Story highlights
Donald Trump described a loan his father gave him for $1 million as a "small loan"
Trump was answering a question from a voter who asked him "have you ever been told no?"
Donald Trump on Monday said his climb to the top of the business world hasn’t been an easy one and depicted a $1 million loan from his father as “small.”
“My whole life really has been a ‘no’ and I fought through it,” Trump said Monday at an NBC-sponsored town hall here. “It has not been easy for me, it has not been easy for me. And you know I started off in Brooklyn, my father gave me a small loan of a million dollars.”
Trump was answering a question from a Republican voter who asked him “with the exception of your family, have you ever been told no?”
Pressed further, Trump conceded that getting a million dollar loan from his father might seem easy to most people, but said “a million dollars isn’t very much compared to what I’ve built.”
Trump has built up a multi-billion dollar net worth, expanding his father’s lucrative real estate business to new heights.
But while much of Trump’s success is a credit to his work, he was born into a successful, wealthy family, inheriting part of his father’s more than $200 million net worth.
Trump said even his father told him his plans to delve into the Manhattan real estate business – away from the Trump family’s projects mostly in Queens and Brooklyn – were a bad idea.
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“Even my father he said you don’t want to go to Manhattan. That’s not our territory,” Trump said.
Trump’s campaign didn’t respond to CNN’s question about when his father gave him the $1 million loan – though it appears to have happened before Trump entered the Manhattan real estate market in the early 1970s.
If Trump’s father made the loan in 1968, the year his son graduated from the University of Pennsylvania, that $1 million would be worth $6.8 million in today’s dollars, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Consumer Price Index inflation calculator.
The median household income in 1968 was $7,700; today it’s $53,675. The median home price then was $25,000; today it’s $269,000.
Trump took