A lad out of control brings disgrace to his mother.
~Proverbs 29:15
It all begins with the mother.
My approach to applied psychoanalysis always starts with the dynamic between infant and mother. Melanie Klein, an Austrian British pioneer in the psychoanalysis of children—from the generation after Freud—developed her revolutionary theories by observing young children’s actual interactions with mothers and primary caregivers, and expanded them into a framework that can help the applied psychoanalyst draw upon the historical record to illuminate the echoes of these early relationships. In Klein’s construct, the interactions between the infant and his mother play a determinative role in shaping essential elements of the individual’s relationships with the self, with others, and with the outside world that develop over a lifetime and profoundly influence the adult’s psychological outlook and health.
Not surprisingly, Kleinian analysis joins the long list of precedents and protocols for which Donald Trump presents a unique challenge, if not an outright disruption. Less has been written about the details of Donald Trump’s early biography in general, and about his mother in particular, than has been written about any US president in recent memory. Perhaps the thinness of the historical record contributes to so many Trump observers asking how an individual could develop such a temperament, let alone get elected president. The dearth of biographical detail lends added resonance to the questions that occupied so many of us in 2017, such as: What happened? How did we get here? How did he get here?
We can hope that future historians and biographers will more closely examine Trump’s life story to gain further insight into the events of his formative years that contributed to the development of a character so profoundly lacking in the attributes appropriate for the office he was so tenaciously compelled to pursue. As a Kleinian, I’m particularly hopeful that attention will be paid to Trump’s relationship with his mother, which I am predisposed to thinking will offer valuable insight into his psychological development.
The Kleinian approach can help identify early childhood dynamics, which can influence the adult’s attitudes toward the capacity to feel empathy for others, the ability to mourn, and the capacity to take responsibility for one’s own behavior—especially acknowledging one’s own destructive or cruel behavior, without having to blame others. Only by facing one’s own destructive fantasies and actions can one be able genuinely to love others. Otherwise it always feels phony or put-on. This failure helps us see Trump’s comfort with conning others, with exaggerating what he can do in a seemingly real way while remaining deceptive.
It is the self-deception for which he might ultimately pay a price, but in the interval, many Americans are already paying. One criterion for my psychiatric residency, something implicitly understood and openly discussed with fellow residents, was that successful psychiatric residents must be aware of their own sadism. Trump’s grandiosity and need for attention are lifelong attempts to compensate for and deny the pain of self-recognition. It’s unlikely by now for him to want to discover the intrapsychic processes at play that have brought him to where he is today.
Nevertheless, despite what could almost be seen as a deliberate or conscious attempt on Trump’s part to do otherwise, the historical record does yield enough information about his mother and their relationship to shed some valuable light on the potential origins of what we now recognize as Trump’s character. If Donald Trump walked into my office as a patient, once I got beyond the obvious first question (about which more later), I would want to know about his early childhood. Without asking him directly, I would listen closely to any discussion of his early years for clues about his capacity to form long-term relationships, his capacity to tolerate disappointments and frustration, and also what qualities he has that he is most proud of. In the absence of that opportunity, however, we can return to what he and others have said and written about his mother, Mary Trump, to create a distinct picture of how her conduct as a mother could have contributed to Trump’s tendencies to lie, to brag, to bully others, and to evade taking responsibility for those and other behaviors.
The portrait of Mary Trump that can be drawn from available resources is by no means comprehensive, and lacks the detail of previous portraits of Stanley Ann Dunham or Barbara Bush. But what we do know about her is consistent enough to form a distinct image of Mary Trump as a person and as a mother—and of Donald Trump. And even if the portrait of Mary Trump that emerges is less detailed than the more familiar portrait of Donald’s father, Fred Trump—who Donald cites as the bigger influence in his life—the assembled pieces fit together to delineate a mother-son dynamic that offers a lot to any consideration of what made him the man he is today.
First let’s consider what we do know about Mary Trump, whose relatively low profile in Trump’s published universe inspired Politico’s Michael Kruse to describe her as “a ghost in [Trump’s] voluminous public record, a cardboard cutout of a character” in his November 2017 article “The Mystery of Mary Trump,” which set out to add some much-needed detail to the known portrait of the president’s mother, and to highlight the general rarity and vagueness of Donald’s references to her.
