Making the man: to understand Trump, look at his relationship with his dad

The art of understanding The Donald is in demand right now. His relationship with his father helped shape him – but they’re not as alike as you’d think


The art of understanding Donald Trump is much in demand right now. What is his appeal? Why does he talk in that very recognizable cadence? What is his relationship with truth, exactly? And how does he manage to spout out such gibberish – especially in front of the editorial board of the Washington Post – and get away with it?

There are many possible angles of attack. We get op-eds about his alleged similarities with Hitler, about the era of Republican decadence, about how the media gives him too much attention. But one angle that largely goes unexamined is the place even the dimmest of therapists would start: his dad. And of course, there’s more to heredity than money. For example, there’s hair.

Everyone agrees that Frederick Christ Trump (the biblical middle name came from his mother’s family) was a more retiring sort than his son, Donald. But he was not immune to the siren song of hair dye. According to Gwenda Blair’s book The Trumps: Three Generations of Builders and a Presidential Candidate, he was, late in life, particularly fond of a shade of red that bore a hint of magenta. Photographs also reveal that Fred liked to wear his hair a little longer than the average man, combed up into a smooth wave away from the head. Stop me if this starts sounding familiar.

And then there’s the myth of the self-made man. In his autobiography, The Art of the Deal, Donald claims that he learned a strong work ethic from his father. “I never threw money around,” he also wrote with a straight face in those innocent days before his first bankruptcy, and before the Apprentice let America get a view of the inside of his apartment. “I learned from my father that every penny counts, because before too long your pennies turn into dollars.”

That sounds nice. Unfortunately, The Art of the Deal is a difficult book to trust, not least because it contains at least one giant whopper with respect to Fred: it claims that the Trumps were of Swedish ancestry, when in fact they were German. As the world knows now, courtesy of John Oliver, the family’s original name was Drumpf and Fred even spoke German. But he, too, worked to conceal this, in part because at the height of his working life it wasn’t such a good idea to be a German in America. In the late 1940s and 1950s, it gave off entirely the wrong impression.

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http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/mar/26/donald-trump-fred-trump-father-relationship-business-real-estate-art-of-deal