For some of the Trump kids, lying was a way of life, and for Fred’s oldest son, lying was defensive—not simply a way to circumvent his father’s disapproval or to avoid punishment, as it was for the others, but a way to survive. Maryanne, for instance, never went against her father, perhaps out of fear of an ordinary punishment such as being grounded or sent to her room. For Donald, lying was primarily a mode of self-aggrandizement meant to convince other people he was better than he actually was. For Freddy, the consequences of going against his father were different not only in degree but in kind, so lying became his only defense against his father’s attempts to suppress his natural sense of humor, sense of adventure, and sensitivity.
Peale’s ideas about inferiority complexes helped shape Fred’s harsh judgments about Freddy, while also allowing him to evade taking responsibility for any of his children. Weakness was perhaps the greatest sin of all, and Fred worried that Freddy was more like his own brother, John, the MIT professor: soft and, though not unambitious, interested in the wrong things, such as engineering and physics, which Fred found esoteric and unimportant. Such softness was unthinkable in his namesake, and by the time the family had moved into the House when Freddy was ten, Fred had already determined to toughen him up. Like most people who aren’t paying attention to where they’re going, however, he overcorrected.
“That’s stupid,” Fred said whenever Freddy expressed a desire to get a pet or played a practical joke. “What do you want to do that for?” Fred said with such contempt in his voice that it made Freddy flinch, which only annoyed Fred more. Fred hated it when his oldest son screwed up or failed to intuit what was required of him, but he hated it even more when, after being taken to task, Freddy apologized. “Sorry, Dad,” Fred would mock him. Fred wanted his oldest son to be a “killer” in his parlance (for what reason it’s impossible to say—collecting rent in Coney Island wasn’t exactly a high-risk endeavor in the 1950s), and he was temperamentally the opposite of that.
Being a killer was really code for being invulnerable. Although Fred didn’t seem to feel anything about his father’s death, the suddenness of it had taken him by surprise and knocked him off balance. Years later, when discussing it, he said, “Then he died. Just like that. It just didn’t seem real. I wasn’t that upset. You know how kids are. But I got upset watching my mother crying and being so sad. It was seeing her that made me feel bad, not my own feelings about what had happened.”
The loss, in other words, had made him feel vulnerable, not because of his own feelings but because of his mother’s feelings, which he likely felt were being imposed on him, especially as he did not share them. That imposition must have been very painful. In that moment, he wasn’t the center of the universe, and that was unacceptable. Going forward, he refused to acknowledge or feel loss. (I never heard him or anyone else in my family speak about my great-grandfather.) As far as Fred was concerned, he was able to move on because nothing particularly important had been lost.
Subscribing as Fred did to Norman Vincent Peale’s ideas about human failings, he didn’t grasp that by ridiculing and questioning Freddy, he was creating a situation in which low self-esteem was almost inevitable. Fred was simultaneously telling his son that he had to be an unqualified success and that he never could be. So Freddy existed in a system that was all punishment, no reward. The other children, especially Donald, couldn’t have helped but notice.
The situation was somewhat different for Donald. With the benefit of a seven-and-a-half-year age difference, he had plenty of time to learn from watching Fred humiliate his older brother and Freddy’s resulting shame. The lesson he learned, at its simplest, was that it was wrong to be like Freddy: Fred didn’t respect his oldest son, so neither would Donald. Fred thought Freddy was weak, and therefore so did Donald. It would take a long time before the two brothers, in very different ways, came to adapt themselves to the truth of this.
It’s difficult to understand what goes on in any family—perhaps hardest of all for the people in it. Regardless of how a parent treats a child, it’s almost impossible for that child to believe that parent means them any harm. It was easier for Freddy to think that his father had his son’s best interests at heart and that he, Freddy, was the problem. In other words, protecting his love for his father was more important than protecting himself from his father’s abuse. Donald would have taken his father’s treatment of his brother at face value: “Dad’s not trying to hurt Freddy. He’s only trying to teach us how to be real men. And Freddy’s failing.”
Abuse can be quiet and insidious just as often as, or even more often than, it is loud and violent. As far as I know, my grandfather wasn’t a physically violent man or even a particularly angry one. He didn’t have to be; he expected to get what he wanted and almost always did. It wasn’t his inability to fix his oldest son that infuriated him, it was the fact that Freddy simply wasn’t what he wanted him to be. Fred dismantled his oldest son by devaluing and degrading every aspect of his personality and his natural abilities until all that was left was self-recrimination and a desperate need to please a man who had no use for him.
The only reason Donald escaped the same fate is that his personality served his father’s purpose. That’s what sociopaths do: they co-opt others and use them toward their own ends—ruthlessly and efficiently, with no tolerance for dissent or resistance. Fred destroyed Donald, too, but not by snuffing him out as he did Freddy; instead, he short-circuited Donald’s ability to develop and experience the entire spectrum of human emotion. By limiting Donald’s access to his own feelings and rendering many of them unacceptable, Fred perverted his son’s perception of the world and damaged his ability to live in it. His capacity to be his own person, rather than an extension of his father’s ambitions, became severely limited. The implications of that limitation became clearer when Donald entered school. Neither of his parents had interacted with him in a way that helped him make sense of his world, which contributed to his inability to get along with other people and remained a constant buffer between him and his siblings. It also made reading social cues extremely difficult, if not impossible, for him—a problem he has to this day.
