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US 2016 Presidential Election
- Thread starter pecan
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Columbo
Never again
Well I tied in my reason for being so vocal about my support of Trump due to loyalty to Inigo. I mean I didn't mind Trump beforehand and thought that there were times that he was getting a rough time of it by the media. But I wasn't vocal about it, not until after Inigo through her actions of supporting Trump inspired me to be more vocal about him.
And yes Inigo is no longer around here at the moment. Which is a shame. Though sometimes I get scared she might post again and get angry at me.
If Inigo stopped supporting Trump and hated supporters like me I would wonder if it had anything to do with me or if it was some other reason.
Thanks for the honest response. I just wish when you were being more vocal about him you were making better arguments for him, not just being silly with what you say. A lot of the things he is doing seems despicable to me,(and I think many others on the forum) but if you think otherwise, and actually want to fight for him then explain to us why you do think he is doing a good thing, not just flippant one liners about him making america great again. Help us to understand another point of view.
Columbo
Never again
fine. i will.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/news/article.cfm?c_id=2&objectid=11863033
Book reveals: Even as a child Donald Trump was a horror
A pint-sized bully who loved to pull girls' hair and once lobbed rocks at a toddler in his playpen. A loud-mouthed classroom know-all who could never admit he was wrong and boasted of giving the music teacher a black eye. And a sporting show-off who yearned to hear the crowd's applause . . . but who would smash his baseball bat in fury if he didn't win, according to Daily Mail.
Arrogant, over-bearing, thin-skinned, determined, and not exactly great with the ladies - does this portrait of a child growing up in Fifties surburban New York sound like a certain grown-up (well, sort of grown-up) currently strutting the world stage? It was Aristotle who said "Give me the child until he's seven and I will show you the man", and Donald Trump, now 70, would certainly agree.
The 45th U.S. President insists he's much the same character now as he was when he was in junior school. According to Trump Revealed, a new biography compiled by Washington Post journalists who spoke to dozens of people who knew Trump as a child, he's not wrong. The psychological resemblance is uncanny, and not a little disconcerting.
Born in June 1946, Trump was the fourth of five children to Fred Trump, a ruthless Queens builder and property developer, and his Scottish-born wife, Mary, an immigrant who had fled poverty on the Isle of Lewis and met Fred at a dance in New York. Trump Sr was a dour, authoritarian patriarch who dressed in a jacket and tie even at home. A workaholic, he was already very rich by the time Donald arrived. They lived in a 23-room, red-brick, mock Georgian mansion in the well-to-do Jamaica Estates neighbourhood of Queens. They were the envy of their neighbours with a chauffeur, cook, colour television, intercom system and two Cadillacs with consecutive personalised number plates (virtually nobody had one back then but, of course, the showy Trumps had two).
A Facebook posting on Donald Trump's page: "#TBT With my family growing up- I'm on the left". Photo/Facebook
Donald - with his ten-speed Italian racing bike and a huge, elaborate model train set - made the local children green with envy.
He clearly left an impression on his neighbours, classmates and teachers because so many could remember at least one chilling anecdote about him 60 years later. When a ball bounced into their garden, he threatened to tell his father and the police about those responsible. Dennis Burnham, who lived next door, was a toddler when his mother briefly put him in a playpen in their garden. She returned a few minutes later to find the current U.S. president, then aged five or six, standing at his fence throwing rocks at the little boy. His mother warned Dennis to "stay away from the Trumps" as they didn't want him "beaten up" by the family bully.
Another local child, Steven Nachtigall, now a 66-year-old doctor, said he never forgot Trump, a 'loudmouth bully', once jumping off his bike and pummelling another boy. The disturbing image remained in his brain decades later, he said, because "it was so unusual and terrifying at that age". Young Donald - whose nicknames at school included Donny, The Trumpet and Flat Top (for the blond pompadour hairstyle he had even as a child) - picked mercilessly on his own little brother, Robert, a quiet and sensitive child.
The future property tycoon later liked to boast how he once stole Robert's building blocks and, so pleased with what he built, glued them together so his brother could never use them again. Bullies are usually cowards, but Donald had a gutsy side. Former babysitter Frank Biggs recalls taking the five-year-old to explore a sewer pipe that was being built in the neighbourhood. To his amazement, as dusk fell, the child followed him into the darkness without flinching.