As the public was reminded during Trump’s early 2017 crackdown on immigration policies, Mary Anne MacLeod, an eighteen-year-old fleeing rural poverty, and the youngest of ten children with minimal prospects in her homeland, arrived in New York City from Scotland in 1930. After six years of working as a domestic and nanny, including a period for a wealthy Long Island family, she married Fred Trump, an already up-and-coming real estate developer. They started having children in 1937—Maryanne, the eldest, followed by Fred Jr. in 1938, Elizabeth in 1942, and Donald in 1946. By the time she had her fifth and final child, Robert, in 1948, Fred had moved his family into the biggest house on the biggest lot in the Queens neighborhood of Jamaica Estates, and Mary had hired her own Scottish maid. Robert’s birth was difficult, followed by near-fatal hemorrhaging and a series of subsequent life-threatening infections and surgeries, which required several years of recovery and left Mary in fragile health thereafter. Still, Mary took to the life of being a prosperous real estate tycoon’s wife, managing a house with servants, busying herself with volunteer work, and famously riding around Queens in a rose-colored Rolls-Royce with vanity plates, collecting the change from her husband’s buildings’ laundry machines. She stood by her wealthy husband—reportedly a notorious philanderer—until his death in 1999, following him to the grave a year later.
Beyond the known facts of her life, Donald Trump has had remarkably little to say about his mother. It’s certainly well known that she wasn’t as big an influence in his life as his father; in Politico, Kruse quotes a former staffer as saying that his mother’s likeness was “noticeably absent” from his Trump Tower office, where the only photograph on his desk was that of his father—which for Trump’s first few months in the Oval Office was the only photo behind his desk, until he later added his mother’s portrait. The absence is consistent with how a former business associate and close friend contrasts the two relationships to Kruse, saying that Trump “was in awe of his father . . . and very detached from his mother”—so much so, Kruse points out, that he misspelled her maiden name in his 2009 book, Think Like a Champion.
The most cogent explanation for the absence of Mary Trump from her son’s memory and frame of mind is that it is reflective of her absence from his presence growing up. In Kruse’s account, which ranks as the most detailed look into his mother’s role in Donald’s life, Mary Trump simply wasn’t very present in Donald’s childhood. Kruse reports that Trump’s childhood friends attest to her absence: Mark Golding, described as “an early pal,” reports that while Trump’s father “would be around and watch him play,” his mother “didn’t interact in that way.” Brother Fred’s friend Lou Droesch says that the neighborhood kids “rarely saw Mrs. Trump,” although they “did see a lot of the housekeeper”—especially noteworthy because of Mary’s line of work before marrying Fred Trump, perhaps suggesting that she saw the work of mothering as something to be delegated to the help. It is also possible that as the tenth child, Mary may have been mothered more by her older siblings than by her own mother.
When neighborhood kids would come over to play, Mary Trump usually would not make an appearance, Kruse reports, only Fred, who “would come down to say hello after work. ‘He was more willing to play with us, if you will, than his mom,’ Golding says.” Another childhood friend tells Kruse that sometimes “the maid would appear with a platter of finger sandwiches with the crusts cut off. ‘Like you’d serve at a cocktail party,’ says Lou Droesch, who also spent time at the Trump house as a boy.” Playmates who were invited to stay for dinner report, “The meal was formal in feel if simple in cuisine.” When both parents were present, only one did most of the talking. “‘Fred was fairly strict and wanted to know how everybody’s days went,’” another friend, Paul Onish, told Kruse. “And Trump’s mother? ‘I don’t remember Mary talking that much.’”
Donald and his siblings appeared to accept their mother’s remoteness. “They spoke well of their mom, or never had a harsh word,” Kruse reports Droesch told him, “but she just did not interact with the kids when their friends were around.” Another childhood friend points out that Trump did talk about his father, especially his telling him to be “a king” and “a killer,” but adds that Donald “didn’t tell [him] what his mother’s advice was. He didn’t say anything about her. Not a word.”
