A tell-all book by President Trump’s niece (Mary Trump, who is also a Clinical Psychologist) describes a family riven by a series of traumas, exacerbated by a daunting patriarch who “destroyed” Donald Trump by short-circuiting his “ability to develop and experience the entire spectrum of human emotion”...“President Trump’s view of the world was shaped by his desire during childhood to avoid his father’s disapproval…”
Mary’s father, Fred Jr., — the president’s older brother — died of an alcohol-related illness when she was 16 years old in 1981. President Trump told The Washington Post last year that he and his father both pushed Fred Jr. to try to go into the family business, which Trump said he now regrets.
Donald escaped his father’s scorn and ridicule because “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.”
(Our t rump, Mary wrote) “is a product of his domineering father and (Donald) was acutely aware of avoiding the scorn that (his father, Fred Sr,) heaped on (Donald’s) older brother, called Freddy (Jr).”
“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.”
Mary Trump wrote that her grandfather’s children routinely lied to him but for different reasons. For her father (Fred, Jr), “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.”
For her uncle Donald, however, “lying was primarily a mode of self-aggrandizement meant to convince other people he was better than he actually was,” Trump writes.
“Fred [Sr.] hated it when his oldest son screwed up or failed to intuit what was required of him, but he hated it even more then, after being taken to task, Freddy [Fred Jr.] apologized. ‘Sorry, Dad,’” Mary wrote of the way her grandfather treated her father, known as Freddy. Fred Sr. “would mock him. Fred wanted his oldest son to be a ‘killer.’”
Donald, seven-and-a-half years younger than his brother, “had plenty of time to learn from watching Fred humiliate” his eldest son, Mary Trump wrote.
“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.”
So long story short, Freddy, Jr dreamed of becoming an airline pilot. He was cajoled by Fred Sr and his lil bro the t rump into abandoning that in order to go into the family real estate business. Freddy does and eventually drinks himself to death.
Anyway, sounds like LYING was a full time way of surviving and thriving in that family.