Ideally, the rules at home reflect the rules of society, so when children go out into the world, they generally know how to behave. When kids go to school, they’re supposed to know that they shouldn’t take other children’s toys and they’re not supposed to hit or tease other children. Donald didn’t understand any of that because the rules in the House, at least as they applied to the boys—be tough at all costs, lying is okay, admitting you’re wrong or apologizing is weakness—clashed with the rules he encountered at school. Fred’s fundamental beliefs about how the world worked—in life, there can be only one winner and everybody else is a loser (an idea that essentially precluded the ability to share) and kindness is weakness—were clear. Donald knew, because he had seen it with Freddy, that failure to comply with his father’s rules was punished by severe and often public humiliation, so he continued to adhere to them even outside his father’s purview. Not surprisingly, his understanding of “right” and “wrong” would clash with the lessons taught in most elementary schools.
Donald’s growing arrogance, in part a defense against his feelings of abandonment and an antidote to his lack of self-esteem, served as a protective cover for his deepening insecurities. As a result, he was able to keep most people at arm’s length. It was easier for him that way. Life in the House made all the children in one way or another uncomfortable with emotions—either expressing them or being confronted with them. It was probably worse for the boys, for whom the acceptable range of human feeling was extremely narrow. (I never saw any man in my family cry or express affection for one another in any way other than the handshake that opened and closed any encounter.) Getting close to other children or authority figures may have felt like a dangerous betrayal of his father. Nonetheless, Donald’s displays of confidence, his belief that society’s rules didn’t apply to him, and his exag
gerated display of self-worth drew some people to him. A large minority of people still confuse his arrogance for strength, his false bravado for accomplishment, and his superficial interest in them for charisma.
* * *
Donald had discovered early on how easy it was to get under Robert’s pale skin and push him past his limits; it was a game he never tired of playing. Nobody else would have bothered—Robert was so skinny and quiet that there was no sport in tormenting him—but Donald enjoyed flexing his power, even if only over his younger, smaller, and even thinner-skinned brother. Once, out of frustration and helplessness, Robert kicked a hole in their bathroom door, which got him into trouble despite the fact that Donald had driven him to it. When his mother told Donald to stop, he didn’t; when Maryanne and Freddy told him to stop, he didn’t.
One Christmas the boys received three Tonka trucks, which soon became Robert’s favorite toys. As soon as Donald figured that out, he started hiding them from his little brother and pretending he had no idea where they were. The last time it happened, when Robert’s tantrum spiraled out of control, Donald threatened to dismantle the trucks in front of him if he didn’t stop crying. Desperate to save them, Robert ran to his mother. Mary’s solution was to hide the trucks in the attic, effectively punishing Robert, who’d done nothing wrong, and leaving Donald feeling invincible. He wasn’t yet being rewarded for selfishness, obstinacy, or cruelty, but he wasn’t being punished for those flaws, either.
Mary remained a bystander. She didn’t intervene in the moment and didn’t comfort her son, acting as if it weren’t her place to do so. Even for the 1950s, the family was split deeply along gender lines. Despite the fact that Fred’s mother had been his partner—she had literally started his business—it’s clear that Fred and his wife were never partners. The girls were her purview, the boys his. When Mary made her annual trip home to the Isle of Lewis, only Maryanne and Elizabeth accompanied her. Mary cooked the boys’ meals and laundered their clothes but didn’t feel that it was her place to guide them. She rarely interacted with the boys’ friends, and her relationships with her sons, already marred by their early experiences with her, became increasingly distant.
When Freddy, at fourteen, dumped a bowl of mashed potatoes on his then-seven-year-old brother’s head, it wounded Donald’s pride so deeply that he’d still be bothered by it when Maryanne brought it up in her toast at the White House birthday dinner in 2017. The incident wasn’t a big deal—or it shouldn’t have been. Donald had been tormenting Robert, again, and nobody could get him to stop. Even at seven, he felt no need to listen to his mother, who, having failed to heal the rift between them after her illness, he treated with contempt. Finally, Robert’s crying and Donald’s needling became too much, and in a moment of improvised expedience that would become family legend, Freddy picked up the first thing at hand that wouldn’t cause any real damage: the bowl of mashed potatoes.
Everybody laughed, and they couldn’t stop laughing. And they were laughing at Donald. It was the first time Donald had been humiliated by someone he even then believed to be beneath him. He hadn’t understood that humiliation was a weapon that could be wielded by only one person in a fight. That Freddy, of all people, could drag him into a world where humiliation could happen to him made it so much worse. From then on, he would never allow himself to feel that feeling again. From then on, he would wield the weapon, never be at the sharp end of it.
