STEVE WRUBLE, M.D.
As a psychiatrist, I am interested in why people are the way they are. Ultimately, the more I understand others, and my relationship to them, the better I understand myself. I am intrigued by the factors that have guided Donald Trump into the Oval Office and into the hearts, minds, and clenched fists of so many Americans. I’m especially frustrated by his having captured the attention and respect of the man I have always craved a closer relationship with—my father.
Fathers and sons have a storied history of playing off each other as they grapple with their evolving separate and shared identities. We tumble through time doing our best to make sense of all that we witness and experience. I, like Donald Trump, grew up watching and interacting with a strong, proud, and successful father. We both looked up to our fathers for guidance, but at the same time we also felt a certain competitiveness with them as we fought for our innate need for separation and individuation. The spectrum of how sons interact with their fathers is vast. The early beliefs that each has about himself will determine the path chosen to act out their drama. As much as I am disturbed by Trump’s behavior, I can’t help but wonder what of him is in me and vice versa. Who is this man who has captivated so much of the American electorate, and for that matter, the whole world? As a son locked into a drama with a father, can I shed light on that question?
Politically, many people in America are single-issue voters. Whether it be abortion, the economy, or foreign policy, it’s that one main issue that holds sway over their vote. In my family’s case, that one issue is Israel. I come from a family of Modern Orthodox Jews, and Orthodox Jewry as a group has thrown its support behind President Trump because it feels Israel will be safer under his watch. Of course, other issues are also important to Orthodox Jews, but these are usually overshadowed by concern for Israel.
About ten years ago, I made the difficult decision to let my family know that I had stopped following the many dictates that an Orthodox Jew is expected to follow. This new choice was quite freeing for me, since I had already been living this way secretly for a few years. At the same time, it was upsetting to my parents and especially my father, because Judaism is a major part of his identity. He said he was worried that this would create chaos in our family and wished, for my children’s sake, that I would keep my secret to myself. On a deeper level, it felt as if he perceived it as a threat to his leadership in the family.
My decision to leave Orthodox Judaism feels connected to the evolution of my political views toward a more liberal agenda. This, at first, was uncomfortable because it was frowned upon in my community to question anything that supported the State of Israel. Donald Trump’s behavior was clear and disturbing to me and overshadowed his support for Israel. However, my misgivings were not echoed in my community. My attempts to be understood by family and friends were surprisingly difficult.
Many Republicans seem to be locked in a dysfunctional relationship with Trump as a strong father figure who appears to have far less to offer than they’re pining for. Yet, like myself, they are looking to their “father” in the hope that he will deliver them from what feels broken within them and the lives they are leading.
Before addressing the difficulties in my family around what it’s like to see the political world so differently and yet to continue to share family events and happy occasions, I’d like to take a short drive through Donald Trump’s life to show you some things that help make sense of what we’re all witnessing.
There are several details that seem to shine a light on how Trump’s relationship with his father, Fred Trump, may have impacted his development. Donald is the fourth of five children. His oldest sister is a circuit court judge and his oldest brother, Freddie Jr., died at the age of forty-three from complications due to alcoholism. According to a New York Times article (Horowitz 2016), it was apparent to those who watched Fred Trump with his children that his intensity was too much for Freddie Jr. to tolerate. As Donald watched the tragedy unfold, he stepped up and became his father’s protégé in his building empire. I can only imagine that following a brother who drank himself to death didn’t leave Donald much room to do anything but try and fill the void where his older brother had failed. Obviously, he was successful at this endeavor in his father’s world of real estate, and the two spent many years working together until Donald moved on to captain his own company. Fred Trump could never understand why Donald wanted to take the financial risk of building in Manhattan. The elder Trump felt that the ease they enjoyed being successful in Brooklyn and Queens should have been intoxicating enough for his son. However, Donald appeared to be attracted to the bright lights of the big city and the challenge of being more successful than his father.
From the same New York Times article, “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 said he learned his father’s values, and his killer sense of competition, by following him to building sites and watching him squeeze the most out of every dollar. In a speech to the National Association of Home Builders, Trump said, “My father would go and pick up the extra nails and scraps, and he’d use whatever he could and recycle it in some form or sell it.”
According to an article in The Guardian (Dean 2016), when Fred Trump died in 1999, Donald Trump gave a cheerful quote for his father’s New York Times obituary, focusing on the way his dad had never wanted to expand into Manhattan. “It was good for me,” he said. “You know, being the son of somebody, it could have been competition to me. This way, I got Manhattan all to myself!” At his father’s wake, Donald stepped forward to address family, friends, and the society power brokers in the crowd. One attendee recalled Mr. Trump’s unorthodox eulogy to his father, “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.” Not the warmest send-off, but it highlighted the language and sentiment that the two men shared. It was the point of their connection. When Donald’s father, Fred Trump, was fifteen, he started in the building business alongside his mother due to the fact that his father died just three years earlier. At the age of fifty-three, Donald, with the death of his own father, was wasting no time on tears; he was moving forward in the familial quest for financial success.
