Woody Guthrie wrote unpublished lyrics in the 1950s attacking Donald Trump’s father, Fred Trump, for racist housing policies that excluded Black tenants.time+1
The lyrics are usually referred to today as “Old Man Trump”, written around 1954 when Guthrie was living in a Brooklyn apartment complex called Beach Haven, owned and managed by Fred Trump.wikipedia+1
Guthrie was angered by the building’s segregationist rental practices, which meant that no Black families were allowed to live there, and he linked this to a broader climate of racial hatred in American life.npr+1
In one fragment, Guthrie writes that “Old Man Trump” stirred up “racial hate” by “drawing that color line” at his Beach Haven housing project, making clear he saw Trump’s policies as deliberately racist.wikipedia
In a reworked stanza of his song “Ain’t Got No Home,” Guthrie imagines Beach Haven as a fake “heaven” where “no black ones come to roam,” repeating the refrain that “Old Man Trump, Beach Haven ain’t my home,” tying Trump’s discrimination directly to the exclusion of Black tenants.npr+1
Guthrie’s lyric is both a personal protest against his landlord and a political attack on institutional racism in mid‑century urban housing.shadowproof+1
It casts Fred Trump as a symbol of white real‑estate power using segregation and discrimination against Black people, and treats that behavior as morally corrupt and un‑American.time+1