Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America

by Maggie Haberman

With Fred’s death came the eventual carving up of his estate by his children and the squeezing out of Freddie’s kids, Mary and Fred III, by Fred Trump’s surviving children. When Freddie’s children went to court to argue for a greater share of the estate, Donald and his siblings cut off medical funding for Fred III’s son, William, who had cerebral palsy. Donald Trump and his siblings would later be accused of misrepresenting how much the estate was worth during that court fight, which had paved the way for a toxic family dispute that haunted Trump nearly two decades later.

As Trump amply demonstrated with irreversible separations of children from their mothers as part of his immigration policies, cruelty flows effortlessly from him.

Trump rarely sounded as comfortable as he did in the New York studio of bawdy shock jock Howard Stern, sometimes bringing along his children Ivanka and Don Jr. to join him on air as they became more active on The Apprentice. In one exchange, Trump raised no objections when Stern referred to Ivanka Trump as a “piece of ass.” To Stern, Trump talked about how much he loved sex, the number of partners he had at a single time, the way he liked to wander backstage at his beauty pageants while the contestants were getting dressed. “You see these incredible looking women, and so, I sort of get away with things like that,” he said of his behavior at the pageants.

Evangelical Christians found away to support their orange-hued golden calf no matter how despicable or egregious the behavior.

Trump had set his own rules for seeking the presidency, treating the perceived obligations of a candidate as a menu from which he could choose. He had skipped a candidate debate and generally avoided the retail politicking of touring small businesses and marching in parades. (The New Hampshire diner visit I had witnessed in 2011 turned out to be a rarity over

Trump knew that he was being told something he did not fully comprehend, and instead of acknowledging that, he shouted down the teachers.

Like a monkey throwing poop at the passerby patrons at a zoo.

Ultimately, thousands of children were separated from adults in the span of a month between May and June, typically one of the higher months for border crossings. Hundreds would remain separated from their parents for years, incurring incalculable psychological damage.

Evangelical Christians found away to support their orange-hued golden calf no matter how despicable or egregious the behavior.

As the pandemic wore on, Trump consistently lagged Biden, only briefly rising above 45 percent in poll averages during the early pandemic weeks before he began participating in daily Coronavirus Task Force briefings. (At no point during Trump’s presidency did a majority of Americans approve of the job he was doing,

And yet, most Republicans bought the Big Lie, without evidence, without a single win in the courts, without a single audit, many of them self-serving, to support it.

The occasion was the nomination of Trump’s third appointee to the Supreme Court, the young federal appeals judge Amy Coney Barrett. She replaced liberal Ruth Bader Ginsburg, an eighty-seven-year-old who had been in and out of hospitals for much of Trump’s term before succumbing to cancer. For weeks, when the subject of Supreme Court justices came up in meetings, Trump would clasp his hands together and look skyward, “Please God. Please watch over her. Every life is precious.” Then, almost winking, he would quickly look at his aides and say, “How’s she doing?” When another visitor came to the Oval Office, Trump asked, “She gonna make it? How much longer you think she has?”

Trump is a sociopath.