Everything we know about Trump’s ancestry after he pushed his rival’s into question
Donald Trump faced heavy criticism on Wednesday after questioning the heritage of the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris, while speaking to the National Association of Black Journalists.
“She was always of Indian heritage, and she was only promoting Indian heritage,” he said. “I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black, and now she wants to be known as Black. So I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black?”
Harris’s father is from Jamaica and her mother was from India. The vice president said on Wednesday night that Trump’s comments were “the same old show” of “divisiveness and disrespect.”
That has sparked questions on the backgrounds of both candidates. Trump is one of five children of the real estate developer Fred Trump and the Scottish immigrant Mary Anne MacLeod Trump. The former president has five children with his three wives as well as 10 grandchildren.
Here is everything we know about Trump’s ancestry and immediate family.
Grandparents
Frederick Trump
Donald Trump’s paternal grandfather was born in 1869 in Kallstadt in what was then the Kingdom of Bavaria. He immigrated to the US in 1885 before moving to the Yukon in Canada and operated a restaurant and brothel for Whitehorse miners, according to CBC News.
He returned to Kallstadt where he married Elisabeth Christ in 1902 but as he had allegedly left Bavaria to avoid conscription, he had been stripped of his citizenship and he subsequently went back to the US.
Frederick Trump moved his family to Queens, where he bought a number of properties before he died at the age of 49 in 1918 during the Spanish Influenza epidemic, according to Politico.
Elizabeth Christ Trump
Following her husband’s death, the 37-year-old took on the management of his properties, co-founding the real estate development company E Trump & Son with Fred Trump, the former president’s father.
She died in 1966 at the age of 85.
Parents
Frederick Trump Sr
While Donald Trump has claimed that his father was born in Germany, he was in fact born in New York City to German immigrants Frederick and Elisabeth in 1905.
Trump Sr started his own construction company as a 15-year-old in high school, partnering with his mother, according to The New York Times.
Starting out by building garages for cars, which were then fairly new, most of Trump Sr’s wealth came from building low- and middle-income housing in Brooklyn and Queens following the World War II.
He died in 1999 at the age of 93.
Mary Anne MacLeod Trump
Born in 1912 in the Outer Hebrides west of the Scottish mainland, MacLeod emigrated to the US in 1930 and became a citizen 12 years later, according to The New Yorker. Her father was a fisherman and she was the youngest of 10 children.
After meeting Fred Trump Sr at a party, they married in 1936 and settled in Jamaica, Queens.
In The Art of the Deal, published in 1987, Donald Trump wrote that his mother “was a very traditional housewife, but she also had a sense of the world beyond her.”
She subsequently became a philanthropist as the family became wealthier. She died in 2000 at the age of 88.
Siblings
Maryanne Trump Barry
Barry was the oldest of the Trump children, born in 1937. A federal judge, she was married to David Desmond for 20 years, between 1960 and 1980. They had a son, David William Desmond. She married fellow attorney John Joseph Barry in 1982 and they stayed together until his death in 2000.
Attending Hofstra University School of Law while her son was in the sixth grade, according to The New York Times, Barry would go on to spend decades as a federal prosecutor and judge. She was nominated to the US Court of Appeals in 1999 by President Bill Clinton. She stopped hearing cases in 2017.
She officially retired in 2019, 10 days after the launch of an investigation on allegations of judicial misconduct and tax evasion.
She was secretly recorded in 2018 and 2019 calling Donald Trump “cruel” and accused him of having “no principles.”
She died in November last year at the age of 86.
Frederick Trump Jr
Born in 1938, Trump Jr had two children, Frederick Trump III and Mary Trump, after marrying Linda Clapp in 1962.
He was expected to take over the family real estate business, but he instead pursued his ambitions to become a pilot, creating unease between him, his father and his brother.
After becoming an alcoholic, he quit flying, got divorced, and moved back into his parents’ house in Queens. He died of a heart attack in September 1981 at the age of 42.
Mary Trump wrote in her 2020 book Too Much and Never Enough, that Fred Sr played a large role in destroying her father.
Elizabeth Trump Grau
Born in 1942, Grau is four years older than the former president. She attended Southern Seminary College in Virginia before joining Chase Manhattan Bank as an administrative assistant, The New York Times noted.
She married TV and film producer James Grau in 1989. The couple has no children and has retired to Florida.
Robert Trump
Robert Trump was born in 1948, the youngest child of Trump Sr and MacLeod.
He attended Boston University and started working on Wall Street before joining the family business, The New York Times reported.
He died in 2020 at the age of 71 with his funeral being held at the White House during the Trump presidency.
Wives
Ivana Trump
Donald Trump’s first marriage lasted for 15 years from 1977 to 1992. They had three children, Donald Jr, Ivanka, and Eric.
Born in 1949 in what was then Czechoslovakia, she lived in Canada in the early 1970s before her marriage to Trump, whom she met via her modeling career.
She held managerial positions in the Trump Organization and worked with her husband on projects such as Trump Tower in New York and the Trump Taj Mahal Atlantic City, New Jersey, according to The New York Times.
She died after a fall at her Manhattan home in July 2022 at the age of 73.
Marla Maples
Maples’s relationship with Trump started while he was still married to Ivana Trump, leading to their 1990 split, according to People.
Maples, a 60-year-old from Georgia, and Trump were married in 1993 two months after having a daughter, Tiffany Trump. They divorced in 1999.
She worked as an actress, appearing in films and on TV in the 1990s and the 2000s.
Melania Trump
Melania Trump was born in what was then Yugoslavia in today’s Slovenia in 1970. She briefly attended the University of Ljubljana before starting her modeling career and moving to New York in 1996, according to The New Yorker and Vanity Fair.
She met Trump two years later at a Fashion Week party in 1998. They were engaged in 2004, married in early 2005 and had their son Barron in 2006.
In 2017, she became the first First Lady born outside of the US since UK-born Louisa Adams served as John Quincy Adams’s first lady in the late 1820s.