Part One

The Cruelty Is the Point

Chapter One
The House

"Daddy, Mom's bleeding!"

They'd lived in the "House," as my grandparents' home was known, for less than a year, and it still felt unfamiliar, especially in the middle of the night, so when twelve-year-old Maryanne found her mother lying unconscious in one of the upstairs bathrooms—not the master bathroom but the bathroom she and her sister shared down the hall—she was already disoriented. There was blood all over the bathroom floor. Maryanne's terror was so great that it overcame her usual reluctance to disturb her father in his bedroom, and she flew to the other end of the house to rouse him.

Fred got out of bed, walked quickly down the hall, and found his wife unresponsive. With Maryanne at his heels, he rushed back to his bedroom, where there was a telephone extension, and placed a call.

Already a powerful man with connections at Jamaica Hospital, Fred was immediately put into touch with someone who could get an ambulance to the House and make sure the best doctors were waiting for them when they arrived at the emergency room. Fred explained the situation as best he could to the person on the other end. Maryanne heard him say "menstruation," an unfamiliar word that sounded strange coming out of her father's mouth.

Shortly after Mary arrived at the hospital, she underwent an emergency hysterectomy after doctors found that serious postpartum complications had gone undiagnosed after Robert's birth nine months earlier. The procedure led to an abdominal infection, and then further complications arose.

From what would become his usual spot by the telephone table in the library, Fred spoke briefly with one of Mary's doctors and, after hanging up the phone, called Maryanne to join him.

"They told me your mother won't make it through the night," he said to his daughter.

A little while later, as he was leaving for the hospital to be with his wife, he told her, "Go to school tomorrow. I'll call you if there's any change."

She understood the implication: I will call you if your mother dies.

Maryanne spent the night crying alone in her room while her younger siblings remained asleep in their beds, unaware of the calamity. She went to school the next day full of dread. Dr. James Dixon, the headmaster of Kew-Forest, a private school she had begun attending when her father joined the board of directors, came to get her from study hall. "There's a phone call for you in my office."

Maryanne was convinced that her mother was dead. The walk to the principal's office was like a walk to the scaffold. All the twelve-year-old could think was that she was going to be the acting mother of four children.

When she picked up the phone, her father simply said, "She's going to make it."

Mary would undergo two more surgeries over the next week, but she did indeed make it. Fred's pull at the hospital, which ensured that his wife got the very best doctors and care, had probably saved her life. But it would be a long road back to recovery.

For the next six months, Mary was into and out of the hospital. The long-term implications for her health were serious. She eventually developed severe osteoporosis from the sudden loss of estrogen that went with having her ovaries removed along with her uterus, a common but often unnecessary medical procedure performed at the time. As a result, she was often in excruciating pain from spontaneous fractures to her ever-thinning bones.

If we're lucky, we have, as infants and toddlers, at least one emotionally available parent who consistently fulfills our needs and responds to our desires for attention. Being held and comforted, having our feelings acknowledged and our upsets soothed are all critical for the healthy development of young children. This kind of attention creates a sense of safety and security that ultimately allows us to explore the world around us without excessive fear or unmanageable anxiety because we know we can count on the bedrock support of at least one caregiver.

Mirroring, the process through which an attuned parent reflects, processes, and then gives back to the baby the baby's own feelings, is another crucial part of a young child's development. Without mirroring, children are denied crucial information both about how their minds work and about how to understand the world. Just as a secure attachment to a primary caregiver can lead to higher levels of emotional intelligence, mirroring is the root of empathy.

Mary and Fred were problematic parents from the very beginning. My grandmother rarely spoke to me about her own parents or childhood, so I can only speculate, but she was the youngest of ten children-twenty-one years younger than her oldest sibling and four years younger than the second youngest-and she grew up in an often inhospitable environment in the early 1910s. Whether her own needs weren't sufficiently met when she was young or for some other reason, she was the kind of mother who used her children to comfort herself rather than comforting them. She attended to them when it was convenient for her, not when they needed her to. Often unstable and needy, prone to self-pity and flights of martyrdom, she frequently put herself first. Especially when it came to her sons, she acted as if there were nothing she could do for them.

