Understanding Trump better

NY Post - Two “extreme” parenting styles have been linked to children becoming criminal psychopaths in later life, a study has revealed.

The Norwegian University of Science and Technology interviewed high-security prisoners and found many have a history of either total parental neglect, or rigidly controlling, authoritarian parents.

A psychopath is a person who suffers from a chronic mental disorder with abnormal or violent social behavior.

They are defined by their lack of empathy and have a tendency to manipulate people without any guilt.

The startling research found that all criminal psychopaths studied also had a history of grotesque physical and/or psychological abuse during childhood.

Study author Dr. Aina Gullhaugen commented: “Without exception, these people have been injured in the company of their caregivers.

“And many of the descriptions made it clear that their later ruthlessness was an attempt to address this damage, but in an inappropriate or bad way.”

“Either they lived in a situation where no one cared, where the child is subjected to total control and must be submissive, or the child has been subjected to a neglectful parenting style.”

Parents cannot be blamed for everything, and there are many children who have awful upbringings and don’t go on to become criminal psychopaths.

Michael D’Antonio, Politico, 2016 - Fred Trump was a fiercely ambitious man who worked seven days a week and devoted few waking hours to his role as a parent. Although he pushed his son Donald to prevail in every arena—to be a "killer" and a "king"—Fred didn’t actually tell the young man how to achieve this destiny. His way of paying attention to his children was to let them watch him at work. As Donald Trump told me in an interview for the biography I was writing about him, he was expected to learn things “by osmosis.” One such lesson came when Donald was seven years old, and his father was brought before a U.S. Senate committee investigating abuses in a housing program for war veterans and middle class families. President Eisenhower had been outraged to learn of the bribes that developers paid to bureaucrats and of the alleged profiteering practiced by Trump and others. Ike called them “sons of bitches.”

What is the source of the need that motivates Trump? In his life story, the most plausible explanation is his stern, demanding, and ultimately rejecting father. As Donald Trump told me, his father Fred was “very tough” and “very difficult” and someone who “would never let anything go.” He was also the man who all but banished his son when he was barely twelve years old,,,

While Fred Trump was busy scheming and manipulating, his son developed into a bullying and out-of-control little boy. As Donald recalled to me, he loved to fight—“all kinds of fights, even physical”—and the teachers and administrators at the private school he attended in Queens, New York, couldn’t manage him. The situation was quite embarrassing to Donald’s father, who was a major benefactor for the school. In exasperation, he abruptly removed his son from the family home, which was a mansion attended by servants, and handed him over to the New York Military Academy in Upstate New York. Upon arrival, twelve-year-old Donald was put into uniform and assigned a tiny cell-like room. In the days, weeks and years to come he would have to cope with an all-male culture of competition and hierarchy where physical abuse, carried out by the students and the adults who supervised them, was part of the routine

In his years as a NYMA cadet, Trump found a new role model and substitute father in a combat veteran of World War II named Theodore Dobias. Sergeant Dobias had fought in some of the bloodiest battles in Italy and seen Mussolini’s body swinging from a rope. He was, in Trump’s telling, a rough and occasionally demanding man. “In those days they’d smack the hell out of you. It was not like today where you smack somebody and you go to jail,” he said. “He [Dobias] could be a fucking prick. He absolutely would rough you up. You had to learn to survive.” Trump recalled that when he responded to an order from Dobias with a look that said, “‘Give me a fucking break,’ he came after me like you wouldn’t believe.”

Like many children who are abused by their caretakers, Trump came to identify with the drill sergeant Dobias. He was especially drawn to the sergeant’s way of coaching the baseball team. (Trump was a star player.) With a nod to football legend Vince Lombardi, Dobias told his boys that “winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.” He put the Lombardi motto on the wall of the locker room.