One theory about Donald’s mother’s scant presence in her children’s lives traces her absence back to her poor health. It’s certainly a plausible scenario that Mary would retreat to a life out of sight of her children’s playmates if her health was just too fragile to allow otherwise. But Kruse describes her life after her recovery as a “busy routine,” including “her volunteering, her ladies’ luncheons,” and her coin-collecting trips to her husband’s properties, suggesting that a lack of stamina wasn’t the reason behind her low family profile.
Biographer Gwenda Blair reports a remarkable story that would stand out even if it weren’t so relatively rare in its offering particulars of Trump family life. For her family biography The Trumps, Blair spoke to Donald’s eldest sister, Maryanne Trump Barry, who told Blair that during her mother’s illness her father “came home and told me she wasn’t expected to live . . . but I should go to school and he’d call me if anything changed. That’s right—go to school as usual!” The command to his daughter speaks volumes about Fred’s lack of compassion, of course, but also suggests that Mary’s absence from the family must have been already established before she was almost entirely and permanently removed from it. It also speaks to Fred’s powerful work ethic, which eclipsed all else in family life. Such circumstances leave no room for the children to express anxiety or concern—especially since they could use their worries as excuses to stay home from school. Fred was always suspicious of potential slackers. Maryanne just rolled her eyes, seemingly dismissive of her father’s strict demands.
When a mother is as disengaged as the Mary Trump portrayed in these anecdotes, the absence can reverberate throughout her children’s lifetimes. As readers familiar with the Kleinian approach of my previous books may recall, the adverse impact of the lack of a nurturing maternal presence can last a lifetime.
The relationship between mother and infant can provide an early blueprint for the model of the child’s inner world that influences all his subsequent relationships. The mother serves as the first object of the infant’s focus, and when he is being contentedly fed by an attentive mother, he experiences her as a loving extension of himself. The baby’s positive experiences at the breast—which we use as a metaphor for the mother, regardless of how the baby is fed—forges his capacity to connect with a source of loving nourishment, the vital core of enduring self-esteem. The mother’s loving smiles and warmth provide connection and emotional nourishment. But negative experiences can have a lasting impact as well, and a deprived or uncomfortable baby could visualize the breast as the source of his discomfort, and experience a distracted or disengaged mother as the source of frustration.
Lacking the ability to perceive that he derives both contentment and frustration from the same breast, the baby develops two primitive but distinct relationships with two different ideas of mother—one with the good breast/good mother, with whom he has a positive relationship that helps him manage his frustration, the other with the bad breast/bad mother, who is experienced as the source of the frustration that she is not helping him manage. The baby sees his own essential goodness in the good mother, and projects the unmanageable negative feelings onto the bad mother.
This primitive perspective is of only temporary usefulness, however, and the baby runs the risk of forever distorting his lifelong perceptions of the universe if he doesn’t move beyond this simplistic approach to understanding his world. The mother plays a central role in this next stage of development, helping her baby transform his discomfort and anxiety into more manageable feelings. By sensing the baby’s emotions and reacting accordingly, the mother processes the baby’s experience and returns the feelings to the child in a form he can more easily tolerate. This leads the baby to develop his own sense of his emotions, empowering him to internalize the maternal function and transforming the bad feelings on his own, while remaining connected to his mother.
In this next stage of healthy development, the infant recognizes he has not two mothers but one, who is able both to comfort and disappoint him; this leads to the understanding that he can love and hate the same person, from which stems his essential capacity to experience ambivalence, as well as to internalize and recognize that the destructiveness he had previously projected comes from within. The baby’s initial comprehension that his rage can damage the person he loves creates anxiety about her well-being, but the mother’s ability to sustain their connection helps the baby develop the ability to regulate frightening feelings. He learns how to understand and respond to the mental states of the people in his life by creating an internal representation of himself, whose accuracy is impacted by the level of nurturing he receives. This development of the child’s psychic reality has lasting implications, empowering the child to manage anxiety when facing challenges, and to feel and contain unpleasant emotions when circumstances call for them.
