After reading Mary Trump's book
His emotional maturity seems to have peaked when was in his Terrible Twos, and he’s been stuck there ever since. When he was two years old his mother gave birth to the last child, a boy, in the family. Not too long after that his 12 or 13 year old oldest sister, Maryanne, found their mother on the bathroom floor hemorrhaging badly.
Old man Fred told his daughter to take care of the kids, five of them including herself, and continued his long days working days without thinking much about the children. Mary, the mother was in bed for a long time so Maryanne took care of the children in the way a mother has to. Mary also suffered ill health throughout her life and was rarely available. Anyone who is a mother will understand that this setup is completely untenable.
So a 13 year old girl was stuck with a two year old toddler, a baby, and her younger brother and sister who at least were all old enough not to need so much attention.
Donald Trump’s most basic emotional needs were never addressed by his parents. This arrested his emotional growth.
There is much more to say about the lack of good attention and the excess of bad attention that Fred Trump gave his children. He was a singularly detrimental person in anyone’s life, and especially in his children’s lives. None of them ever had a chance at having a normal childhood.
Donald Trump’s behavior makes sense when you realize he’s forever stuck emotionally in the worst part of an infants life. The Terrible Twos. For me that makes complete sense. Now that I read about how it happened it’s very obvious to me. It’s made me realize our expectations were based on behavior that has to do with what his abilities should be for a grownup. His behavior is that of a two year old toddler throwing tantrums, severing doll heads off their bodies and breaking toys in fits of rage when thwarted in the least bit. No one helped him grow up and now he’s just a monster. A true product of his father’s own monstrous inhumanity.
I could move on to describe more but it would be too long to post. I just feel Mary Trump nailed it as to what caused what he became on a psychological level and I wanted to share it if anyone is interested.
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No one stopped him from being a brat and to add to the problem his father encouraged him as he got older and acted out against others. His father saw Freddie, his older son as being weak because he was a nice person, and he saw Donald as being strong for being nasty and a bully. His father liked the way Trump treated others because his father did the same thing, which means that Donald would never get help. In that family the father was in charge of the boys and the mother of the girls. Women had a restricted place and role.
I think you were very brave and determined, and smart to get help. It had to have been very difficult. 
In my early life in a dysfunctional family I remember very clearly the moment I swore to myself that I would never be like my parents. I was between six and eight years old. It was a conscious decision, which yours was too. Free will and choice are always available even if you don’t understand it too well as a child.
rewarded by his father for being an evil, lying, cheating psychopath and he's still trying to please the man even though he has been dead for years, so for him to soften up or try to change his ways would be like rejecting his own father.
Thank you for your kind words! Like most people, I ended up getting help because I was in so much pain I needed someone to help me through it. It took some time, but it was worth it. I am glad you had the foresight at an early age to see that you didn't want to repeat the patterns of your parents and made a conscious decision to take a different path. 
You knew your head was a mess and rather than just go into denial you reached out for someone to fix it. Most people never even get to the level of knowing they have to get help. Their messed up lives are normalized.
That is incredibly precocious insight, lunatica. Moments of clarity like that are so liberating, whenever we get them. I meditate to move in that direction.
Sorry for your suffering, glad for your wisdom.
It’s almost always a blend of nature and nurture.
I read a long time ago that most people who are abused as children do not grow up to be abusers of children, but many, maybe most?, child abusers were abused. Not sure to what extent that applies to psychopathy, though.
ISTM that Trump had the worst genetic inheritance from his father (low natural empathy?), a serious lack of intellectual ability and a rotten family life.
My empathy genes are too worn out by his chaos and criminality to care a lot about his rotten childhood...poor little rich boy. 
We have conscious choice. Some more conscious that others, but still. In his case, taking care of himself is all that matters. Not a good psych profile for anyone in a position of responsibility, let alone POTUS. It has become devastating that so many are so uninformed. Teachers should be paid more, therapy should be available to everyone, and propaganda shouldn’t be permitted to masquerade as news, that’d be a start.
You’ve gone through a heroic struggle, and your posts here are always thought provoking or otherwise interesting... glad you made it out ok.
I appreciate it!
You’re amazing. I’m always impressed by your intelligence and your observations. You have been amazing in your life!
agreed to fill in as an emergency after-school babysitter for a boy with serious attention deficit problems, and god knows what else. Friends had consulted friends until someone agreed to help.
It was extremely trying, much more than I would have guessed. We didn't have internet groups to consult for help in this days, but I dug in and did my ignorant best for him, basically just giving him the constant attention he insisted on from me because I was never able to distract him to play for more than a couple minutes at most. Cuddling didn't work, he couldn't hold still either. Our daughter spent the two weeks at a friend's house with my blessing. His mother begged me to become his permanent sitter, and I felt terrible for her, having experienced just some of her reality, but it was completely out of the question. I felt nothing but relief each day when he finally left and we got our life back again until the next.
With that memory, I find it easy to suspect that, even if Donnie wasn't a fraction as bad, he may well have developed no rewarding relationships with anyone who wasn't specifically hired to care for him. And maybe not any of those.
punished for and a lot of how he learned to please his father came from that.
I was once chatting with a pair of psychologists for Santa Monica who counseled people who were really screwed up and often homeless. I mentioned that my mom had had mental problems and we'd lived on the street a lot, including in Santa Monica, and they started me by immediately saying simultaneously, seemingly out of left field, "But she didn't criticize you, did she"? Huh? But they leaped to that specific assumption because I was in a business suit, working and functional, instead of one of their patients. And the answer, as they expected, was no. She was almost completely lacking in ability to actually raise a child, but she wasn't unkind and was never mean to me.
A pattern of cruelly critical parenting is something they seemingly found in a good many of those who were remained damaged and dysfunctional years into adulthood, and of course Fred and Donald, and probably Mary, seemingly fit that pattern.
Which brings my thoughts around to what's happening in too many homes these days. Time to pull out my novel set in Greece in the 1950s. There are a couple dead people who hadn't left the war behind yet, but they needed killing.
on point, but I once read a housekeeper said that when the grown-up The Donald finished with anything he dropped it on the floor to be picked up. A contemptuous and contemptible attitude, of course, but acted out excessively toward domestic employees.
It does remind me of people I've known whose lives at some point (but not when I knew them 
) were spent with great, carefully maintained class differences between their very wealthy families and domestics. One who'd been a child in a pre-revolution Cuban family, but worked with me in insurance, often longed openly for a return to the days when she'd always use 5 towels for her daily bath and drop them on the floor for the servants to take off to be washed. Enough to make me start praising Castro.
