Personally I’m curious as to why Clothahump appears to be so intimately familiar with the sounds made by dogs with penis injuries.
That’s similar to when Errol Morris interviewed him and he talked about how Citizen Kane was his favorite movie because he identified so much with Kane, mistakenly thinking that Kane was meant to be the hero of that movie.
Trump?
Bully. Egomaniac. self-publicist. Micro-manager. Bad client. Attempted stiffer of contractors.
I’m going to go out on a limb and say achieving success and and being able to get what he wants have contributed the largest portion of why he is how he is. The Donald Trump I heard about 30 something years ago seems to have pretty much the same personality as the President Trump I see today. For forty years he he gotten what he wants far more and to a much greater degree than most people. There is little he has not been able to achieve - supermodel wives, fame, respect, a loyal and apparently loving family, loyal friends, ivy league education, and finally Leader of the Free World. The world has truly been his oyster. Probably half the world never gets any of these things their entire life, living dying struggling in pathetic obscurity.
This may sound like an endorsement for Trump, but it is not. It’s just a statement of fact. I think a world where his behavior isn’t rewarded by success would be preferable - but that’s not the world we live in.
I think that some of the comments here have touched on it already but I’ll add my thoughts.
The first factor is probably how he was raised by his father. His father, from what I’ve read, was a brutally competitive man and expected his children to be so as well. In this way, Fred Trump is kinda like Joe Kennedy Sr., who is legendary for having done the same thing with the Kennedy clan, all of whom were brutally competitive with one another.
But that’s where the similarities end and I suspect part of that is attributable to differences in their spiritual makeup. The Kennedys were Roman Catholics and as such believed that while it was certainly good to compete with and try to dominate people, compassion was also emphasized. Not so apparently with the Trumps. Fred Trump was apparently merciless and relentlessly rewarded the sons for success and beat them down into submission when they failed. In that environment, when the reward for success is failure and the punishment is harsh criticism, people can crack. Donald’s older brother cracked so badly that he became an alcoholic and killed himself iwth the bottle. Donald himself actually learned to survive in that harsh environment, but what cracked was his soul and his sense of compassion and empathy for others.
I think for sure Fred Trump played a major, major part in this. But I think one factor that’s yet to be mentioned is how New York high society is a petty, venal place and relentlessly ostracized Trump in ways that were incredibly psychologically damaging.
It was clear from very early on that one of the things Trump craved the most was to be accepted by the city’s elite as one of them. Unfortunately, in the high school lunch drama world of New York, the best way to guarantee you would never be accepted is to act like you desperately want to be accepted.
In many ways, Trump is like the nerd kid in High School who was bullied by the cool kids and vowed to show them up by becoming more powerful than them. Working in tech startups, you meet a lot of those types of people and they tend to be some of the most driven and motivated people around. Some of them eventually mature out of that phase and use that drive for good but some never get out of that high school mentality and they eventually become warped, bitter people. I see a lot of the same drive in Trump.
You’re giving him too much credit. Don never got out of grade school mentality.
Well, orange (not an Ethiopian Muslim Communist black guy).
Huh. I’d expect supervillain backstories should go in Cafe Society.
Don’t compare Trump with Luthor. I’ve met Luthor, and Trump’s no Luthor.
Luthor knows which wine to drink with his after dinner cheese, for one thing.
Yep, absolutely, and I wanted to get to that but ran out of time. Trump was from Queens, but it was Manhattan that really got seared into memory. Trump on the one hand felt that Manhattan was both too good for him and too sleazy and shitty all at the same time. Trump was never taken seriously by New York cosmopolitans who clearly had more intellect than he. So I think that this is why, despite being a billionaire, he prefers the company of truck drivers and coal miners because he relates to their feelings of being shunned by high society. On the other hand, he also recalls when Manhattan and much of New York was overrun with poverty and there was high crime in minority communities. So Trump sees all of his America in his New York experiences but they’re not the experiences that are typical of most New York politicians who make it to the national stage.
But I think it all goes back to Trump’s early days in his household. In the Trump household, losers got no love and affection, only the winners. There was no father to come along and say “Hey man, you tried your best. We’ll get him next time.” There was only disappointment and shame if you failed. When someone grows up fearing the loss of affection from parents and other important figures, that breeds a tremendous amount of insecurity which people end up dealing with in different ways. Donald’s older brother dealt with it by accepting that he was a nobody and drinking himself to death. Donald avoided alcohol but instead thrust himself into his businesses. But Donald learned that he had to win, no matter the cost. The idea of losing, the idea of coming home to a disappointed father figure and losing the respect of his family and not being good enough terrified him into becoming what he is today. Donald Trump is brutally competitive because winning is essential to his survival. It defines him. He told himself along time ago that he must never allow himself to lose – so great is his desire to win that even when he might lose he tells himself that he’s won. He can’t lose. He can’t have other people laugh at him and call him a failure at something.
Related to that, he can’t feel empathy for losers. He’s like a reptile or an animal in the wild. He has to be at the top of the food chain and everyone else is prey – everyone. He cannot allow himself for a moment to feel empathy for anyone he’s offended or worse. He cannot function the way he does and have a conscience.
Also, better hair.
Welcome to the Straight Dope Message Board,** U900**!
You didn’t make a good first impression with that post, but maybe you can turn it around.
There’s also that paradox of his father making failure the worst thing in the world while also coddling him so much that he never got a chance to fail. Every time he was on the verge of failing something, his father would step in and use the money to bail him out. It’s a vindictive, controlling thing to do and one you see in a certain type of rich family that severely fucks you up psychologically.
If anybody watches Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, the relationship Nathaniel has with his father reminds me a lot of Donald’s relationship with Fred Trump.
Trump is Dame Edna’s son?
Yes, I suspect there’s a lot of truth in this as well.
But I get the feeling that, the way Donald sees it, he’s the lion cub that survived; his brother didn’t, couldn’t. I think Donald Trump sees the world as a jungle in which there are predators and prey, and having grown up around upper-middle class and having gone to school with classmates whose families were downright wealthy, I’ve seen this in other crusty, upper class families. White male children, usually the product of successful, brutally competitive white male fathers who kind seem kind on the surface but have a mean streak and bestow upon their children a strong sense of entitlement. There’s a strong belief among people in these circles that they are somehow extraordinary, different from the rest of society. They have what it takes to succeed - maybe a gift given to them by God or something. It’s a bit of a different view of themselves than what you might find in a caste society like India or even Old Europe – American WASPS believe that they “earned” their wealth through bootstrapping and bust-ass work and from divine providence above. This is what simultaneously gives them a jaundiced view of people who, in their view, can’t cut it in society. They believe they didn’t work hard enough, weren’t smart enough, weren’t whatever enough. And it’s not the job of the wealthy to save them. It’s a jungle out there and if you can’t survive in it, then that’s just tough shit. It’s just part of the natural world, or all part of God’s plan anyway.
Remember, he was just as rabid about GWB. Fucking hypocrite if there ever was one.
No, I still see a large number of idiotic posts, much like the one quoted above.
Cite? Please post proof that Trump is a rapist.