Fw: Analysis of the big man by Lucas Bean
John Churchilly
In 2020, Donald Trump's own niece, a clinical psychologist “Mary Trump” , published a book explaining exactly how her uncle became as he is now. Trump sued her for $100 million to stop the book from being published. She published it anyway.
Here are the five childhood factors that shaped Donald Trump individuality
One: The mother who disappeared. Donald Trump was 2 years old when his mother was hospitalized for 6 months following a series of emergency operations. When she came back, she was never really quite the same. Psychologist John Bowlby at the Tavistock Institute in London identified what happens to a child when the primary caregiver disappears during the first two years of life. He called it ‘maternal deprivation’, the complete failure of the attachment bond at the exact moment the brain is learning whether other people can be trusted and whether other people's pain matters.
Bowlby found that children who lose their primary caregiver before age two develop what he called affectionless psychopathy — the permanent inability to feel remorse, the permanent inability to feel empathy, the permanent inability to form genuine emotional bonds with other human beings. Donald Trump was 2 years old. His brain was forming its first understanding of what other people are. And the person who was supposed to show him perception of other people matter simply was not there. Bowlby's Maternal Deprivation Theory The concept was primarily developed by British psychiatrist and psychoanalyst John Bowlby, who proposed that a continuous, warm, and intimate relationship with a mother (or primary caregiver) is essential for healthy psychological development. Key components of Bowlby’s theory include: The Critical Period: Bowlby suggested that the first 2.5 to 5 years of life are critical. If the primary attachment is broken or never formed during this window, the resulting damage was originally considered to be permanent and irreversible. Monotropy: The belief that a child has an innate need to form a primary attachment to one single, special figure (usually the mother).
Mary Trump described her grandmother as ghostly absent for most of Donald's childhood — a woman who attended to her children when it was convenient for her, not when they actually needed her. Mary Trump argues her uncle has never watched another human being suffer and felt anything. Not the disabled reporter, not the separated families at the border, not the people dying without healthcare. The person who was supposed to teach him that other people matter was not there. And nobody else ever filled that gap.
Two: The brother his father disdained. Donald Trump's father had three sons. He chose one to worship, and one to neglect. Donald's older brother, Freddy, was the firstborn. He was kind and sensitive and loved people. Freddy Trump wanted to be a pilot more than anything in the world. His father called Freddy weak every single day. He mocked him at the dinner table in front of the whole family constantly. When Freddy apologized, his father mocked the apology too. He would repeat it back in a sneering way. Freddy was a human being, and his father marginalized him for no apparent reason.
Mary Trump, Freddy's own daughter, documented what happened to her father. She wrote that Trump's father dismantled Freddy by devaluing and degrading every aspect of his personality until all that was left was a man who hated himself and spent every day trying to earn the approval of a father who would never give it. Freddy became an alcoholic. He lost his pilot's license. He ended up doing maintenance work for the family business. While his brother Freddy lay dying in the hospital, Donald went to the movies. He died at 42, broken, invisible, and alone.
Three: The moment Donald chose to become his father. Watching was not enough for Trump's father. Donald did not just observe what happened to his older brother Freddy. He participated. Mary Trump documented that Donald began mocking Freddy alongside his father. He learned to sneer at his brother's sensitivity the same way his father did. He learned to call Freddy weak. He learned to degrade him in front of other people. He chose his father's side completely and permanently.
Anna Freud, one of the most important psychologists of the 20th century, identified the mechanism that produces this exact behavior in 1936. She called it identification with the aggressor. When a child cannot escape an abuser and cannot defeat them, the brain chooses a third option: become the abuser. Adopt their cruelty. Perform the humiliation on the target. Make yourself indistinguishable from the thing that terrifies you so you don't become the target.
Anna Freud found that this is not a completely conscious choice. If you become the aggressor, no one can use the aggressor's tactics against you — but a child pays a price for that safety.
Mary Trump described what it cost Donald in clinical terms. She wrote that Trump's father short-circuited Donald's ability to develop and experience the entire spectrum of human emotion. By limiting Donald's access to his own feelings, his father perverted his son's perception of the world and damaged his ability to live in it. Trump's father did utilized Freddy's fate to cut Donald off from normal feelings. He made Donald the duplicate of what he was.