During and after her surgeries, Mary's absence—both literal and emotional—created a void in the lives of her children. As hard as it must have been for Maryanne, Freddy, and Elizabeth, they were old enough to understand what was happening and could, to some extent, take care of themselves. The impact was especially dire for Donald and Robert, who at two and a half years and nine months old, respectively, were the most vulnerable of her children, especially since there was no one else to fill the void. The live-in housekeeper was undoubtedly overwhelmed by the sheer volume of housework. Their paternal grandmother, who lived nearby, prepared meals, but she was as terse and physically unaffectionate as her son. When Maryanne wasn't in school, much of the responsibility of taking care of the younger kids fell to her. (As a boy, Freddy wouldn't have been expected to help.) She gave them baths and got them ready for bed, but at twelve there was only so much she could do. The five kids were essentially motherless.

Whereas Mary was needy, Fred seemed to have no emotional needs at all. In fact, he was a high-functioning sociopath. Although uncommon, sociopathy is not rare, afflicting as much as 3 percent of the population. Seventy-five percent of those diagnosed are men. Symptoms of sociopathy include a lack of empathy, a facility for lying, an indifference to right and wrong, abusive behavior, and a lack of interest in the rights of others. Having a sociopath as a parent, especially if there is no one else around to mitigate the effects, all but guarantees severe disruption in how children understand themselves, regulate their emotions, and engage with the world. My grandmother was ill equipped to deal with the problems caused in her marriage by Fred's callousness, indifference, and controlling behaviors. Fred's lack of real human feeling, his rigidity as a parent and a husband, and his sexist belief in a woman's innate inferiority likely left her feeling unsupported.

Since Mary was emotionally and physically absent due to her injuries, Fred became, by default, the only available parent, but it would be a mistake to refer to him as a caregiver. He firmly believed that dealing with young children was not his job and kept to his twelve-hour-a-day, six-day-a-week job at Trump Management, as if his children could look after themselves. He focused on what was important to him: his increasingly successful business, which at the time was developing Shore Haven and Beach Haven, two massive residential projects in Brooklyn that were to date the most significant of his life.

Again, Donald and Robert in particular would have been in the most precarious position vis-a-vis Fred's lack of interest. All behavior exhibited by infants and toddlers is a form of attachment behavior, which seeks a positive, comforting response from the caregiver—a smile to elicit a smile, tears to prompt a hug. Even under normal circumstances, Fred would have considered any expressions of that kind an annoyance, but Donald and Robert were likely even needier because they missed their mother and were actively distressed by her absence. The greater their distress, however, the more Fred rebuffed them. He did not like to have demands made of him, and the annoyance provoked by his children's neediness set up a dangerous tension in the Trump household: by engaging in behaviors that were biologically designed to trigger soothing, comforting responses from their parents, the little boys instead provoked their father's anger or indifference when they were most vulnerable. For Donald and Robert, "needing" became equated with humiliation, despair, and hopelessness. Because Fred didn't want to be disturbed when he was home, it worked in his favor if his children learned one way or another not to need anything.

Fred's parenting style actually exacerbated the negative effects of Mary's absence. As a result of it, his children were isolated not just from the rest of the world but from one another. From then on it would become increasingly difficult for the siblings to find solidarity with other human beings, which is one of the reasons Freddy's brothers and sisters ultimately failed him; standing up for him, even helping him, would have risked their father's wrath.

When Mary became ill and Donald's main source of comfort and human connection was suddenly taken away from him, not only was there no one to help him make sense of it, Fred was the only person left that he could depend on. Donald's needs, which had been met inconsistently before his mother's illness, were barely met at all by his father. That Fred would, by default, become the primary source of Donald's solace when he was much more likely to be a source of fear or rejection put Donald into an intolerable position: being totally dependent on his father, who was also likely to be a source of his terror.