Donald witnessed his father’s tough negotiating style, even at home. One time, some of Donald’s friends were confused as to why his wealthy father would not buy him a new baseball glove. Trump said it was because his father suspected him, correctly, of playing dumb about the high price of the glove he wanted, and of trying to get the salesman to go along with this ruse. It appears Donald learned early on that his father’s frugality would leave him wanting. It also may have taught him that he needed to be sneaky at times to get what he desired.
When I was about the same age, I remember my father telling me how surprised and impressed he was that I was able to convince a salesman to refund our money and take back an expensive board game that we had already opened but didn’t like. I could see in my father’s face that he was enamored of my moxie. The power of a father’s attention to our behavior forms a strong lock and key for that behavior to become something we depend upon in order hopefully to receive that same coveted attention again and again. Of course, I’ve learned the hard way that behaviors I picked up from pleasing my father don’t always translate to the healthiest way to relate to others. Those habits take time and experience to break.
Fred Trump’s housing projects made him wealthy and powerful. Some tenants appreciated him for his solid, well-priced apartments; others loathed him for his suspected exclusion of blacks from his properties. The famous folk singer Woody Guthrie, who wrote “This Land Is Your Land,” was a tenant of Mr. Trump’s Beach Haven apartments for two years. In the early 1950s, he composed two songs that address his disgust with the racist practices of Fred Trump that he witnessed. Here are some of his lyrics from the songs he wrote: “I suppose Old Man Trump knows just how much Racial Hate he stirred up in the blood-pot of human hearts when he drawed that color line here at his Eighteen hundred family project.… Beach Haven looks like heaven where no black ones come to roam! No, no, no! Old Man Trump! Old Beach Haven ain’t my home!”
Unlike Trump, I was fortunate to watch my father come home daily from saving lives as a physician. I can only imagine how ashamed I would have felt if my father had been accused of being racist by anyone, much less a famous composer. That being said, Donald may not have given it a second thought.
The human brain can protect us from seeing and feeling what it believes may be too uncomfortable for us to tolerate. It can lead us to deny, defend, minimize, or rationalize away something that doesn’t fit our worldview. Actually, as I observe President Trump’s behavior, I imagine that there is a good chance he identifies with his father’s aggressive business style and parenting, and is now employing that orientation to his role as president. In psychology, this is called identification with the aggressor. At first, it may appear counter-intuitive to identify with an aggressor who has abused his position of power to take advantage. However, our brains often use this early relationship as a template to shape our future behavior. We are attracted to the power we witness from our powerless position. We can be hungry for the same power that we originally resented or even fought against. Taking all this into consideration, President Trump’s aggressive behavior seems to illuminate the part of his father that still lives on within him.
Individuals with such a history often exhibit insecurities that can lead to all kinds of compensatory behaviors. However, no matter how successful a person is at alleviating the associated anxiety, fear usually still exists unconsciously and can be uncovered at times of stress. Trump’s sensitivity to being seen as weak or vulnerable along with his need to exaggerate and distort the truth are signs of his deep-seated insecurity. His confabulation protects his fragile ego. Meanwhile, his blustering becomes fodder for comedians and the media. Watching reporters try to address the “alternative facts” and Trump’s impulsive tweets with his press secretary staff is comically surreal.
In simplified fashion, in order for Trump to avoid feeling the effects of his insecurities, and to feed his narcissistic needs, he appears to compensate by trying to be seen as powerful and special with the hope that he will indeed feel powerful and special. Only he knows the truth about how successful he is at this. The human brain has a unique ability to work in the background, using past beliefs as if we were living in the times when those beliefs are birthed. From a survivalist standpoint, our brains work off the assumption that we are safer to believe that situations will most likely repeat themselves. We don’t challenge those beliefs unless something drastic occurs that overwhelms our defenses. We have learned through research on trauma survivors that early events that stimulate our fight-or-flight response have long-lasting effects. It usually directs us to create a negative belief about ourselves, which in turn leads to the counterbalancing behaviors that try to minimize the deleterious effects of those negative beliefs. Therefore, President Trump will most likely change his way of being only if reality throws him a large enough curveball to which he is unable to respond using the signature defensive measures he has grown accustomed to.
