Donald Trump falsely claimed that Kamala Harris somehow cooked up being Black to her political advantage years after he and his father claimed to be Swedish, according to reports and Trump's own authobigraphy.
The Swedish lie was first floated by Trump's father, the late Fred Trump, whose own dad was a German immigrant. Trump's mother was a Scottish immigrant.
The Trump family hid its German heritage "in large part because Fred Trump was trying to sell apartments, often to Jewish tenants, in the aftermath of World War II," the Boston Globe reported in 2017.
Fred Trump used to say: "You don't sell apartments after the war if you're German, " John Walter, a family historian and one of Donald Trump's cousins, told the newspaper at the time. "So he's Swedish, no problem."
Donald Trump repeated the lie that his grandfather "came from Sweden as a child" in his ghost-written autobiography "The Art of the Deal," the New York Times noted.
Eventually, Trump admitted that it was untrue, and claimed German heritage in later versions of the book.
When the Globe asked him about the contradiction in its 2017 article, Trump described the lie as expedient.
"Our country was at war with Germany," Trump told the Globe. "So being from Germany didn't necessarily play so well for a period of time."
He said his father "talked about Swedish because of the fact, you know, we happened to be at war with Germany, which I guess makes sense in a lot of ways doesn't it? But he spent time in Sweden," Trump added
Major Trump critic Omarosa Manigault Newman, his one-time White House aide and participant on his reality TV show "The Apprentice," pointed out the Swedish lie in an interview with CNN Wednesday saying Trump's father thought a fake Swedish ancestry would "play better to those who were patronizing his businesses."
She added: "Donald doesn't know the difference between ancestry and race. He doesn't want to know the differences, nor does he understand the nuances of how people self-identify."
Trump used to lie that he was Swedish. His father's family is German. Mom's family is from Scotland. Trump’s 3 kids are half Czech & Barron is half Slovenian. Alina Habba's parents emigrated from Iraq. Yet they pretend not to understand VP Kamala Harris is Black & South Asian. pic.twitter.com/LhR0xxnfrl
— Fly Sistah 🪷 (@Fly_Sistah) August 1, 2024
Trump is careful never to point out that four of his his five children were born to immigrant mothers as he rails about immigrants.
His late first wife, Ivana Trump, revealed that before marrying Trump she wed her first husband, a friend, in what her lawyer called a "Cold War marriage," solely to get out of then-Czechoslovakia to move to Canada following the years after World War II. The marriage was reportedly never consumated.
She married Trump after moving to America from Canada.