CHAPTER THREE The Great I-Am
By the time Maryanne left for Mount Holyoke and, a couple of years later, Freddy for Lehigh University, Donald had already had plenty of experience watching his older brother struggle with, and largely fail to meet, their father’s expectations. They were vague, of course. Fred had the authoritarian’s habit of assuming that his underlings knew what to do without being told. Generally, the only way to know if you were doing something right was if you didn’t get dressed down for it.
But it was one thing for Donald to stay out of his father’s crosshairs and another to get into his good graces. Toward that end, Donald all but eradicated any qualities he might have shared with his older brother. Except for the occasional fishing trip with Freddy and his friends, Donald would become a creature of country clubs and offices, golf being the only thing on which he and his father differed. He would also double down on the behaviors he had thus far gotten away with: bullying, pointing the finger, refusing to take responsibility, and disregarding authority. He says that he “pushed back” against his father and Fred “respected” that. The truth is, he was able to push back against his father because Fred let him. When he was very young, Fred’s attention was not trained on him; his focus was elsewhere—on his business and his oldest son, that’s it. Eventually, when Donald went away to military school at thirteen, Fred began to admire Donald’s disregard of authority. Although a strict parent in general, Fred accepted Donald’s arrogance and bullying—after he actually started to notice them—because he identified with the impulses.
Encouraged by his father, Donald eventually started to believe his own hype. By the time he was twelve, the right side of his mouth was curled up in an almost perpetual sneer of self-conscious superiority, and Freddy had dubbed him “the Great I-Am,” echoing a passage from Exodus he’d learned in Sunday school in which God first reveals himself to Moses.
Because of the disastrous circumstances in which he was raised, Donald knew intuitively, based on plenty of experience, that he would never be comforted or soothed, especially when he most needed to be. There was no point, then, in acting needy. And whether he knew it on any level or not, neither of his parents was ever going to see him for who he truly was or might have been—Mary was too depleted and Fred was interested only in whichever of his sons could be of most use—so he became whatever was most expedient. The rigid personality he developed as a result was a suit of armor that often protected him against pain and loss. But it also kept him from figuring out how to trust people enough to get close to them.
Freddy was terrified to ask Fred for anything. Donald had seen the results of that reticence. Whenever Freddy deviated even slightly from Fred’s often unspoken expectations, he ended up humiliated or shamed. Donald would try something different: he chose instead to ingratiate himself with their father by smashing through every barrier his older brother never dared test. He knew exactly how to play it: when Freddy flinched, Donald shrugged. He took what he wanted without asking for permission not because he was brave but because he was afraid not to. Whether Donald understood the underlying message or not, Fred did: in family, as in life, there could be only one winner; everybody else had to lose. Freddy kept trying and failing to do the right thing; Donald began to realize that there was nothing he could do wrong, so he stopped trying to do anything “right.” He became bolder and more aggressive because he was rarely challenged or held to account by the only person in the world who mattered—his father. Fred liked his killer attitude, even if it manifested as bad behavior.
Every one of Donald’s transgressions became an audition for his father’s favor, as if he were saying “See, Dad, I’m the tough one. I’m the killer.” He kept piling on because there wasn’t any resistance—until there was. But it didn’t come from his father.
Though Donald’s behavior didn’t bother Fred—given his long hours at the office, he wasn’t often around to witness much of what happened at home—it drove his mother to distraction. Mary couldn’t control him at all, and Donald disobeyed her at every turn. Any attempt at discipline by her was rebuffed. He talked back. He couldn’t ever admit he was wrong; he contradicted her even when she was right; and he refused to back down. He tormented his little brother and stole his toys. He refused to do his chores or anything else he was told to do. Perhaps worst of all to a fastidious woman like her, he was a slob who refused to pick up after himself no matter how much she threatened him. “Wait until your father comes home” had been an effective threat with Freddy, but to Donald it was a joke that his father seemed to be in on.
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Finally, by 1959, Donald’s misbehavior—fighting, bullying, arguing with teachers—had gone too far. Kew-Forest had reached its limits. Fred’s being on the school’s board of trustees cut two ways: on the one hand, Donald’s behavior had been overlooked longer than it otherwise might have; on the other, it caused Fred some inconvenience. Name-calling and teasing kids too young to fight back had escalated into physical altercations. Fred didn’t mind Donald’s acting out, but it had become intrusive and time consuming for him. When one of his fellow board members at Kew-Forest recommended sending Donald to New York Military Academy as a way to rein him in, Fred went along with it. Throwing him in with military instructors and upperclassmen who wouldn’t put up with his shit might toughen up Fred’s burgeoning protégé even more. Fred had more important things to do than deal with Donald.
I don’t know if Mary had any say in the final decision, but she didn’t fight for her son to stay home, either, a failure Donald couldn’t help but notice. It must have felt like a replay of all the times she’d abandoned him in the past.
Over Donald’s objections, he was enrolled at NYMA, a private boys’ boarding school sixty miles north of New York City. The other kids in the family referred to NYMA as a “reform school”—it wasn’t prestigious like St. Paul’s, which Freddy had attended. Nobody sent their sons to NYMA for a better education, and Donald understood it rightly as a punishment.
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