You should go back.”

“And do what, exactly?” Dad scoffed.

“I don’t know. Whatever you used to do.”

“I had your job.”

In the uncomfortable silence, Donald looked at his watch. “My driver’s waiting downstairs. Get this to Dad by four o’clock, okay?”

After Donald left, Dad sat on the couch next to me and lit a cigarette. “So, kiddo,” he said, “want to take a ride to Brooklyn?”

When we visited the office, Dad made the rounds on his way to Amy Luerssen, my grandfather’s secretary and gatekeeper (and also my godmother), whose desk stood right outside of her boss’s door. Aunt Amy clearly adored the man she called “my Freddy.”

My grandfather’s private office was a square room with low lighting, its walls covered with plaques and framed certificates, a lot of wooden busts of Indian chiefs in full headdress scattered about. I sat behind his desk and chose from what seemed an endless supply of blue Flair markers and the same thick pads of cheap scratch paper he had at the House, writing notes and drawing until it was time to go to lunch. When I was left alone, I spun wildly in his chair.

My grandfather always took us to eat at Gargiulo’s, a formal restaurant with crisp cloth napkins and tablecloths where he went almost every day. The deferential waiters knew him, always called him “Mr. Trump,” pulled out his chair, and generally fussed over him throughout the meal. It was better when Aunt Amy or somebody else from the office joined us because it took the pressure off Dad; he and my grandfather had little left to say to each other. It didn’t happen often that Donald was at the office at the same time we were, but it was much worse when we crossed paths. He acted as though he owned the place, which my grandfather seemed not only to encourage but to enjoy. My grandfather was transformed in Donald’s presence.

In 1973, the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division sued Donald and my grandfather for violating the 1968 Fair Housing Act by refusing to rent to die Schwarze, as my grandfather put it. It was one of the largest federal housing discrimination suits ever brought, and the notorious attorney Roy Cohn offered to help. Donald and Cohn had crossed paths at Le Club, a swanky members-only restaurant and disco on East 55th Street that was frequented by Vanderbilts and Kennedys, an array of international celebrities, and minor royalty. Cohn was more than a decade removed from his disastrous involvement in Joseph McCarthy’s failed anti-Communist crusade. He’d been forced to resign from his position as the senator’s chief counsel, but not until he’d wrecked the lives and careers of dozens of men because of their alleged homosexuality and/or ties to communism.

Like many men of his vicious temperament and with his influential connections, Cohn was subject to no rules. Embraced by a certain segment of the New York elite and hired by a diverse pool of clients such as Rupert Murdoch, John Gotti, Alan Dershowitz, and the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York, Cohn entered private practice back in New York City, where he’d grown up. Over the ensuing years, he became very rich, very successful, and very powerful.

Though Cohn was flashy where Fred was conservative and loud where Fred was taciturn, the differences between them were really of degree, not kind. Cohn’s cruelty and hypocrisy were more public, but Fred had, in the intimate context of his family, also mastered those arts. Fred had also primed Donald to be drawn to men such as Cohn, as he would later be drawn to authoritarians such as Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un or anyone else, really, with a willingness to flatter and the power to enrich him.

Cohn recommended that Trump Management file a countersuit against the Justice Department for $100 million over what he alleged were the government’s false and misleading statements about his clients. The maneuver was simultaneously absurd, flashy, and effective, at least in terms of the publicity it garnered; it was the first time that Donald, at twenty-seven, had landed on a newspaper’s front page. And although the countersuit would be tossed out of court, Trump Management settled the case. There was no admission of wrongdoing, but they did have to change their rental practices to avoid discrimination. Even so, both Cohn and Donald considered it a win because of all the press coverage.

When Donald hitched his fortunes to the likes of Roy Cohn, the only things he had going for him were Fred’s largesse and a carefully cultivated but delusional belief in his own brilliance and superiority. Ironically, the defenses he had developed as a young child to protect himself against the indifference, fear, and neglect that had defined his early years, along with his being forced to watch the abuse of Freddy, primed him to develop what his older brother clearly lacked: the ability to be the “killer” and proxy his father required.

There’s no way to know precisely when Fred started to notice Donald, but I suspect it was after he shipped his son off to military school. Donald seemed amenable to his father’s exhortations to be tough, a “killer,” and he proved his worth by bragging about the random beatings he received from the upperclassmen or pretending not to care about his exile from home. Fred’s growing confidence in Donald created a bond between them and an unshakable self-confidence in Donald. After all, the most important person in the family, the only one whose opinion mattered, was finally showing him favor. And unlike Freddy, the attention Donald received from his father was positive.

After college, when Donald was finally out in the world using his father’s connections to make more connections and using his father’s money to create his image as a burgeoning Master of the Universe, Fred knew that anything his son got credit for would redound to his own benefit. After all, if Donald was embraced as an up-and-coming dealmaker, that was entirely to the credit of Fred Trump—even if Fred was the only person who knew it.

In interviews in the early 1980s, Fred claimed that Donald’s success had far exceeded his own. “I gave Donald free rein,” he said. “He has great visions, and everything he touches seems to turn to gold. Donald is the smartest person I know.” None of that was true, and Fred must have known that a decade before he said it.