Child abuse is, in some sense, the experience of "too much" or "not enough." Donald directly experienced the "not enough" in the loss of connection to his mother at a crucial developmental stage, which was deeply traumatic. Without warning, his needs weren't being met, and his fears and longings went unsoothed. Having been abandoned by his mother for at least a year, and having his father fail not only to meet his needs but to make him feel safe or loved, valued or mirrored, Donald suffered deprivations that would scar him for life. The personality traits that resulted—displays of narcissism, bullying, grandiosity—finally made my grandfather take notice but not in a way that ameliorated any of the horror that had come before. As he grew older, Donald was subjected to my grandfather's "too-muchness" at second hand-witnessing what happened to Freddy when he was on the receiving end of too much attention, too much expectation, and, most saliently, too much humiliation.

From the beginning, Fred's self-interest skewed his priorities. His care of his children, such as it was, reflected his own needs, not theirs. Love meant nothing to him, and he could not empathize with their plight, one of the defining characteristics of a sociopath; he expected obedience, that was all. Children don't make such distinctions, and his kids believed that their father loved them or that they could somehow earn his love. But they also knew, if only on an unconscious level, that their father's "love," as they experienced it, was entirely conditional.

Maryanne, Elizabeth, and Robert, to greater or lesser degrees, experienced the same treatment as Donald because Fred wasn't interested in children at all. His oldest son and namesake received Fred's attention simply because he was being raised to carry on Fred's legacy.

In order to cope, Donald began to develop powerful but primitive defenses, marked by an increasing hostility to others and a seeming indifference to his mother's absence and father's neglect. The latter became a kind of learned helplessness over time because although it insulated him from the worst effects of his pain, it also made it extremely difficult (and in the long run I would argue impossible) for him to have any of his emotional needs met at all because he became too adept at acting as though he didn't have any. In place of those needs grew a kind of grievance and behaviors-including bullying, disrespect, and aggressiveness-that served their purpose in the moment but became more problematic over time. With appropriate care and attention, they might have been overcome.

Unfortunately for Donald and everybody else on this planet, those behaviors became hardened into personality traits because once Fred started paying attention to his loud and difficult second son, he came to value them. Put another way, Fred Trump came to validate, encourage, and champion the things about Donald that rendered him essentially unlovable and that were in part the direct result of Fred's abuse.

Mary never completely recovered. Restless to begin with, she became an insomniac. The older kids would find her wandering around the House at all hours like a soundless wraith. Once Freddy found her standing at the top of a ladder painting the hallway in the middle of the night. In the morning her children sometimes found her unconscious in unexpected places; more than once, she ended up having to go to the hospital. That behavior became part of the life of the House. Mary got help for the physical injuries she sustained but none for whatever underlying psychological problems made her put herself into high-risk situations.

Beyond his wife's occasional injuries, Fred was aware of none of this and wouldn't have acknowledged the effects his particular brand of parenting had on his children then or later, even if he had recognized them. As far as he was concerned, he had been, for a brief time, faced with the limits of his wealth and power in fixing his wife's neardeath health crisis. But ultimately Mary's medical challenges were a small blip in the grand scheme of things. Once she was on the mend and his Shore Haven and Beach Haven real estate developments, both phenomenal successes, were nearing completion, everything seemed once again to be going Fred's way.

When eight-year-old Freddy Trump asked why his very pregnant mother was getting so fat, talk at the dinner table ground to a halt. It was 1948, and the Trump family, which now consisted of four children-ten-year-old Maryanne, Freddy, five-year-old Elizabeth, and one-and-a-half-year-old Donald-were weeks away from moving into the twenty-three-room house that Fred was in the process of building. Mary looked down at her plate, and Fred's mother, also named Elizabeth, an almost daily visitor to the house, stopped eating.

Table etiquette at my grandparents' house was strict, and there were certain things Fred did not tolerate. "Keep your elbows off the table, this is not a horse's stable" was a frequent refrain, and Fred, knife in hand, would tap its handle against the forearm of any transgressor. (Rob and Donald took over that task when Fritz, David, and I were growing up, with a bit too much enthusiasm.) There were also things the children were not supposed to talk about, especially in front of their father or grandmother. When Freddy wanted to know how the baby had gotten there, Fred and his mother stood up as one, left the table without saying a word, and walked off. Fred wasn't a prude, but Elizabeth, a stern, formal woman who adhered to Victorian mores, very likely was.

