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As usual with Donald, the story mattered more than the truth, which was easily sacrificed, especially if a lie made the story sound better.
To this day, the lies, misrepresentations, and fabrications that are the sum total of who my uncle is are perpetuated by the Republican Party and white evangelical Christians. People who know better, such as Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell; true believers, such as Representative Kevin McCarthy, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and Attorney General William Barr; and others too numerous to name, have become, unwittingly
Friedrich, born in Kallstadt, a small village in western Germany, left for the United States when he turned eighteen in 1885 in order to avoid mandatory military service.
When Fred was twenty-five years old, he attended a dance where he met Mary Anne MacLeod, recently arrived from Scotland.
In early May 1930, in a classic example of “chain migration,” Mary boarded the RMS Transylvania in order to join two of her sisters who had already settled in the United States. Despite her status as a domestic servant, as a white Anglo-Saxon, Mary would have been allowed into the country even under her son’s draconian new immigration rules
Financial worth was the same as self-worth, monetary value was human value. The more Fred Trump had, the better he was. If he gave something to someone else, that person would be worth more and he less. He would pass that attitude on to Donald in spades.
A large minority of people still confuse his arrogance for strength, his false bravado for accomplishment, and his superficial interest in them for charisma.
Nobody sent their sons to NYMA for a better education, and Donald understood it rightly as a punishment.
For Fred, who had no use for military service, it was a waste of his employee’s time.
he had the bully’s unerring instinct for finding
the most effective way to undermine an adversary.
The banks admonished him for betraying their agreement, but they never took any action against him, which just reinforced his belief that he could do whatever he wanted, as he almost always had.
Donald fully believed that whatever was happening to him was the result of the economy, the poor treatment he received from the banks, and bad luck. Nothing was ever fair to him. That struck a chord in Fred,
Fred had known all along what games Donald was playing, because he’d taught Donald how to play them. Working the refs, lying, cheating—as far as Fred was
concerned, those were all legitimate business tactics.
no matter what happens, no matter how much damage he leaves in his wake, he will be okay.
I watched in real time as Donald shredded norms, endangered alliances, and trod upon the vulnerable. The only thing about it that surprised me was the increasing number of people willing to enable him.
Donald today is much as he was at three years old: incapable of growing, learning, or evolving, unable to regulate his emotions, moderate his responses, or take in and synthesize information.
The idea that his tactics were legitimate calculations instead of unethical cons was yet another aspect of the myth that he and my grandfather had been constructing for decades.
The people with access to him are weaker than Donald is, more
craven, but just as desperate. Their futures are directly dependent on his success and favor. They either fail to see or refuse to believe that their fate will be the same as that of anyone who pledged loyalty to him in the past.
the government as it is currently constituted, including the executive branch, half of Congress, and the majority of the Supreme Court, is entirely in the service of protecting Donald’s ego; that has become almost its entire purpose.
he would have kept doing it anyway, because lying, playing to the lowest common denominator, cheating, and sowing division are all he knows.
reveals Donald as a petty, pathetic little man—ignorant, incapable, out of his depth, and lost in his own delusional spin.
If he can in any way profit from your death, he’ll facilitate it, and then he’ll ignore the fact that you died.
COVID19, we’re living the nightmare of this truth
his father and Freddy. Perhaps most crucially, for Donald there is no value in empathy, no tangible upside to caring for other people.
David Corn wrote, “Everything is transactional for this poor broken human being. Everything.” It is an epic tragedy of parental failure that my uncle does not understand that he or anybody else has intrinsic worth.
he is and always will be a terrified little boy.
