Your father had or has a paper trail of scandal? Though I don't think we really need to pry into your familys privacy.
Well, my father's not so big that it's a celebrity scandal or anything (although how he wished he was). I mean scandal in the sense of doing things which are shocking in civilized company (like Trump's sex scandals, or the time Trump cut his brother's family out of the will and denied payments to his grandnephew who was suffering a horrible neurological condition because his brother was an alcoholic and died in his forties.) My father happens to be much smaller-fry, and because he's not a celebrity he simply hides his scandals instead of embracing them as Trump did for so many years. But really, with the paper trail I meant bankruptcies, infidelities, loans, and other similar things that never seem to stick, while spending money extravagantly. Never serving prison time no matter what. Incidentally, my father hasn't had a real day-job since the Twin Towers went down. He just makes a large (but uncertain) amount of money through public relations for corrupt unions... Actually hang on, I don't think my father's ever released his tax returns either, even though he was mandated to do so by the courts. Huh.
And as for privacy, my father deserves no privacy at all. None. He doesn't live in NYC (and hasn't for years), and very soon I won't even share his name. But it doesn't matter. He's very small-fry. The only way you could actually find him was if I mentioned his much more famous brother (in fact, the first picture that shows up when I google my father is that of his brother), or discussed the details of my father's genocide denialism; both of which would turn up positive results (for what it's worth, I did actually pre-emptively google these things to make sure he doesn't show up, and he doesn't).
Nah misk, a small million dollar loan might not have done it. Now, a 40-100 million dollar inheritance and a gaggle of other things including the loan, well...
Perhaps. I should tell my father that, he might get a kick out of it. These sort of people are very bad at realizing when they are being mocked if you aren't actually laughing at their face.
If you want information, though, I don't need to say much about my father. The only really important parts are a few key details. I read that the Fred/Donald relationship was not affectionate.
“The two of them together in the same room was very strange,” she quotes one of them saying. “They were both talking, supposedly to each other, but I was sure neither heard what the other was saying. They talked right past each other.”
This sounds hostile, right? No.
Mr. Trump’s childhood friends have said they see in him his father’s intensity, but also a constant and often palpable need to please and impress the patriarch who ruled his family with a firm hand. Even today, Donald Trump seems to bathe in his father’s approval. A framed photo of Fred Trump faces him on his cluttered desk.
Donald Trump's mother comes up very rarely, by contrast, despite the fact that she was the one who actually did the business of raising the Trump kids. A proper housewife, and I'd bet one who showed absolute loyalty and deference to her husband. My grandmother was the same. The husband does reciprocate it in some sense, but his love for her is like being in love with a mirror, or as a better example, the affection the sun might have for the moon: it only shines to the extent that it reflects the light of the sun.
So, a strong relationship with the father, but not one founded on any sort of mutual affection or shared time together. So what else is there? To know this you must understand that there is a certain, special loyalty a narcissist demands as the head of a family. My own grandfather was known for owning a whistle, and when he whistled he expected his children would immediately appear at his side (and they did, dropping whatever they were doing). This sort of one-sided, "I will periodically take a deep interest in your affairs, but otherwise ignore you; but you must always be available when I want or need your attention" is essential to how they demand their household be run. But the relationship of the narcissist with the narcissist of the next generation (my father was also the only one of
his father's kids to become a true narcissist, just as Donald is the only real narcissist of his bunch) is particularly special. It's never marked by actual affection (and I don't think they are really capable of love), but it
is marked by absolute devotion of the younger to the older; and later, when the younger one becomes an adult, to the mere
idea of the elder, rather than the elder in
practice (since, obviously, two mature narcissists can never truly get along).
At Fred Trump’s wake, at the Frank E. Campbell funeral home, his son stepped forward to address the political, real estate and society power brokers in the crowd. One attendee recalled Mr. Trump’s unorthodox ode to his father, which Mr. Trump confirmed.
“My father taught me everything I know. And he would understand what I’m about to say,” Mr. Trump announced to the room. “I’m developing a great building on Riverside Boulevard called Trump Place. It’s a wonderful project.”
The elder narcissist often does things that are "harsh" when their children are loyal, and "abusive" when not. The elder narcissist (and later, the younger) often exhibits a tendency to use their extended family, and eventually become isolated:
[Fred Trump] treated his extended family like business partners. On Sunday mornings, he would drop all of his children off at the house of his sister, Elizabeth, and ask his brother-in-law, who worked six days a week, to check his books. To avoid Fred, the family started attending an earlier church service, said John Walter, his sister’s son, who eventually did his uncle’s books.
Fred brought that hard-charging approach home. While his oldest son, Freddy, crumbled under the pressure, Donald blossomed under it.
And incidentally, my father is
also not the eldest son.
So there's a lot there. But what does it add up to? What goes on in Trump's head? For this, I reach to my mother's favorite quote about my father:
There is no there, there.
I could write for pages about both my father and Trump, but this sums up their actual personalites better than anything I could say.