Despite her own rigid views regarding gender roles, however, she had, many years earlier, made an exception for her son; a couple of years after Fred's father had died suddenly, Elizabeth had become her fifteen-year-old son's business partner.

That was made possible in part because her husband, Friedrich Trump, something of an entrepreneur, had left money and property valued at approximately $300,000 in today's currency.

Friedrich, born in Kallstadt, a small village in western Germany, left for the United States when he turned eighteen in 1885 in order to avoid mandatory military service. He eventually made the bulk of his money through ownership of restaurants and brothels in British Columbia. He lit out for the Yukon territories in time for the Gold Rush, cashing out just before the boom collapsed near the turn of the century.

In 1901, while visiting his family in Germany, Friedrich met and married Elizabeth Christ, a petite blond woman nearly twelve years his junior. He brought his new bride to New York, but one month after the birth of their first child, a girl they named Elizabeth, the couple returned to Germany with the intention of settling there permanently. Because of the circumstances under which Friedrich had originally left the country, he was told by authorities that he could not stay. Friedrich, his wife—now four months pregnant with their second child—and their two-year-old daughter returned for the last time to the United States in July 1905. Their two sons, Frederick and John, were born in 1905 and 1907, respectively. They eventually settled in Woodhaven, Queens, where all three children grew up speaking German.

When Friedrich died of the Spanish flu, twelve-year-old Fred became the man of the house. Despite the size of her husband's estate, Elizabeth found it difficult to make ends meet. The flu epidemic, which killed upward of 50 million people worldwide, had a destabilizing effect on what otherwise might have been a booming wartime economy. While still in high school, Fred took a series of odd jobs in order to help his mother financially and began to study the building trade. Becoming a builder had been his dream for as long as he could remember. He took every opportunity to learn the business, all aspects of which intrigued him, and during his sophomore year, with his mother's backing, he began building and selling garages in his neighborhood. He realized he was good at it, and from then on he had no other interests—none. Two years after Fred's high school graduation, Elizabeth created E. Trump and Son. She recognized her son's aptitude, and the business, which enabled her to handle financial transactions for her underage middle child—in the early twentieth century, people didn't attain legal majority until the age of twenty-one—was her way of supporting him. Both the business and the family thrived.

When Fred was twenty-five years old, he attended a dance where he met Mary Anne MacLeod, recently arrived from Scotland. According to family legend, when he returned home, he told his mother that he had met the girl he was going to marry.

Mary had been born the youngest of ten in 1912 in Tong, a village on the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides, located forty miles off the northwest coast of Scotland; her childhood had been bracketed by two global tragedies, the latter of which also deeply affected her future husband: World War I and the Spanish flu epidemic. Lewis had lost a disproportionate percentage of its male population during the war, and in a cruel twist of fate, two months after the armistice was signed in November 1918, a ship carrying soldiers home to the island from the mainland crashed into rocks just a few yards offshore in the early hours of January 1, 1919. More than 200 soldiers of the approximately 280 on board died in the brutally cold waters less than a mile from the safety of Stornoway Harbor. Much of the island's young adult male population was lost. Any young woman hoping to find a husband would have better luck elsewhere.

Mary, one of six daughters, was encouraged to journey to America, where the opportunities were greater and the men more plentiful.

In early May 1930, in a classic example of "chain migration," Mary boarded the RMS Transylvania in order to join two of her sisters who had already settled in the United States. Despite her status as a domestic servant, as a white Anglo-Saxon, Mary would have been allowed into the country even under her son's draconian new immigration rules introduced nearly ninety years later. She turned eighteen the day before her arrival in New York and met Fred not long after.

Fred and Mary were married on a Saturday in January 1936. After a reception at the Carlyle Hotel in Manhattan, they honeymooned in Atlantic City for one night. On Monday morning, Fred was back at his Brooklyn office.

