Out of the four Trump children, only Donald was sent to military school (just before 8th grade) due to his non-stop trouble-making at home and at his fancy private school.
The father was a hard, cold man who told his kids to ‘win, be killers,’ but little Donny seemed to have an extra helping of sociopathy in his makeup.
And, reportedly, Roy Cohn was a major influence on young Donald’s drive to always be the alpha male in the room.
So, probably–as with most people–a combination of nature and nurture account for Donald Trump.
I gotta think #1 is that he’s a narcissist who has a documented history of surrounding himself with yes men and refusing to take responsibility for his failures.
Now he’s "The Most Powerful Man on Earth"and he’s facing the reality that this means he is subject to a lot of criticism, right or wrong, that everyone has a right to do it, and as President, his ability to demand unconditional support with no liabilities is severely limited.
As a business executive, his experience and vision is that of the owner of a privately held family business, not that of a *hired *CEO that can be kicked to the curb if he embarasses the Board or makes the stock tank. It’s the latter type of exec who I’d rather try to “run the government like a business”.
Also Trump as public figure over the decades faced the scorn of two different sociocultural elites – Old Money and the Culturally Hip – considering him to be beneath them and denying him his due . Through life he must have early on become aware he could not buy real respect and admiration but just the fake veneer thereof that comes because you’ve money and pull, even though he is convinced that he truly is of superior intelligence and natural talent and should naturally be the boss, so therefore those who fail to recognize that are being stupid or contrary for its own sake.
Trump is a bully. This is clear — look at how he treats women, forcing himself on beauty contestants; look at how he treats his contractors; look at how he insults other people. Most bullies are forced to grow up, but Trump was insulated from such needs by his huge wealth.
Many criminals, especially con-men, behave as bullies. Successful businessmen often have some degree of bulliness. If you can get away with it, being a bully provides a path to financial gain. Sociopathy and bulliness are similar — I’m not sure what the exact difference is, or which more accurately describes Trump.
Some of us get more curmudgeonly with age. Trump may have been less blatant of an asshole when he was younger.
There may be many hundreds of thousands of Americans as obnoxious as Trump; many of them would be even less suited for the Presidency. The relevant question is not How did Trump come into being?, but How could we elect such a man? How could GOP party leaders have supported his election?
My college class had a lot of people from the higher economic classes. There were two distinct groups: one of them was sensible people who knew money does not grow in trees, had used as one of their filters for majors “what kind of skills will my family’s business need”, and were perfectly happy to make friends with people from any socioeconomic layer and to use their money to help others if and when it was needed and accepted. The second group had never changed the roll of toilet paper, did not in fact know where the toilet paper was stocked in their multiple homes or how did it miraculously appear in place, viewed anybody in a lower socioeconomic class as “unworthy minions” and were generally a bunch of jerkfaces who could never understand why the first group refused to befriend them.
I’ve also read the opposite, that FDR came from a family which had a tradition of attending to the less fortunate, and that he had already done so before he contracted whatever the actual disease was that took away his ability to walk unaided (apparently it was never actually diagnosed and confirmed as polio).
As for why Trump is what he is, I wont guess exclusively “nurture” explanations, because I’ve by now had so many experiences that proved to me that some people are just plain born that way.
When an entire family behaves a given way, it’s tough to tell what’s nature and what’s nurture. But since we’ve seen that many identical twins, separated at birth, ended up behaving identically despite very different adoptive families; and that plenty of siblings of serial killers and other mistakes of existence are not remotely defective, I suspect that at least SOME of what makes Trump Trump, is biological.
Empathy, and emotional sensitivity, does require a different blood chemistry than callousness does.
By the way, don’t be fooled by any seeming introspective story Trump may tell. He has repeatedly shown that he is prone to “taking a trip” on an idea, and making things up to follow the romance, or poignancy or other appeal of the tale he has started to weave, and then added more and more on to it to appeal to his audience of the moment.
In this way, he very much resembles someone with psychological disorders such as Borderline Personality Disorder. People like that don’t so much lie in order to follow an insidious clever plan, they lie because they can’t tell the difference between lies about themselves, and actual self-discovery. Sufferers of such conditions can turn the memory of a childhood spanking into a bizarre sexual assault by a family member, or change an actual assault by them of someone else, into a caring act of teaching.
He has spent his entire life without ever having to hear the word “no”, never been told “no, you can’t do that”, never having to face the slightest consequence of any action he has ever taken. He is like a child raised by wolves, unable to operate within the construct of societal norms. He is always the one to whom rules don’t apply. He’s a sad piece of shit, really. One can only hope that someday he realizes what an evil, twisted sociopath he is.
Dunno, his old man sounds like a controlling prick. Most likely had a lot of pressure on that nerve until the patriarch passed. After that, the monsters came out to play. And there was nobody to stop them. Greed and pride are always hungry.
I see him as the epitome of a spoiled, narcissistic, “holier-than-thou”, smug, baby boomer - regardless of being a democrat or running as a republican.