There are any number of reasons, however, why the mother might not be able to feel her child’s discomfort or recognize his needs: the mother may be overly depressed, distracted or distant, or the baby may simply be too active for his needs to be interpreted, or for him to take in or even perceive her loving efforts. Whatever the reason, when mother and infant do not engage in this vital exchange, the effect on the child’s psychological development may be significant. His fear remains unrelieved, and the split between good and bad does not heal. Relying on primitive and ineffective tools to manage his anxiety, but still desperate to rid himself of his bad and conflicting feelings that he lacks the ability to integrate, the emotionally uncontained baby continues to project his negative feelings on his surroundings, dependent upon unevolved mechanisms to protect what has become a compensatory idealized image of himself and his inner world. Devoid of ambiguity, and peopled by unreal figures, his world remains simplified, placing parts of his personality at risk.
The relationship between the infant and the outside world establishes a framework that one returns to throughout life, according to Melanie Klein. The child who fails to progress into the process of integration will later face calamitous consequences in adulthood, the signs of which I look for when I am assessing patients in my practice. The infant’s unintegrated, split worldview will reappear in adult perspectives that are easily identifiable reflections of the individual’s fragmented state of mind. He fills his world with caricatures of evil that he can attack without remorse, seeing himself as victim rather than aggressor or victimizer. Evading accountability for a role he can’t recognize, unburdened by any threats to his idealized self-image that a sense of responsibility might bring, his feelings of infallibility flourish, unchallenged by reality in his fantasy world. The adult who is mired in the infant’s primitive patterns of division will oversimplify his world by viewing it with black-and-white thinking or friend-or-foe characterizations, or by reducing reality to an epic contest between righteous and evil, good and bad, winners and losers. For decades, I have observed these symptoms of arrested psychological development in my patients. Now we see them in our president, Donald Trump.
Because Trump doesn’t say much about his mother in general or her maternal presence in particular, it’s hard to imagine him writing or saying anything critical about her mothering style; from what we know about how Trump describes anything and everything else in the world, any criticism of Mary Trump’s maternal presence would in his self-centered perspective somehow reflect poorly on him, which he would of course avoid or refuse to do. (It would also open him up for criticism from others, and he always rejected sounding defensive.) Conversely, had she lavished maternal love on her middle son, he would no doubt have let us know that as well—again, likely as a reflection of his lovability.
Instead, Mary Trump is as scarce a presence in Donald Trump’s accounts of his life as she is in his contemporaries’ memories of Trump family life—or was in his Oval Office photo display until he added her photo to join his father’s, which one can imagine was suggested to improve the optics. Writing about his “very traditional” family in Trump: The Art of the Deal, Trump describes his mother as “the perfect housewife”—hardly a warm verbal embrace of a son for his mother. Elaborating on that label, he continues, “That didn’t mean she sat around playing bridge and talking on the phone. There were five children in all, and besides taking care of us, she cooked and cleaned and darned socks and did charity work at the local hospital.” Again, there’s nothing about the portrait Trump offers of his mother that indicates he regards her as a loving, nurturing force. (With all those servants, did she really clean and darn socks—or even cook? We’ll never know, unless siblings Maryanne, Elizabeth, or Robert speak up.) And, no doubt unintentionally, Donald’s remark reveals the implication that perfect housewives have no power—which may shed light on why years later his commencing his affair with Marla Maples coincided with Ivana’s beginning to exert her power running a hotel business.
Trump’s longest anecdote about his mother is perhaps the most revealing. “Looking back, I realize now that I got some of my sense of showmanship from my mother,” he writes. “She always had a flair for the dramatic and the grand.” Again, showmanship, drama, and grandeur are hardly the stuff of maternal authenticity that a son might reflect back upon remembering a different kind of mother-son dynamic. When a child is hungry for love he often imitates the remote parent as a way to have that parent inside, as a way of keeping that parent close at hand. It helps growth and development when the child’s inner world might otherwise be more barren. At the same time, he might also—and I think this is the case—identify with that quality she did possess, i.e., remoteness. He is remote at moments, alternating between being in touch with interviewers and being completely detached. Identification with the parent who causes injury is a defense against expressing open criticism. In Donald’s case, I think he identified with each of his parents’ most threatening qualities: maternal remoteness and paternal tyrannical demands. Nevertheless, his continuation of the anecdote confirms her lasting impact on him: “I still remember my mother, who is Scottish by birth, sitting in front of the television set to watch Queen Elizabeth’s coronation and not budging for an entire day. She was just enthralled by the pomp and circumstance, the whole idea of royalty and glamour. I also remember my father that day, pacing around impatiently. ‘For Christ’s sake, Mary,’ he’d say. ‘Enough is enough, turn it off. They’re all a bunch of con artists.’ My mother didn’t even look up. They were total opposites in that sense. My mother loves splendor and magnificence, while my father, who is very down-to-earth, gets excited only by competence and efficiency.” What Donald obliquely acknowledged was that his father recognized con artists and did not find them particularly notable or likable.
