A TikTok video by contributor “dh479.710” explains in excruciating detail how Donald Trump became the cruel, chaotic person that has caused so much destruction to our government and our nation. I’m not sure who this individual is, but from where I sit he absolutely nails it, and so I felt it worthwhile to transcribe his video and present it here for your consideration. You can watch the full video at TikTok.

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Transcript:

I’ve been wondering for years how Donald Trump became so cruel, and so sadistic. So I decided to do some research on child trauma and dark psychology to understand what’s actually going on here.

He mocked a disabled reporter on national television and laughed. He called for violence at his campaign rallies time and time again and reveled in it. (See “Personal Observations” below)

He stood in front of crowds and fantasized about jailing his political enemies while the crowd cheered.

In 2020, Donald Trump’s own niece, a clinical psychologist named Mary Trump, published a book¹ explaining exactly how her uncle became this cruel.

Trump sued her for $100 million to stop the book from being published; she published it anyway.

Here are the five childhood events that turned Donald Trump into who he is today.

1: The Mother who disappeared

Donald Trump was two years old when his mother was hospitalized for six months following a series of emergency operations. She nearly died, and when she came back she was never really quite the same.

Psychologist John Bowlby at the Tavistock Institute in London identified what happens to a child when the primary caregiver disappears during the first two years of life. He called it “maternal deprivation” – the complete failure of the attachment bond at the exact moment when the brain is learning whether other people can be trusted and whether other people’s pain matters.

Bowlby found that children who lose their primary caregiver before age 2 develop what he called “affectionless psychopathy,” the permanent ability to feel remorse; the permanent inability to feel empathy; the permanent inability to form genuine emotional bonds with other human beings.

Donald Trump was 2 years old. His brain was forming its first understanding of what other people are. And the person who was supposed to show him that other people matter simply was not there.

Mary Trump described her grandmother as “ghostly absent” for most of Donald’s childhood. A woman who attended to her children when it was convenient for her, not when they actually needed her. Mary Trump argues that her uncle has never watched another human being suffer and felt anything. Not the disabled reporter, not the separated families at the border, not the people dying without healthcare. The person who was supposed to teach her that other people matter was not there and nobody else ever filled that gap.

2) The Brother his father destroyed

Donald Trump’s father had two sons. Donald’s older brother Freddy was the firstborn. Freddy was kind, Freddy was sensitive, and Freddy loved people. Freddy Trump wanted to be a pilot more than anything in the world. His father called Freddy weak every single day. He mocked him at the dinner table in front of the whole family constantly. When Freddy apologized, his father mocked the apology too. He would repeat it back in a sneering way. His father wanted a killer. Freddy was a human being and his father destroyed him for it. Mary Trump, Freddy’s own daughter, documented what happened to her father. She wrote that Donald Trump’s father dismantled Freddy by devaluing and degrading every aspect of his personality until all that was left was a man who hated himself and spent every day trying to earn the approval of a father who would never give it.

Freddy became an alcoholic; he lost his pilot’s license; he ended up doing maintenance work for the family business. He died at 42, broken, invisible, and alone.

Trump’s father did not just destroy Freddy; he used Freddy as a live lesson to Donald. “This is what happens to weak people in my household. This is what being sensitive gets you. This is what happens when you feel things.” Freddy was not weak. Freddy was the only one in that family who made his daughter Mary feel loved.

Trump’s father destroyed the kindest person in the family and made Donald watch every single day. Donald never forgot the lesson as he watched his brother get destroyed daily and never spoke to defend him.

3) The moment Donald chose to become his father

Watching was not enough for Trump’s father. Donald did not just observe what happened to his older brother Freddy – he participated. Mary Trump documented that Donald began mocking Freddy alongside his father. He learned to sneer at his brother’s sensitivity the same way his father did. He learned to call Freddy weak. He learned to degrade him in front of other people. He chose his father’s side completely and permanently.

Anna Freud, one of the most important psychologists of the 20th Century, identified the mechanism that produces this exact behavior in 1936. She called it “identification with the aggressor.” When a child cannot escape an abuser, it cannot defeat them, the brain chooses a third option: become the abuser. Adopt their cruelty. Perform the humiliation on the target. Make yourself indistinguishable from the thing that terrifies you so you don’t become the target. Anna Freud found that this is not a completely conscious choice. If you become the aggressor, no one can use the aggressors tactics against you. But a child pays a price for that safety. Mary Trump describes what it cost Donald in clinical terms.

She wrote that Trump’s father short-circuited Donald’s ability to develop and experience the entire spectrum of human emotion. By limiting Donald’s access to his own feelings, his father perverted his son’s perception of the world and damaged his ability to live in it. Trump’s father did not just destroy Freddy; he used Freddy’s destruction to cut Donald off from his own humanity. He made Donald the monster he was. Mary Trump argues her uncle Donald has not felt genuine empathy for another human being since he was a small child sitting at the dinner table, learning to laugh while his brother was destroyed in front of him.

Donald didn’t lose his humanity, his father³ Fred took it from him.

4) Malignant narcissism

In 1964, psychologist and philosopher Erich Fromm identified the most severe personality pathology in clinical history. He called it malignant narcissism. The combination of four traits that together produce what Fromm called the purest form of evil a human being can become: 1) narcissism 2) paranoia 3) antisocial personality and 4) sadism. Fromm said malignant narcissism represents the most vicious destructiveness and lack of humanity that psychology has ever documented. This is not ordinary cruelty, it’s cruelty that feeds on itself, cruelty that needs to escalate, cruelty that is never satisfied.