The couple moved into their first house on Wareham Road, just down the street from the house on Devonshire Road that Fred had shared with his mother. In those early years, Mary was still in awe of her head-spinning change in fortune, both financial and social. Instead of being the live-in help, she had live-in help; instead of competing for limited resources, she was the woman of the house. With free time to volunteer and money with which to shop, she never looked back, which perhaps explains why she was quick to judge others who came from similar circumstances. She and Fred put together an entirely conventional life with strictly drawn roles for husband and wife. He ran his business, which kept him in Brooklyn ten, sometimes twelve hours a day, six days a week. She ran the house, but he ruled it—and, at least in the beginning, so did his mother. Elizabeth was an intimidating mother-in-law who, during the first few years of her son's marriage, made sure that Mary understood who was really in charge: she wore white gloves when she visited, putting Mary on notice regarding the expectations she had for her daughter-inlaw's housekeeping, which must have felt like a not-so-subtle mockery of her recent employment.

Despite Elizabeth's hazing, those early years were a time of great energy and possibility for Fred and Mary. Fred whistled his way down the stairs on his way to work, and when he returned home in the evening, he whistled his way up to his room, where he changed into a clean shirt before dinner.

Mary and Fred hadn't discussed baby names, so when their first child, a daughter, was born, they named her Maryanne, combining Mary's first and middle names. The couple's first son was born a year and a half later, on October 14, 1938, and named after his father—with one small change: Fred, Sr.'s, middle name was Christ, his mother's maiden name; his boy would be named Frederick Crist. Everybody except his father would call him Freddy.

It seems as though Fred mapped out his son's future before he was even born. Although he would feel the burdens of the expectations placed upon him when he grew older, Freddy benefited early on from his status in a way Maryanne and the other children would not. After all, he had a special place in his father's plans: he would be the means through which the Trump empire expanded and thrived in perpetuity.

Three and a half years passed before Mary gave birth to another child. Shortly before the arrival of Elizabeth, Fred left for an extended period to work in Virginia Beach. A housing shortage, the result of service members' returning from World War II, created an opportunity for him to build apartments for navy personnel and their families. Fred had had time to sharpen his skills and gain the reputation that got him the work because while other eligible men had enlisted, he had chosen not to serve, following in his father's footsteps.

Through his growing experience with building many houses simultaneously and his inherent skill at using local media to his own ends, Fred was introduced to well-connected politicians and learned through them how to call in favors at the right time, and, most important, chase government money. The lure in Virginia Beach, where Fred learned the advantage of building his real estate empire with government handouts, was the generous funding made available by the Federal Housing Administration (FHA). Founded in 1934 by President Franklin D.

Roosevelt, the FHA seems to have strayed far from its original mandate by the time Fred began taking advantage of its largesse. Its chief purpose had been to ensure that enough affordable housing was being built for the country's constantly growing population. After World War II, the fHa seemed equally concerned with enriching developers such as Fred Trump.

The project in Virginia was also a chance to hone the expertise he'd begun to acquire in Brooklyn: building larger-scale projects as quickly, efficiently, and cheaply as possible while still managing to make them attractive to renters. When the commute back and forth to Queens became too inconvenient, Fred moved the entire family to Virginia Beach when Elizabeth was still an infant.

From Mary's perspective, other than finding herself in an unfamiliar environment, things were much the same in Virginia as they had been in Jamaica Estates. Fred worked long hours, leaving her alone with three children under the age of six. Their social life revolved around people he worked with or people whose services he needed. In 1944, when the FHA funding that had been financing Fred's projects dried up, the family returned to New York.

Once back in Jamaica Estates, Mary suffered a miscarriage, a serious medical event from which it took her months to recover fully. Doctors warned her against further pregnancies, but Mary found herself expecting again a year later. The miscarriage created large age gaps between the older and younger children, with Elizabeth floating in the middle, almost four years younger or older than her two closest siblings. Maryanne and Freddy were so much older than the youngest children that it was almost as if they belonged to two different generations.

Donald, the couple's fourth child and second son, was born in 1946, just as Fred began plans for the new family house. He purchased a half-acre lot directly behind the Wareham Road house situated on a hill overlooking Midland Parkway, a wide tree-lined thoroughfare that runs through the entire neighborhood. When the kids found out about the impending move, they joked that they didn't need to hire a moving truck; they could just roll their belongings down the hill.