The beliefs and compensatory mechanisms that young Donald created to help steward him through the turbulent waters of his childhood are probably still in effect today. They were reinforced during his years working with his father, and later as a successful businessman. As the owner of his own company, he was able to exact control and demand loyalty in ways that he cannot as president. Transferring his strategies and expectations to the culture of government has been frustrating for him, and his responses to that frustration have been eye-opening. He doesn’t appear to have the flexibility to switch gears in order to deal with the function of his job as president. His handling of FBI director James Comey is a good example. Conversations about loyalty appear to have contributed to his firing. Trump’s befuddlement regarding all the fireworks that ensued makes it appear that he is either limited in understanding the impact of his behavior or insensitive to it. Either way, his leadership leaves a large segment of the population feeling insecure and fearful about what to expect next.
Fred Trump’s competitiveness was quite apparent near the end of his life, when he was quoted as saying that his thrice-divorced son would never beat him in the “marital department,” since he had been married to the same woman for sixty years. In addition, when Donald Trump was asked in 2016 while he was running for office what his father would have said about him running for president, he said, “He would have absolutely allowed me to have done it.” Allowed?? Despite being seventy years old, Trump answered as if he were an adolescent in an oedipal battle with his father who had died seventeen years earlier.
In August of 2016, I was speaking with my father on the phone about the presidential election, and he was addressing his confusion as to why Trump was acting so erratically. This was at a time when there were several articles being written out about how Trump’s advisers were having difficulty getting him to stop tweeting his aggressive thoughts and feelings. I was surprised when my father asked me what my understanding as a psychiatrist was regarding Trump’s behavior. Usually, my father has his own ideas about why things are the way they are and enjoys teaching me what he feels the truth is. Although I had strong feelings and ideas about why Trump was acting the way he was, my father’s inquiry felt like an easy path to receiving some of the attention and respect that I continue to look for. It felt powerful and invigorating to be asked by my father what my thoughts were.
As I proceeded to describe my hypothesis of what was happening with Trump, I confidently and proudly told my father that I believed that Trump was unconsciously sabotaging his chances of winning the election because a part of him probably recognized he wasn’t worthy and/or capable of being successful in that position. I went on to say that Trump appeared to be more comfortable complaining about, and fighting against, the system that he believed was conspiring against his bid to be elected. In response, my father said, “Well, whatever’s going on, I wish he would just shut up because if Hillary wins, it’ll be horrible for Israel.” Despite giving my father what I felt was my intellectual gold, he only commented on what was important to him.
Since Trump has taken office, I have tried to engage my father, and others within my family and in the Orthodox Jewish community, about my concerns with Trump’s exaggerations and lying, along with his xenophobia, all of which appear to be playing on the fears and insecurities of his support base. Almost invariably I hear, “Yeah, he’s a little crazy, but he’ll be better than Obama ever was,” or something like, “Don’t be such a bad sport. You guys lost; deal with it!” And when people were protesting peacefully around the country, I would hear, “When Obama won, we never acted this way.” When I explained that it’s a wonderful thing that we live in a place where we have the right to protest, my words usually fell on deaf ears. I couldn’t believe that Trump’s behavior was being downplayed. By questioning it, I was automatically labeled by some as having drunk the liberal Kool-Aid. Some inferred that I must believe that Israel wasn’t without sin in its fight to live in peace with the Palestinians. Others accused me of wanting a socialist state. It became clear that, in parts of my family and within the wider community of Orthodox Jews, there was an “us-versus-them” mentality. It’s frustrating to be told that my thoughts and clinical ideas about unfolding events are really just politically motivated.
It is especially difficult for me to be thrown into a category where family and friends wrongly assume that I must not care about Israel enough, or that I am more sympathetic to the plight of Syrian refugees than to the safety of Israelis and Americans. I try to explain that my love for Israel is separate from my feelings for anybody who is being trampled on by Trump’s process. No lives should be dismissed as unimportant. All this feels surreal as I try to emphasize that any end, even Israel’s security, that follows an inappropriate process is dangerously fragile and not worth depending on.
The online environment of Facebook has taken center stage as the arena of choice for many Jews to fight about politics in general and about Trump specifically. I had a “friend” on Facebook say that in continuing to attack Trump’s behavior, I was forgetting the Holocaust. I was told that Trump’s policies were protecting Americans by keeping “dangerous” people outside our borders. The fact that innocent people were being harmed, they said, was an unfortunate but necessary side effect. Conversely, a few Jewish patients I treat who are children of Holocaust survivors fear that another Holocaust is more likely because of Trump’s policies and his association with the likes of Steve Bannon. They are afraid that those in bed with white nationalists send a message to anti-Semitic people that it is safe to act out their racist and prejudiced agendas.