Trump has mocked a gold star family³ on national television. He has suggested that a female journalist was bleeding from a facelift. He called a gold star widow who had just buried her husband, and fumbled her husband’s name, and told her that he knew what he had signed up for. She said it made her cry even worse. In my opinion, those are not political acts, those are the acts of someone who experiences other peoples’ pain as entertainment.

John Gardner, a psychologist who taught at Johns Hopkins medical school for 28 years, applied Fromm’s concept of malignant narcissism to Trump specifically. He called it the most destructive and dangerous collection of psychiatric symptoms possible in a leader.

In 2017, 27 psychiatrists and mental health experts published a book called 𝑇ℎ𝑒 𝐷𝑎𝑛𝑔𝑒𝑟𝑜𝑢𝑠 𝐶𝑎𝑠𝑒 𝑜𝑓 𝐷𝑜𝑛𝑎𝑙𝑑 𝑇𝑟𝑢𝑚𝑝. They said their duty to warn the public superseded professional neutrality; they put it on record. Mary Trump, who sat across the dinner table from Donald for decades and holds a PhD in clinical psychology said he meets all nine DSM² criteria for narcissistic personality disorder. She said he will never change. She said the damage was done too early and too completely. She wrote that Donald continues to exist as he was at 3 years old: incapable of growing, incapable of learning, unable to regulate his emotions or take in new information. And the country gave this three-year-old the most powerful office in the world.

5) Why he needs the chaos.

Trump’s presidency has been defined by one thing above everything else: chaos. Daily explosions, constant firings, threats in every direction. Reversals that make no sense. A government that bounces from crisis to crisis without ever stopping. Mary Trump argues this is not incompetence – he does it because it feels familiar to him.  Chaos is the only environment her uncle has ever felt safe in.

Sigmund Freud identified this pattern over a century ago. He called it “repetition compulsion,” the unconscious drive to re-create the conditions of your original trauma in childhood – not because you want to suffer, but because familiar pain feels safer than unfamiliar calm.

Psychologist Bessel van der Kolk at Boston University spent decades studying how childhood trauma rewires the brain. He found that people who grow up in chaotic households don’t just tolerate chaos as adults – the recreate it, because calm feels like the moment before something bad happens. Chaos feels like home. Donald Trump grew up in a house where his father destroyed people at the dinner table every night for fun. Where nothing was safe. Where love was withheld and cruelty was the only currency that mattered. That was his normal from the day he was born, so when he got power he recreated the chaos. The daily explosions, the firings, the threats, the reversals, the cruelty aimed at every direction at once.

Van der Kolk’s research suggests this is not incompetence – Trump recreates chaos because chaos is the only thing that has ever felt like home, and now the entire country lives inside chaos. This is what happens when you emotionally destroy someone at a young age. A mother who vanishes at the exact moment the brain learns how to treat other people; a father who tortured his oldest son in front of his younger son every single day; a younger son who watched that torture and chose to become the torturer and the abuser rather than defend the older brother; a clinical diagnosis that 27 psychologists put on the record; a man so traumatized by his own childhood that he needs the entire country to live inside chaos with him.

Mary Trump documented all of it. She watched it happen from the inside. Donald Trump’s older brother Freddy paid for it with his life. Donald paid for it with his humanity. And the rest of us are paying for this damaged person’s reality right now.

End of Transcript

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Personal observations:

For those who doubt Trump has mocked a disabled reporter:

You don’t think Trump has ever advocated violence? We won’t even talk about January 6th, 2021.

As I read of Fred Trump’s destruction of his son Freddy, including mocking his apologies, was immediately put in mind of the depiction of Denethor son of Ecthelion in the Lord of the Rings movies. This is exactly how he was depicted in his treatment of the favored son Boromir and the rejected son Faramir, and it was painful to watch. This devastating exchange happens in “The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.” Before Faramir rides out to retake Osgiliath, Denethor tells him he wishes Faramir had died instead of Boromir. Faramir turns back and asks, “If I should return, think better of me, father,” to which Denethor chillingly replies, “That will depend on the manner of your return”. Excruciating cruelty, portrayed with horrid accuracy by John Noble.

The description of Fred Trump’s hatred of weakness is echoed in detail in a mini-essay by xenophonsXiphos; I have bowdlerized it slightly for a family-friendly blog.

I have experienced this kind of sadistic, passionate hatred for perceived weakness in my own life, as early as 1963. Bullies abound in the world, and they cannot be appeased. The only courses of action is to become like them (witness LeFou and Gaston in Disney’s “Beauty and the Beast,”) or to hit back at them so hard that they find an easier target with fewer consequences. They can not, sadly, be taught the error of their ways. What is certain is that in the American school system, while administrators crow loudly about their “zero tolerance policies,” these are nothing more than lip service to a problem they do not care to deal with and end up punishing victims often more than perpetrators. Not hard to understand why things like Columbine happen.

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Footnotes

¹ Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man

² Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders

³ A “gold star family” is a family who has lost at least one member to military conflict. During World War II, it was common for people to hang service flags in their window to indicate how many family members were actively serving n the military, blue for living and gold for deceased. In August 2024 the Red Star Service Banner was created by the Red Star Foundation. Creating a symbol of hope and recognition for the families who have lost a service member or veteran to suicide. On January 28, 2025, Rep. Jack Bergman (MI) read the Red Star Service Banner into the Congressional Record. You can still see these flags in many windows today.