Shades of Sigmund Freud. Author and journalist Nina Burleigh just published a new book, Golden Handcuffs: The Secret History Of Trump’s Women wherein she explores the *resident’s fraught relationship with his wives, the women who accused him of assault, his public ogling of his daughter — and that’s fascinating, but the real Rosetta Stone is how his immigrant mother’s fascination with wealth and being one of the Big People instead of a lilliputian seared his psyche for life. New York Magazine:
And Donald’s mother, Mary Anne — I had no idea she was a domestic!
A domestic in one of the wealthiest homes in America. I couldn’t believe it when I looked her up in Census records. Her first address was in the Carnegie household, the closest thing to a castle that existed in the U.S. in that time. So she’s 19, coming from a place in Scotland where ten kids are crammed into a two-bedroom cottage. Then she’s polishing banisters or silver and watching this woman [Louise Carnegie] with the airs of a queen being chauffeured around with footmen. It marked Trump’s mother for life. She admired that wealth and wanted to be part of it, and Donald inherited that from her.So it gave him an appetite for royal trappings. Do you think it also gave him a sense of always being an outsider?
It’s two sides of the same thing. The entire country is now living in this man’s conflict between a desire to be royalty and a profound feeling that he doesn’t belong.
He is an outsider, still. The nonpareil of New York society have never accepted him, because he’s a uncultured boor, and in that cadre it takes more to succeed than just cash. Show business cast him as what he is, an entertaining freak, but that ran it’s course. And he doesn’t belong in politics, certainly not at the presidential level, for a plethora of reasons, first and foremost that he lacks even a scintilla of empathy or social conscience, let alone a desire to serve. Yet, despite that, he succeeded and gained the nation’s top office. Why? According to Burleigh, because people can smell that insecurity on him, like sweat, and the ones who identify with it, the other losers, inflamed by Fox News’ lies, voted for him.
But here’s the nugget of revelation that is a mind blower. The Trump Organization was the brainchild of his grandmother, not his all powerful father. Grandma Trump was a woman who found herself in desperate straits and like all women in that circumstance, swam against the undertow that was dragging her down, and in her case survived and prospered.
…His grandmother was this stern, probably cold woman who came from a tiny village in Germany. Then suddenly her husband dies, leaving her with three young children and a small nest egg. To survive, she transformed it into the Trump Organization in the 1920s.
So she’s the original Trump!
But she’s been written out of history. They tell it now as if Fred started the whole organization at age 16.
Of course they do, because women, in Trump world, cannot be the brains behind anything — even though his sister in an appellate court judge.
But here’s the clincher, and all you need to know about Trump and women, and Trump and insecurity.
Can you talk about the great Freudian moment of his young life?
When he was 2, his mother went to the hospital to give birth to his little brother, Robert, and didn’t come home for many months because she contracted peritonitis and had to go through numerous surgeries. And so he was alone, bereft of a primary caretaker. And his father is not warm and fuzzy. He’d tell the older kids, “Your mother may die today, but you need to go to school.” At 2 is when you’re making primary connections, learning about love and being loved — and his mother was gone.Coupled with that, I think, he had a learning disability, a reading problem, and probably ADHD, undiagnosed. Except in those days the rambunctious boys were regarded as the healthy ones; the readers were the sissies and neurotics. So Donald wasn’t regarded as having a problem. His aggressiveness was praised.
That would explain his loathing of the book learned, intelligentsia. The insecurity is strong with this one. Fearful he always has been, think I. Undoing, his ego will be.
Trump is like Icarus, he didn’t quit while he was ahead. He couldn’t. He had to keep chasing the next deal, the next woman, the next celebrity turn, all in an effort to fill up the emptiness inside himself, the vast gulf that wakes him up at 3:30 a.m. , that hole in the belly that wrests him from sleep and compels him to tweet.
The philosophers of the ages could have told him to look within for the answers — but we’re talking about a man who never read a book, so how would he ever find what the great minds of the ages had to teach about being a lost soul? and that the road to salvation is to learn to walk a different way, not to keep blasting down the path of fruitless endeavor, of self will run riot?
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