The anecdote is remarkable for its specificity, which is scarce in Trump’s childhood recollections of his mother. Whether it necessarily looms as large in Trump’s unconscious as it does in his presentation of his childhood is impossible to know, but it certainly continues the representation of Mary Trump as distracted and self-involved, with the additional element of identifying the “pomp and circumstance” of the royal family as getting her attention when her own family doesn’t. More revealing, Trump’s including this particular anecdote sets up ongoing themes with an exactness that would be a stretch to ascribe to a first-time memoirist: his mother demonstrating that what gets her attention is very much like what young Donald grew up to try to re-create, even at one point comparing his Trump Tower home to Versailles; and his father speaking the unspeakable truth of the con behind the illusion, at once both affirming and condemning the con artist his son would grow into, putting him on notice that the son could never legitimately or authentically provide the mother what she wants.
Elsewhere in The Art of the Deal, Trump offers another clue that his feelings about his mother were largely unconscious. “It’s funny,” he writes. “My own mother was a housewife all her life. And yet it’s turned out that I’ve hired a lot of women for top jobs, and they’ve been among my best people. Often, in fact, they are far more effective than the men around them.” Beyond the apparent sexism, Trump calls attention to the likelihood that his feelings about his mother remain unconscious with his awkward claim that “and yet it’s turned out” that he has hired women for “top” positions despite his mother being a housewife. What one has to do with the other is far from clear; what is clear is the backhanded insult he gives his mother by trying to compliment his female employees. There is something here about ownership as well, that the women working for him are his best people. Again it is about function, not about other qualities. His mother sounds like she was respected—something his father demanded from his children—and at the same time seen either as not relevant or, at best, as a kind of servant herself. Unconsciously this reinforces the child’s denial of dependency, especially denial of a need for warmth, affection, and love. Rather, the mother here is virtually indistinguishable from housekeeper, more a function than a person. Howard Stern pointed out something similar after Trump told him that marrying Melania turned his business fortunes around. Stern said, “You talk like she’s a lucky charm, not a person.”
His employees aren’t the only women in Trump’s life who he compares to his mother. “Part of the problem I’ve had with women has been in having to compare them to my incredible mother, Mary Trump,” Trump writes in The Art of the Comeback. “My mother is smart as hell.” Close observers of Trump are not surprised to hear him find his mother smart and incredible, because rating people is such a common defense for him, one that likely goes back to early childhood efforts to manage the anxiety of uncertainty by asserting control over one’s world by judging others. But smart and incredible are of course not the same as loving, connecting, and maternal. The most specific aspect of this particular comparison of other women to his mother is of course the result—the problem he has with women.
The Art of the Comeback quote is indicative of the imprecision with which Trump speaks or writes when he actually does talk about his mother. Kruse catalogs many of the platitudes Trump has evoked in discussing his mother, noting that “in interviews over the past several decades, the president has called her ‘fantastic’ and ‘tremendous’ and ‘very warm’—‘a homemaker’ who ‘loved it.’” Kruse adds that Trump told Martha Stewart on her television show that his mother “used to do a great job” with her meat loaf; on his beloved Twitter, Trump referred to his mother simply as “a wonderful person” and “a great beauty.” And on the 2016 campaign trail, Kruse notes, Trump followed a claim that “nobody respects women more than [him],” with the hollow claim that the “greatest person ever was my mother. Believe me, the greatest.” Between the wild claim about his respect for women and his familiar “believe me” entreaty, Trump is sending distinct signals that whatever he says about his mother is different from—if not opposite to—how he really feels, or at least how he also feels.
