Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man by Mary L. Trump;

Homer from St. Paul’s School had stolen a hearse for a joyride. Before returning the vehicle to the funeral home, Freddy pulled into a gas station to fill up the tank. As he got out of the car and walked toward the pump, Homer, who was lying down in the back to see what it was like, sat up. A man at the pump across from them, thinking he’d just seen a corpse rising from the dead, screamed, and Freddy and Homer laughed until they cried. Freddy lived for that kind of prank, but he regaled his brothers and sisters with his exploits only if their father wasn’t home.
    For some of the Trump kids, lying was a way of life, and for Fred’s oldest son, lying was defensive—not simply a way to circumvent his father’s disapproval or to avoid punishment, as it was for the others, but a way to survive. Maryanne, for instance, never went against her father, perhaps out of fear of an ordinary punishment such as being grounded or sent to her room. For Donald, lying was primarily a mode of self-aggrandizement meant to convince other people he was better than he actually was. For Freddy, the consequences of going against his father were different not only in degree but in kind, so lying became his only defense against his father’s attempts to suppress his natural sense of humor, sense of adventure, and sensitivity.
    Peale’s ideas about inferiority complexes helped shape Fred’s harsh judgments about Freddy, while also allowing him to evade takingresponsibility for any of his children. Weakness was perhaps the greatest sin of all, and Fred worried that Freddy was more like his own brother, John, the MIT professor: soft and, though not unambitious, interested in the wrong things, such as engineering and physics, which Fred found esoteric and unimportant. Such softness was unthinkable in his namesake, and by the time the family had moved into the House when Freddy was ten, Fred had already determined to toughen him up. Like most people who aren’t paying attention to where they’re going, however, he overcorrected.
    â€œThat’s stupid,” Fred said whenever Freddy expressed a desire to get a pet or played a practical joke. “What do you want to do that for?” Fred said with such contempt in his voice that it made Freddy flinch, which only annoyed Fred more. Fred hated it when his oldest son screwed up or failed to intuit what was required of him, but he hated it even more when, after being taken to task, Freddy apologized. “Sorry, Dad,” Fred would mock him. Fred wanted his oldest son to be a “killer” in his parlance (for what reason it’s impossible to say—collecting rent in Coney Island wasn’t exactly a high-risk endeavor in the 1950s), and he was temperamentally the opposite of that.
    Being a killer was really code for being invulnerable. Although Fred didn’t seem to feel anything about his father’s death, the suddenness of it had taken him by surprise and knocked him off balance. Years later, when discussing it, he said, “Then he died. Just like that. It just didn’t seem real. I wasn’t that upset. You know how kids are. But I got upset watching my mother crying and being so sad. It was seeing her that made me feel bad, not my own feelings about what had happened.”
    The loss, in other words, had made him feel vulnerable, not because of his own feelings but because of his mother’s feelings, which he likely felt were being imposed on him, especially as he did not share them. That imposition must have been very painful. In that moment, he wasn’t the center of the universe, and that was unacceptable. Going forward, he refused to acknowledge or feel loss. (I never heard him oranyone else in my family speak about my great-grandfather.) As far as Fred was concerned, he was able to move on because nothing particularly important had been lost.
    Subscribing as Fred did to Norman Vincent Peale’s ideas about human