After Steeplechase, Fred had lost a lot of ground. If he wanted to expand the reach of his empire, he would need a new playing field and a surrogate. He needed Donald to go out in the world and create the brand. It hadn’t taken Fred long to realize that his profligate middle son wasn’t suited to the unglamorous, tightly budgeted, and highly regimented routine of running rental properties. But with his father’s backing, maybe he could use his hubris and shamelessness to make the push into Manhattan. Fred wasn’t living vicariously; he was intimately involved in all aspects of Donald’s early forays into the Manhattan market, getting things done behind the scenes while Donald played to the crowd up front. Fred made it possible for Donald to play a role that fulfilled his own desire for recognition while allowing his son to garner the reputation as a Manhattan developer that Fred had always aspired to. Fred would never get the public recognition, but it was enough for him to know that the opportunities Donald had to make his mark and promote himself would never have materialized without him. The success and the acclaim were due to Fred and his vast wealth. Any story about Donald was really a story about Fred. Fred also knew that if that secret was uncovered, the ruse would fall apart. In retrospect, Fred was the puppeteer, but he couldn’t be seen to be pulling his son’s strings. It’s not that Fred was overlooking Donald’s incompetence as a businessman; he knew he had more than enough talent in that arena for both of them. Fred was willing to stake millions of dollars on his son because he believed he could leverage the skills Donald did have—as a savant of self-promotion, shameless liar, marketer, and builder of brands—to achieve the one thing that had always eluded him: a level of fame that matched his ego and satisfied his ambition in a way money alone never could.

When things turned south in the late 1980s, Fred could no longer separate himself from his son’s brutal ineptitude; the father had no choice but to stay invested. His monster had been set free. All he could do was mitigate the damage, keep the cash flowing, and find somebody else to blame.

Over the next two years, Dad became more taciturn, more grim, and, if possible, thinner. The apartment in Sunnyside Towers was grey—grey because of the northwest exposure, grey from the unending clouds of cigarette smoke, grey because of his terrible moods. There were mornings when he barely managed to get out of bed, let alone spend a whole day with us. Sometimes he was hungover; sometimes it was his depression, which grew heavier. If we didn’t have anything scheduled, Dad often made an excuse to leave us alone, saying he had to work or run an errand for Gam.

Once Dad told us he had a job managing paperboys. I’d briefly had a paper route, and as far as I could tell that meant he was the guy who handed out the papers to the delivery kids from the trunk of his car, then collected the cash from them when they’d finished their routes. He told me once that he made $100 a day, which seemed like an enormous sum to me.

One evening, we were at the apartment having dinner with Dad’s girlfriend, Johanna. I preferred it when she wasn’t there; something about her was off-putting. She didn’t connect—or even try to—with me and Fritz. It was bad enough that she said things such as “Freddy, light me a fag,” considering she wasn’t British, but Dad started saying them, too.

We’d just finished eating when I started to recount the adventures I’d had with my mother at the bank that afternoon. While she had waited in the very long line, I had stood at one of the counters and filled out deposit slips with all sorts of aliases and wild sums of money I planned to withdraw in order to fund various schemes. I could barely contain how funny I thought the whole thing was. But as I told them about the secret identities, the secret withdrawals of cash, and my fiendish plots to disperse them, Dad got a wary look in his eyes.

“Does Mr. Tosti know about this?” he asked.

If I’d been paying closer attention, I might have known to stop, but I thought he was kidding, so I kept telling my story.

Dad got increasingly agitated, leaned forward, and pointed his finger at me. “What did you do?” As moody as my father could be, I’d rarely seen him so angry, and I’d almost never heard him raise his voice. I was confused and tried to retrace my narrative back to the point where he had started to think I’d done something wrong. But there was no such point, and my explanation about what had really happened only agitated him further.

“If Mr. Tosti finds out about this, I’m going to be in trouble with your grandfather.”

Johanna put her hand on Dad’s arm, as if to draw his attention away from me. “Freddy,” she said, “it’s nothing.”

“What do you mean ‘nothing’? This is really goddamn serious.”

I flinched at the curse word.

At that point both Johanna and I knew there was no talking him down. He was drunk and trapped in some old narrative. I tried to explain it to him, to steady him, but he was too far gone. And I was only eight.

In the summer of 1975, Donald gave a press conference during which he presented a rendering of the architect’s plans for the Grand Hyatt, as if he’d already won the contract to replace the old Commodore Hotel next door to Grand Central Terminal on 42nd Street. The media printed his claims as fact.

That same summer, just before Fritz and I were scheduled to leave for camp, Dad had told Mom that he had some news. She invited him to dinner. I answered the door when Dad rang the bell. He was wearing what he almost always wore—black slacks and a white dress shirt—but his clothes were crisp and his hair was slicked back. I had never seen him look so handsome.

While Mom tossed the salad, Dad grilled the steak on our small terrace. When the food was ready, we sat at the small table next to the terrace, propping the door open so the mild summer breeze could blow in. We drank water and iced tea.

“I’m moving to West Palm Beach at the end of the summer,” he told us. “I found a great apartment on the Intracoastal with a dock in the back.” He already had a boat picked out, and when we visited, he’d take us fishing and waterskiing. As he spoke, he seemed happy and confident—and relieved. All of us knew it was the right decision; for the first time in a very long time, we felt hope.