I recently spent the Jewish holiday of Passover with my family at a resort where a conservative political writer had been hired to speak. My family and I attended the talk, which I assumed would be pro-Trump. I sat with my father while the speaker made clear that he was not happy with Trump and, furthermore, he felt that Trump’s leadership style was dangerous. I almost laughed out loud as I watched my father’s mouth drop open. During the question-and-answer session, I asked about the impact on Orthodox Jews voting for a man who has such a flawed process of leading, yet who strongly supports the State of Israel. The speaker validated my concerns by responding that the ends do not justify the means, stating emphatically, “President Trump needs to shut up and just let those he has selected for his Cabinet do their jobs and push their conservative agenda forward.” Afterward, my father minimized what he had heard as if acknowledging the speaker’s full message would leave him too vulnerable. In the end, I felt as if I had won a battle. Perhaps, more importantly, this situation illustrates the dance my father and I often fall into when we unknowingly work out where we stand in relationship to each other.
My father and I, like Donald and his father, are men with unique flavors of insecurity. Unwittingly, we use each other to make a case for the verdict we already believe about ourselves. Donald and I are expert at putting our fathers on pedestals while at the same time trying to knock them off in order to make room for us to have our time being seen as special. A part of us believes this will lead to feeling special, but it’s fleeting. It only lasts long enough to make us keep wishing for it again and again. Unfortunately, since it’s a cover for our true negative beliefs about ourselves, we often sabotage and cut short our stay on this shaky pedestal. It’s a precarious perch for us. A lonely view from a place we actually don’t feel we fully deserve.
On the night that Donald Trump won the election, he couldn’t be found for a number of hours for comment on his momentous victory. In Leslie Stahl’s 60 Minutes interview aired three days later, he was asked where he had been during those hours. He soberly responded, “I realized this is a whole different life for me.” It was as if the president-elect had never imagined actually winning. He seemed stunned that he had knocked out his formidable opponent and now would be expected to put his angry fighter persona on the shelf and go to work as the next president. Is that what he really wanted? One wonders if he even had a victory speech prepared at all.
As with all adults, Donald Trump’s early development created who we are witnessing. Children need to receive love and attention in order to feel secure, but they receive only the love and attention that their parents are capable of providing. Indeed, his father’s intensity left its mark on the entire family. Donald’s oldest brother essentially killed himself under his father’s rule. This tragedy must have played a prominent role in the formation of Donald’s identity and left minimal room to rebel against his father’s authority, except through competition in the realm of business success. Despite their appreciation for each other, the tension between father and son caused Donald psychological wounds that still fester. To compensate, Donald Trump puffs himself up to project a macho image that appeals to many of his followers. But it’s empty, a defense against his fear of seeming weak and ineffectual like his brother. Before being elected, Trump could treat people as he wished, using his wealth and status as a means to achieve his goals. As the president of the United States, he is expected to handle issues more delicately and follow the checks and balances that make up our democratic society. Unfortunately for him and possibly the nation, his strengths that got him elected president don’t ensure success in that position.
Trump’s base of support saw in him the strength to be powerful in ways they didn’t see in themselves and/or in past leadership. What they may not be aware of is that President Trump appears to question his own ability to deliver what they are seeking. Evidence of this can be seen in his use of lying, distortion, marginalization, and the firing of those he fears are disloyal. Our fathers did the best they could with the resources they had, and our unique connection with them helps fill the gaps where we feel deficient. Despite the moments of contention, and maybe even because of them, I feel fortunate to have a relationship with a father who continues to do his part to help our relationship become closer. I’m also grateful for the insight I’ve received through psychotherapy to address those parts of myself that are either stuck or confused by my past. It’s unfortunate that our president has not figured out how to heal himself or at least learn how to do his job without being defensive and aggressive with those that disagree with him. I feel for the young parts of the president that are trying desperately to help him swim through rough waters despite fear of drowning. What most concerns me is whether we Americans can tread water long enough to come together and avoid being pulled under.
Steve Wruble, M.D., is an accomplished singer-songwriter and storyteller. He has won the Moth StorySLAM, for which he uses a pseudonym in SLAM competitions. Dr. Wruble is also a board-certified child and adult psychiatrist in private practice in Manhattan and Ridgewood, New Jersey, at the Venn Center. He specializes in anxiety disorders, trauma, and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorders. He attended medical school in his hometown of Memphis, Tennessee, and did his general psychiatry residency at Northwestern University. He did his child psychiatry fellowship at the Institute for Juvenile Research at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he was chief fellow.
References
Dean, Michelle. 2016. “Making the Man: To Understand Trump, Look at His Relationship with his Dad.” The Guardian, March 26. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/mar/26/donald-trump-fred-trump-father-relationship-business-real-estate-art-of-deal.
Horowitz, Jason. 2016. “Fred Trump Taught His Son the Essentials of ShowBoating Self-Promotion.” New York Times, August 12. www.nytimes.com/2016/08/13/us/politics/fred-donald-trump-father.html?_r=0.