General Discussion

The trouble with Donald had started long before he entered school. At home, he tormented his little brother, Robert, a year and a half younger, and seemed to have nothing but disdain for everybody else, including, and perhaps especially, his mother. The kids in the neighborhood alternately despised and feared him; he had a reputation for being a thin-skinned bully who beat up on younger kids but ran home in a fit of rage as soon as somebody stood up to him.

Nobody liked Donald when he was growing up, not even his parents. As he got older, those personality traits hardened, the hostile indifference and aggressive disrespect that he’d developed as a toddler to help him withstand the neglect he suffered at his parents’ hands—from his mother because she was seriously ill and psychologically unstable, and from his father because, as a sociopath, he had no interest in his children outside of Freddy, who, at least initially, was being groomed to take over his empire. Even so, the interest wasn’t love—Fred Trump was incapable of loving anybody.

Donald’s reputation at school also preceded me. By second grade he was already known as a troublemaker who contradicted his teachers and resorted to physical violence when he didn’t get his way. He treated students who were smaller and weaker than he was, and his teachers, with the same contempt with which he treated his family. After he finished seventh grade, despite my grandfather’s place on the board, the school administrators made it clear that other accommodations had to be made for Fred’s obnoxious middle son.

Instead of fixing the problem, moving Donald to another school only transferred it elsewhere. At the time my father was mystified by the fact that Fred couldn’t control Donald, but I suspect my grandfather didn’t want to waste his time trying. He was happy to delegate the responsibility to the staff at New York Military Academy, a boarding school in central New York State that was essentially a rich kids’ alternative to reform school. Everybody in the family, especially his mother, was relieved when Donald was sent away.