“His style as a leader is to have to be a tough guy,” Rep. Peter T. King of New York, one of the president’s allies, said in an interview. “You cannot show any kind of weakness. He doesn’t want to show that this is getting the best out of him. “
Mr. Trump has exhibited this behavior his entire life, friends and family say. They learned it, they say, at home, particularly from his father, a disciplinarian who spent hundreds of millions of dollars to finance his son’s career and taught him to dominate or submit. In Fred Trump’s world, showing sadness or pain was a sign of weakness.
“The only thing that Trump cared about was that he had this: ‘I have to win. Teach me how to win,'” George White, a former classmate of Mr. Trump at the New York Military Academy who spent years, said in an interview. close to father and son.
Recalling Fred’s harsh influence, White said that Trump’s former school mentor, a WWII combat veteran named Theodore Dobias, once told him that “he had never seen a cadet whose father was tougher on him That his father”. about Donald Trump. “Fred Trump would visit almost every weekend to watch his son, White said.
Trump’s father is still part of his life, said Andrew Stein, a former Manhattan county president who has known him for decades and has regularly met with him at the White House. Mr. Trump said, he often pointed to the ceiling and referred to his father when they were alone in the Oval Office. “He will look up at the sky and say, ‘Fred, can you believe this?'” Stein said.
This article is based on interviews with more than 20 friends, political allies, administration members, family members, and current and former Trump employees.
Fred Trump’s dominant relationship with his children, and how that shaped his second child, is now the central animating force of the best-seller “Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the Most Dangerous Man in the World” by Mrs. Trump, clinical psychologist and Mr. Trump’s only niece.