Kruse also cites generic words of maternal wisdom that Trump put in front of his Twitter followers no fewer than seven times in two years: “Advice from my mother, Mary MacLeod Trump: Trust in God and be true to yourself.” Is it too much sophistry on my part to infer that being true to yourself is the same as being true to God, i.e., that he is God? Kruse also cites a Sunday Times of London interview in which Trump told the reporter, “The values she gave to me were strong values. . . . I wish I could have picked up all of them, but I didn’t, obviously.” This moment of humility and seeming self-reflection raises the question of which of his mother’s values he was referring to. One also wonders whether he ignored them or rejected them actively—or if he was thinking of his mother’s equally unguarded and almost certainly haunting moment of reflection in the 1990 pages of Vanity Fair, where it was reported that she’d once asked her daughter-in-law Ivana, “What kind of son have I created?”
IT WAS IN ANOTHER discussion of his mother’s values that Trump offered some of the most vivid, and almost certainly unintentional, glimpses into his interior life. In a Q&A in the final pages of his 2007 self-help tome, Think Big: Make It Happen in Business and Life, Trump actually acknowledges that his upbringing—particularly his relationship with his father—left him with a level of mental health that was something shy of ideal, letting slip that he regards himself as “screwed up.” In answer to the question of the best advice that his parents gave him growing up, Trump responds: “They gave me different advice. My mother was a wife who was really a great homemaker. She always said, ‘Be happy!’ She wanted me to be happy. My father understood me more and he said, ‘I want you to be successful.’ He was a very driven kind of guy. That’s why I’m so screwed up, because I had a father that pushed me pretty hard. My father was a tough man, but he was a good man. He was a kind man, and he would tell me to always do something that you love. Now I’m happy, so I ended up doing what both of my parents wanted me to do.” He revealed more self-awareness than we usually see from him. While not revealing a moral compass, he does seem to “get” what his parents were about. He needed immediately to backpedal from what he wrote about his father—rather than continue to elaborate on how that “tough man” affected him—and what things his father was particularly tough about.
As we’ve seen before, Trump reveals more than intended in his uncharacteristically candid moment of self-awareness. Perhaps most telling is the admission that his father “understood [him] more”—which suggests of course that his mother “understood” him less. Trump expressed a similar sentiment to biographer Tim O’Brien, to whom he made the impossible claim, “My father was more directly related to me.” Perhaps Trump has had at least some awareness of his disregard for his mother; Kruse quotes a 1992 interview with Charlie Rose in which Trump says, “One of my attorneys said, ‘Always count on your mother.’ Now, you know, I maybe took advantage of my mother. I never appreciated her as much. . . .”
A child who doesn’t feel understood by or related to his mother grows into adulthood with his psychological development significantly disadvantaged. So much of Trump’s recognizable pathology—the familiar grandiosity, the need for reassurance that he’s well loved and seen as extraordinarily successful, and the complex process of not feeling understood—compromises one’s ability to understand others. At one level it leads to empathic failure. At another level, it has helped Trump hone his powerful capacity to “read” other people—also a compensation for not having been read by his own mother. I think that the only person in Trump’s life who really knew him—other than his first wife, Ivana—was his father. He saw his son’s great strength as well as his comfort with delinquency, which can be traced to an early breakdown in the mother-son connection.
If Mary Trump were indeed as absent from the infant Donald’s formative interactions with his mother as she was reportedly from the rest of his childhood—and remains relatively absent from his memory and from his perspective—then many of his contemporary attitudes can be read as adult expressions of deeply ingrained, lifelong limitations to his ability to embrace empathy, ambivalence, and complexity. A child needs to be confident that he is loved so he can risk hating the very person who loves him. That makes it safe enough to express the full range of feelings. If not, one retreats from complexity and nuance, and even from feeling ambivalence. This also has to do with Trump’s memory—he can say something positive one day and negative the next day about the same person. It’s harder for him to do so simultaneously, unless he’s trying to make up for criticizing someone who reminds him of his father. Then there is good on both sides.
Even Trump’s obsession with image can be traced back to infancy. In the normal, healthy dynamic, the baby looks into his mother’s eyes as she feeds him at the bottle or breast. He can see himself reflected in those eyes, feeling his love reverberate with hers. They share that in a “harmonious mix-up” described by many psychoanalysts observing mother-infant relationships in the early months.
