President Donald Trump's ancestral German village of Kallstadt isn’t exactly bubbling over about its hometown boy and the leader of the free world, The New York Times reported.
Trump appears to have plenty of relatives in and around the village of 1,200 where both of his paternal grandparents, Friedrich and Elisabeth Trump, were born, but like in the rest of the country his politics don’t play so well in the rolling hills of Germany’s southwestern wine country.
On Sunday, Trump said in a television interview that Germany and its European Union partners were "as bad as China" when it comes to trading unfairly with the United States, The Independent reported.
And Trump has repeated bashed Germany and its chancellor Angela Merkel over the country's immigration policy, charging in tweets last month that crime there was up because of it.
Ursula Trump, who works at the Trump Bakery in Kallstadt, said the U.S. president's politics have followed the family name to Germany, according to the Times. After he was elected, Ursula Trump said she received a phone call asking her to tell new president to not build a wall between the United States and Mexico.
"I had to break it to her," Ursula Trump told the Times. "I don't have his phone number."
She said neighbors at one time boycotted the bakery after she baked sponge cakes covered in stars and stripes and edible pictures of the president as a joke after the election.
Kallstadt's mayor Thomas Jaworek told the Times that "practically half the village" is related to Trump, but the village had not played up its deep roots to him.
"We don't use the name in any way in touristic marketing," Jörg Dörr in the tourism office told the Times. "The topic is too controversial."
Friedrich Trump moved to the United States at 16 in 1885, and returned in 1902, a rich man, Roland Paul, a local historian who was one of the first to research Trump's German family, told the Times. Paul said he married the girl next door and later the couple went back to America.
Friedrich worked as a barber in New York City before making his fortune running a restaurant and, reportedly, a brothel for gold diggers in the Yukon.
While living in Kallstadt, he was described as a "polite," a man who "lived quietly and withdrawn" and had an "unblemished way of life."
The Times said in 2001 the Trump Organization did donate $5,000 to help restore the church facade in Kallstadt, with Trump himself signing the check, said the church's priest Oliver Herzog.
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