The Brothel Behind The Trump Fortune

You can trace the fortune that helped to propel Donald Trump into the White House all the way back to Canada at the end of the 1800s. A story about a ghost town, a brothel, and a businessman whose ventures during the Klondike Gold Rush solidified his family's name for years to come: Frederick Trump.

*Please note: This is a re-release of a previous version published briefly to our channel in September 2018. A small change was necessary but the story remains the same.

Friedrich (Frederick) Trump continued operating his hotel/brothel in Whitehorse, Yukon for over a year—he actually had the building rafted there from Bennett, BC after just six weeks. Eventually, news got out that the Mounties were going to crack down on gambling and prostitution, so Trump took his money and went back to Germany. But, Germany didn't want him. To his homeland, he'd been a draft-dodger—leaving the country at the time he would have been conscripted—so he was deported. Trump moved back to the U.S. (he'd become a citizen while in Seattle) with his new wife. The couple had children, one of whom was Fred Trump Jr.. He would turn his father's Klondike nest-egg into the fortune eventually inherited by Donald Trump. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau gave President Trump a photo of Frederick Trump's hotel as a gift.

Notes/Corrections: There's controversy regarding the term 'pimp' and the wider story of the hotel's secondary function as a brothel. In fact, Snopes deemed a meme that circulated about the story 'mostly false' in this article. We've read their treatment and see that it focuses on a rumour Trump was involved in the opium trade—we can't speak to that because we haven't seen any mention of it. The article also takes the position that, during the Gold Rush, most hotels included sex work. Snopes states that Trump's establishments may have also been brothels, but the evidence is anecdotal. What convinces us is the excerpts you see and hear from newspapers at the time, as well as the mountain of other articles written about Frederick Trump that point to the fact that owning a combination hotel-brothel wasn't unusual for him. Calling Trump a 'pimp' might be a little on-the-nose because he most likely rented those 'private rooms' to sex workers to use rather than literally going to find customers for them. However, the distinction is a grey area and he clearly profited from the prostitution he promoted in newspaper ads. We leave it to you to decide what to make of it all, and would like to point you to the following articles and resources:

Gwenda Blair's "The Trumps: Three Generations of Builders and a President"

Articles by Maclean's, Bloomberg, and CBC (there are many others as well).

The Trump family name was once Drumpf.