He got lucky. In the 90s he met a group of corrupt Russians who needed an ignorant patsy

just as badly as he needed their laundered money. Otherwise, he'd be living beneath a freeway overpass.

The rest is history.

Also, running as an angry populist if what you do if you if you're the opposite of a mastermind. Look at history's tyrants.

I hate to be so cynical, but some of these governors, I suspect, appreciate

when citizens die because they think of citizens in terms of what they cost the state. They see social security checks, medicaid payments, food stamps and pensions, jail cell space, reduced crowding in prisons, the homeless problem. Especially when members of marginalized communities perish.

I'm not an expert on the Trumps but I've read a little bit about it.

Most of the psychiatric profiles I've read agree with the first part, that Fred Sr. tried to groom Fred Jr but that Fred Jr had his own aspirations separate and apart from what his father planned for him, and that he was squeezed out as Fred Sr set his sights on Donald, who was willing and didn't want to be subjected to the treatment his older brother received from their father. It's a very tough thing to go against your father and live with constant rejection from the dominant male influence in your life, which undoubtedly contributed to his alcoholism.

You might be getting a little bit ahead of yourself by accusing Mary Trump of omitting this, since your theory is by your own admission a hypothesis, and it's one that other books by psychiatrists on this subject (The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, Dangerous Charisma and likely the longer biographies) don't really back up. That's kind of a tough charge to make when the evidence so far is that she's brutally honest and experiencing great discomfort and assuming great personal risk by coming forward. Of course new facts could come out that could change that.

I'll be reading her book this weekend and maybe there will be additional clues.

But what you are saying is interesting conjecture.

That family dynamic was set in stone by Fred Sr. Donald Trump didn't actually have to do anything to Fred Jr. except to fall in line with his father for Fred Jr. to experience the interpersonal catastrophe that followed once he distanced himself from his father. One brother resisted the father; the other brother did not.

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New York Times Book Reviews
Jennifer Szalai
July 16, 2020, 5:00 a.m. ET

Book:

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"This is our wartime president today": Anderson Cooper incinerates Trump in opening monologue

Wonderful news.

I've ordered her book, but it might be worthwhile to hear her narrate her own work.

This is a great anecdote. Thanks for sharing.

The authors of The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump theorized that it's Trump's unwillingness to experience emotions like humiliation and shame that led to his aberrant character development. So I find this fascinating.

What gets lost in the discussion of Trump's narcissism and psychopathology is that he also has a

lot of traits of Borderline Personality Disorder, like (as you are pointing out) building people up until they receive more attention, acclaim or respect than he receives, or realizing they are smarter than he is, and then proceeding to tear them down. Tillerson, Mattis, Kelly, Gary Cohn, Cohen, Scaramucci, Bannon, Sessions, Omarosa, etc...

I've been saying, The only thing more dangerous than being Trump's opponent is

being one of his supporters. By November, MAGAts are going to wish they'd never heard of Trump.

So unbelievable. Is THIS what Trump is paying Brad Parscale the big bucks for?

Brad "Death Star"/"We're just getting warmed up" Parscale in action.



Desperate hours.

I'm grateful for every single one of these books.

Now, we're getting to the pulp. Dr. Lance Dodes always said that Trump's personality was fixed at an extremely young age. Yes, this is territory already covered by Dr. Bandy Lee and the other authors of The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump and a handful of other books, but considering the source this book will be more than simply validation of what is obvious to 70% of Americans.