But sometimes this vital connection isn’t sufficiently developed—because the mother is distracted, for example, or because the child is too jumpy to take her gaze—and the infant who didn’t get enough of his mother’s attention grows into an adult who hungers for attention from others. It’s easy to see how this dynamic would have evolved between Donald and his disengaged mother. The depth of his current need for attention and affirmation makes more sense when understood as an adult expression of a lifelong craving with roots in the earliest years of childhood.
An inconsistent bond between mother and infant leads to an adult inability to internalize parental love enough to build genuine self-esteem. Trump’s deficit of healthy self-esteem paradoxically thus renders him dependent upon the attention of others—particularly the media, whose attention he craves to heal the loss of his mother’s childhood gaze. These psychological stakes contribute to a relationship between Trump and the media that is beyond his control and his capacity to break away from. Unable to accept or acknowledge his deep psychological need for their admiring, affirming, or soothing gaze, he bridles against his dependency on the media, denying the legitimacy or importance of the press. When the media offer an unadmiring reflection, he experiences their criticism as their asserting a level of autonomy he knows he doesn’t himself possess. It activates the early disharmony Trump experienced with his mother, so he responds with resentment, dismissal, and even threats. He is so dependent on the press that he must reassure himself that the opposite is true, and fights back against anything that challenges his denial.
Trump’s overreaction to his treatment in the media brings to mind another critical developmental stage in the life of the infant. In healthy development, at some point after the infant has begun to internalize the affirming power of his mother’s gaze, he comes face-to-face with the power of the gaze of another—himself. French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan described the “mirror stage” in which the infant comes into contact with his own reflection. What the infant sees in the mirror, however, appears to possess more integration and self-control than he knows or physically experiences in his chaotic existence as an infant. The reflected image establishes an ideal version of the self that the individual will typically spend a lifetime pursuing—always inevitably reminding himself of the frustrating distance between the real and ideal selves whenever he repeatedly and inevitably falls short.
The infant who is confronting his own reflection without the empowering benefit of regularly receiving and returning his mother’s loving gaze will have a harder time confronting the gap between his real and ideal selves—a gap that will be experienced as being more pronounced by an infant with restless, hyperactive tendencies, which we’ll see that Donald Trump manifested in his childhood. Donald’s challenges navigating the lifelong process of knowing where to place his ideal self became even more difficult in adulthood when his ideal self was broadcast into millions of homes at a time. He soon realized that the Donald Trump reality-show character was far more successful than the man who was playing him on television. (One way to think about this is that on The Apprentice, Donald was able to become his ideal self, to claim it as if it were really his to have, his to be.) His needy bravado makes this harder to assess, because he wants reassurance far too often. But at the same time his numerous daily tweets on many different subjects reflect a grandiose, confident fantasy that as president he can say and do whatever he wants to, whenever he wants. He is unselfconscious in those tweets, much like a young teenager who is full of himself and his power in the world—not self-conscious on one level, but needing to look in the mirror regularly as well, to reaffirm his grandeur.
These days, however, when Donald Trump looks into the mirror, he also sees something else entirely. As online commenters enthusiastically reported in 2017, and as anyone familiar with Mary Trump’s personal style already knew, Donald Trump looks into the mirror and sees . . . his mother. Or, at least, his mother’s hair. Any observer can instantly understand that Donald Trump’s hair doesn’t have to look the way it does—and wouldn’t, in fact, without great forethought and effort. As enterprising Internet sleuths made very public last year, with a few pictures that spoke thousands of words, Donald Trump’s hairstyle shares an assertive disregard for both gravity and natural color with the style his mother wore. The unasked question—Hey, what’s with the hair?—that vied to be the opening salvo of a hypothetical therapy session with Trump is perhaps more effectively framed to ask: Why does Trump wear his hair so similar to the parent he felt didn’t understand him? Is he still hoping to re-create the maternal gaze he missed as an infant? Or is this just the latest of Donald Trump’s decisions crafted to elicit his father’s hard-won support? As we’ll see, Donald has a long history of trying to please his father—with very mixed results.