Trump and Trauma
By Otto Do ‘22
President Donald Trump’s actions have engulfed the United States in an era of inequity and injustice. Simply put, America deserves a better President. But why is Trump who he is?
Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man, by niece Mary Trump, explores the multigenerational greed and expectations that have worked to condition the current commander-in-chief for this moment. It poses quite a few questions worth unpacking. For instance, we know that Trump has witnessed and suffered a great deal of childhood abuse, but did that push him towards what most at Exeter would consider “evil?” Does his upbringing justify—or, that failing, explain—his choices and behavior as President of the United States so many years later?
Fred Trump Sr., the President’s father, sits at the center of this saga. Fred Sr. had near-impossible expectations for his eldest son, Fred Jr. The patriarch pitted the President—the middle child—against his brother. President Trump, who is seven years younger than his late brother, “had plenty of time to learn from watching Fred humiliate” his brother, his niece writes, and “the lesson he learned, at its simplest, was that it was wrong to be like Freddy: Fred [Sr.] didn’t respect his oldest son, so neither would Donald.”
Mary Trump says that their father, a New York City real estate mogul, “destroyed” Donald by stunting his “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,” she writes.
However, Fred Sr.’s expectations were more than lofty. “Softness was unthinkable,” Mary says. Whenever Fred Jr. apologised for any errors, his father grew furious. “Fred [Sr.] wanted his oldest son to be a ‘killer.’” While not meant to be interpreted literally, per se, the “killer” attitude that Fred Sr. tried to instill in his sons explains President Trump’s unapologetic and aggressive demeanor.
When Fred Jr. passed away from illness stemming from his chronic alcoholism in 1981, their father turned to Donald, and “when things turned south in the late 1980s, Fred [Sr.] could no longer separate himself from his son’s brutal ineptitude; the father had no choice but to stay invested,” Mary writes.
According to M. Trump, who has a degree in psychology, Fred Sr.’s cutthroat parenting cultivated Donald’s narcissism. “This is far beyond garden-variety narcissism,” she says. “Donald is not simply weak, his ego is a fragile thing that must be bolstered every moment because he knows deep down that he is nothing of what he claims to be.”
In short, Mary Trump persuasively argues that President Donald Trump is a product of his childhood trauma—and that the effects of that trauma have permeated throughout the country during his presidency.
So, how much does this matter? Well, we are all shaped by two things—circumstance and choice. The former we have no control over, but the latter, although not entirely separate from the former, is within our reign of control. When we learn about the impact of our actions, we can no longer blame circumstance. The ball enters our court.
See, justice does not have a one-step, simple, easy how-to guide; its long arc is a continuous effort. The same is true of compassion, of empathy and of just about every other virtue. They have to be cultivated over long periods of time. But watch Trump’s progress—after three whole years in the Presidency—his words and actions speak loudly.
In one of the gravest worldwide emergencies in decades, President Trump’s administration has been thoroughly dishonest and has refused to help those suffering most during the pandemic. He has gone so far as to reject the aid of others. When China offered supplies and insight, for example, senior Trump administration trade official Peter Navarro said that “what we don’t need is some kind of propaganda exercise during a crisis that the actions of the Chinese Communist Party have made far more serious than it otherwise would have been.” Anyone trained in Trumpian rhetoric knows exactly what’s going on there—Trump’s administration cares more about its own political image than the lives of Americans.
But that’s not the most startling demonstration of his callousness. When asked to comment about the United States’ lofty death toll, President Trump responded, “They are dying, that’s true. And you have—it is what it is.” When we should be turning to the White House for wisdom, he tells us that “it is what it is” and raves about ingesting magical drugs. The joke is on us.
“The world’s most dangerous man” has lived through years of trauma, and so I have sympathy for him, but I do not excuse his behavior. Trump is not an evil man because his father made him that way. He is an evil man because he refuses to take a single step towards change.