At more than four thousand square feet, the House was the most impressive residence on the block but still smaller and less grand than many of the mansions that dominated the hills in the northern part of the neighborhood. Set at the top of a rise, the House cast shadows in the afternoon over the wide flagstone steps that led from the sidewalk to the front door, an entrance we used only on special occasions. The lawn jockeys, racist reminders of the Jim Crow era, were first painted pink and then replaced with flowers. The faux coat of arms on the pediment over the front door remained.

Although Queens would eventually be one of the most diverse places on the planet, in the 1940s, when my grandfather bought the land and built the imposing redbrick Georgian colonial with the twenty-foot columns, the borough was 95 percent white. The upper-middle-class neighborhood of Jamaica Estates was even whiter. When the first Italian American family moved to the neighborhood in the 1950s, Fred was scandalized.

In 1947, Fred embarked on the most important large-scale project of his career up until that point: Shore Haven, a proposed complex in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, comprising thirty-two six-story buildings and a shopping center spread over more than thirty acres. The draw this time was the $9 million in FHA funds that would be paid to Fred directly, just as Donald would later capitalize on tax breaks lavished on him by both the city and the state. Fred had previously described the type of people renting the 2,201 apartments as "unwholesome," the implication being that upstanding people lived only in the single-family dwellings that had been his early specialty. But $9 million can be very persuasive. Around that time, when it became clear that Fred's fortune would only continue to grow, he and his mother set up trust funds for his children that would shield the money from taxation.

Though an iron-fisted autocrat at home and in his office, Fred had become expert at gaining access to and kowtowing to more powerful and better-connected men. I don't know how he acquired the skill, but he would later pass it on to Donald. Over time, he developed ties to leaders of the Brooklyn Democratic Party, the New York State political machine, and the federal government, many of whom were major players in the real estate industry. If getting funding meant sucking up to the local politicos who held the FHA purse strings, so be it. He joined an exclusive beach club on the south shore of Long Island and later North Hills Country Club, both of which he considered excellent places to entertain, impress, and rub elbows with the men best positioned to funnel government funds his way, much as Donald would do at Le Club in New York in the 1970s and at golf clubs everywhere.

As Donald was later alleged to do with Trump Tower and his casinos in Atlantic City, Fred was said to have worked discreetly with the Mob in order to keep the peace. When he got the green light for another development—Beach Haven, a forty-acre, twenty-three-building complex in Coney Island that would net him $16 million in FHA funding—it was clear that his strategy of building on the taxpayer's dime was a winner.

Though Fred's business was built on the back of government financing, he loathed paying taxes and would do anything to avoid doing so. At the height of his empire's expansions, he never spent a dime he didn't have to, and he never acquired debt, an imperative that did not extend to his sons. Bound by the scarcity mentality that had been shaped by World War I and the Depression, Fred owned his properties free and clear. The profits his company generated from rents were enormous. In relation to his net worth, Fred, whose children said he was "tighter than a duck's ass," lived a relatively modest life. Despite the piano lessons and private summer camps—of a piece with his notion of what was expected for a man of his station in life —his two oldest children grew up feeling "white poor." Maryanne and Freddy walked the fifteen minutes to Public School 131, and when they wanted to go into the city, as everyone in the outer boroughs of New York refers to Manhattan, they took the subway from 169th Street. Of course, they weren't poor—and aside from some early struggles after his father's death, Fred never had been, either.

Fred's wealth afforded him the opportunity to live anywhere, but he would spend most of his adult life less than twenty minutes from where he had grown up. With the exception of a few weekends in Cuba with Mary in the early days of their marriage, he never left the country. After he completed the project in Virginia, he rarely even left New York City.

His business empire, though large and lucrative, was equally provincial. The number of buildings he came to own exceeded four dozen, but the buildings themselves had relatively few floors and were uniformly utilitarian. His holdings remained almost exclusively in Brooklyn and Queens. The glitz, glamour, and diversity of Manhattan might as well have been on another continent as far as he was concerned, and in those early years, it seemed just as far out of reach.

By the time the family moved into the House, everybody in the neighborhood knew who Fred Trump was, and Mary embraced her role as the wife of a rich, influential businessman. She became heavily involved in charity work, including at the Women's Auxiliary at Jamaica Hospital and the Jamaica Day Nursery, chairing luncheons and attending black-tie fund-raisers.