Mary Trump argues her uncle Donald has not felt genuine empathy for another human being since he was a small child sitting at the dinner table, learning to laugh while his brother was suffering in front of him. Donald loset his humanity feelings because his father took it from him.
Four: Malignant narcissism. In 1964, psychologist and philosopher Erich Fromm identified the most severe personality pathology. He called it malignant narcissism — the combination of four traits that together produce what a human being can become: narcissism, paranoia, antisocial personality, and sadism.
This is not ordinary cruelty. It's cruelty that feeds on itself. Cruelty that needs to escalate. Cruelty that is never satisfied.
Trump has mocked a Gold Star family on national television. He has suggested that a female journalist was bleeding from a facelift. He called a Gold Star widow who had just buried her husband, fumbled her husband's name, and told her he knew what he signed up for. She said it made her cry even worse. In my opinion, those are not political acts. Those are the acts of someone who experiences other people's pain as entertainment.
John Gartner, a psychologist who taught at Johns Hopkins University Medical School for 28 years, applied Fromm's concept of malignant narcissism to Trump specifically. He called it most negative collection of psychiatric symptoms possible in an individual.
In 2017, 27 psychiatrists and mental health experts published a book called The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump. They said their duty is to warn the public to supersede professional neutrality.
Mary Trump, who sat across the dinner table from Donald for decades and holds a PhD in clinical psychology, said he meets all nine DSM criteria for narcissistic personality disorder. She said he will never change. She said the damage was done too early and too completely. She wrote that Donald continues to exist as he was incapable of learning, unable to regulate his emotions or take in new information.
Five: Why he needs the swivet. Trump's presidency has been characterized by daily explosions, constant firings, threats in every direction associated With reversals that make no logic. A government that bounces from crisis to crisis without ever stopping. Mary Trump argues this is not incompetence. He does it because it feels familiar to him. Chaos is the only environment her uncle has ever felt safe in.
Sigmund Freud identified this pattern over a century ago. He called it repetition compulsion — the unconscious drive to recreate the conditions of your original trauma in childhood. Not because you want to suffer, but because his unconscious familiar pain feels safer than unfamiliar calm.
Psychologist Bessel van der Kolk at Boston University spent decades studying how childhood trauma conditions the brain. He found that people who grow up in chaotic households don't just tolerate chaos as adults, but they recreate it. because their existence is in pandemonium.
Donald Trump grew up in a house where his father depredates his family at the dinner table every night for fun, where love was withheld and cruelty was the only characters that mattered. That was his normal from the day he was born. So when he got power, he recreated the pandemonium through the daily explosions, the firings, the threats, the reversals, the cruelty aimed in different directions at once.
Van der Kolk's research suggests this is not incompetence. Trump recreates chaos because chaos is the only thing that has ever felt like home. And now the entire country lives inside chaos.
In conclusion: when an emotionally destroyed personality at a young age. A mother who vanishes at the exact moment the brain learns how to treat other people. A father tortured his oldest son in front of his younger son and other members of the family every single day. A younger son who watched that torture and chose to become the torturer and the abuser rather than defend his older brother. A clinical diagnosis that 27 psychiatrists put on the record. A man so traumatized by his own childhood that he needs the entire country and world to live in pandemonium status.
Bowlby's Maternal Deprivation Theory ; The concept was primarily developed by British psychiatrist and psychoanalyst John Bowlby, who proposed that a continuous, warm, and intimate relationship with a mother (or primary caregiver) is essential for healthy psychological development. Key components of Bowlby’s theory include: The Critical Period: Bowlby suggested that the first 2.5 to 5 years of life are critical. If the primary attachment is broken or never formed during this window, the resulting damage was originally considered to be permanent and irreversible. Monotropy: The belief that a child has an innate need to form a primary attachment to one single, special figure (usually the mother). documented all of it. She watched it happen from the inside. Donald Trump's older brother, Freddy, paid for it with his life... Mary Trump documented that all in her books.
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