No matter how great the couple's success, there remained for both Fred and Mary a tension between their aspirations and their instincts. In Mary's case it was likely the result of a childhood marked by scarcity if not outright deprivation and in Fred's a caution deriving from the massive loss of life, including his father's, during the Spanish flu and World War I, as well as the economic uncertainty his family had experienced after his father's death. Despite the millions of dollars pouring in from Trump Management every year, Fred still couldn't resist picking up unused nails or reverse engineering a cheaper pesticide. Despite the ease with which Mary took to her new status and the perks that went along with it, including a live-in housekeeper, she spent most of her time in the House, sewing, cooking, and doing laundry. It was as if neither of them could quite figure out how to reconcile what they could possibly have and what they would actually allow themselves.

Although frugal, Fred was neither modest nor humble. Early in his career, he had lied about his age in order to appear more precocious. He had had a propensity for showmanship, and he often trafficked in hyperbole— everything was "great," "fantastic," and "perfect." He inundated local newspapers with press releases about his newly completed homes and gave numerous interviews extolling the virtues of his properties. He plastered south Brooklyn with ads and hired a barge covered with ads to float just off the shoreline. But he wasn't nearly as good at it as Donald would come to be. He could handle interacting one on one and currying favor with his politically connected betters, but speaking in front of large groups or navigating television interviews was beyond him. He took a Dale Carnegie public speaking course, but he was so bad at it that even his usually obedient children teased him about it.

Just as some people have a face for radio, Fred had a level of social confidence made for back rooms and print media. That fact would figure significantly in his later support of his second son at the expense of his first.

When Fred heard about Norman Vincent Peale in the 1950s, Peale's shallow message of self-sufficiency appealed to him enormously. The pastor of Marble Collegiate Church in midtown Manhattan, Peale was very fond of successful businessmen. "Being a merchant isn't getting money," he wrote. "Being a merchant is serving the people." Peale was a charlatan, but he was a charlatan who headed up a rich and powerful church, and he had a message to sell. Fred wasn't a reader, but it was impossible not to know about Peale's wildly popular bestseller, The Power of Positive Thinking. The title alone was enough for Fred, and he decided to join Marble Collegiate although he and his family rarely attended.

Fred already had a positive attitude and unbounded faith in himself. Although he could be serious and formal, or dismissive to people such as his children's friends, who were of no interest to him, he smiled easily, even when he was telling somebody he or she was nasty, and was usually in a good mood. He had reason to be; he was in control of everything in his world. With the exception of his father's death, the course of his life had been fairly smooth and full of supportive family and colleagues. Since his early days building garages, his success had been on an almost constantly upward trajectory. He worked hard, but unlike most people who work hard, he was rewarded with government grants, the almost limitless help of highly connected cronies, and immensely good fortune. Fred didn't need to read The Power of Positive Thinking in order to co-opt, for his own purposes, the most superficial and self-serving aspects of Peale's message.

Anticipating the prosperity gospel, Peale's doctrine proclaimed that you need only self-confidence in order to prosper in the way God wants you to. "[O]bstacles are simply not permitted to destroy your happiness and wellbeing. You need be defeated only if you are willing to be/' Peale wrote. That view neatly confirmed what Fred already thought: he was rich because he deserved to be. "Believe in yourself! Have faith in your abilities!... A sense of inferiority and inadequacy interferes with the attainment of your hopes, but self-confidence leads to self-realization and successful achievement." Self-doubt wasn't part of Fred's makeup, and he never considered the possibility of his own defeat. As Peale also wrote, "It is appalling to realize the number of pathetic people who are hampered and made miserable by the malady popularly called the inferiority complex."

Peale's proto-prosperity gospel actually complemented the scarcity mentality Fred continued to cling to. For him, it was not "the more you have, the more you can give." It was "the more you have, the more you have." Financial worth was the same as self-worth, monetary value was human value. The more Fred Trump had, the better he was. If he gave something to someone else, that person would be worth more and he less. He would pass that attitude on to Donald in spades.