With his siblings, Donald went to a smart private primary school called Kew-Fores, where he quickly became notorious for being unruly, going around with a gang of boys who pulled girls' hair and talked during class. "He was so headstrong and determined," recalled former teacher Ann Trees. "He would sit with his arms folded with this look on his face - I used the word surly - almost daring you to say one thing or another that wouldn't settle with him."
It's an image that anyone who saw one of the 2016 Republican presidential debates can easily imagine. Ditto, a former classmate, recalled a boy who would never admit he was wrong, no matter how trivial the subject. "He had a reputation for saying anything that came into his head," he added. Trump spent so much time in detention that the punishment was nicknamed 'DT' in his honour. When he was seven, he yanked classmate Sharon Mazzarella's pigtails. She chased him downstairs and smashed him over the head with her metal lunchbox. Trump admits he was a troublemaker at primary school. "I liked to stir things up and I liked to test people," he said years later. "It wasn't malicious so much as it was aggressive." Trump bragged for a long time that, aged eight, he almost got expelled for giving his music teacher a black eye "because I didn't think he knew anything about music". However, it later emerged he had exaggerated. The teacher, Charles Walker, remembered Trump as supremely attention-seeking. Told on his deathbed that Trump was running for president, he reportedly remarked that even at ten, Donny had been a "little s**t".
Trump was more successful at sports than he was in class. He adored baseball and, needless to say, played it aggressively. He loved to hit balls directly at the fielders rather than away from them. A team-mate recalled lending Trump his bat once, only to see him do badly and furiously smash it on concrete, cracking it and not bothering to apologise. Trump's home life offers clues to his fierce competitiveness and limited social skills at school.
A portrait of Trump in 1983. Photo/Getty Images
Moustachioed Trump Sr was a tight-fisted and dour disciplinarian who was determined to toughen up his sons so they could follow him into a life as a ruthless, cost-cutting businessman. The children were banned from having pets or calling each other nicknames at home, and were urged to earn pocket money by collecting empty bottles for their deposits. Donald and his brothers needed to be 'killers' in everything they did, he urged.
Young Donald and his school pal Peter Brant, who became a publishing tycoon, found some freedom by sneaking into Manhattan on Saturday mornings and mooching around the big city. West Side Story, the musical about warring gangs, was a Broadway hit at the time and the two boys emulated the hoodlums by buying flick knives in a shop where they normally bought stink bombs and fake vomit.
Trump hardly seemed that serious a rebel, but when his authoritarian father discovered his knife collection and the secret Saturday trips, he decided drastic action was needed.In 1959, 13-year-old Donald was packed off to New York Military Academy, a strict Army-style boarding school 70 miles outside the city. Some have speculated that Trump never got over such a harsh banishment by the father he tried so hard to emulate. Off went that hairdo for a crewcut as Trump had to knuckle down to a harsh regime ruled by a drill sergeant who smacked students in the face if they disobeyed him, and punished academic under-achievers by making them box each other.
Offences included unpolished shoes, "not walking properly" and "holding hands with a young lady". Years later, that drill sergeant, Theodore Dobias, recalled how Trump "just wanted to be first in everything - and he wanted people to know he was first".
It was the sort of place where the stocky, athletic and hyper-competitive Trump could thrive, and he did. He loved to compete for medals for best-made bed or shiniest shoes, earning a reputation as intensely meticulous, just as his Scottish-born mother had been.
Boasting loudly of each of his father's new business successes, he assured other students he would be famous one day.
Promoted steadily up the cadet ranks to become a captain - a sort of senior prefect - he loved wielding his authority, although he was famously soft-spoken. He once ordered a cadet to be whacked on the backside with a broomstick for performing a drill badly.
On inspection duty, he found an unmade bed and hurled the sheets on the floor. Its incensed owner, Ted Levine, recalls hitting Trump with a broom, whereupon furious Donald tried to push him out of a second-floor window before they were separated by other cadets. Trump, Mr Levine recalls, would threaten to "break" anyone who defied him.
Trump Revealed is a new biography compiled by Washington Post journalists. Photo/Getty Images
Book reveals: Even as a child Donald Trump was a horror
A pint-sized bully who loved to pull girls' hair and once lobbed rocks at a toddler in his playpen. A loud-mouthed classroom know-all who could never admit he was wrong and boasted of giving the music teacher a black eye. And a sporting show-off who yearned to hear the crowd's applause . . . but who would smash his baseball bat in fury if he didn't win, according to Daily Mail.
Arrogant, over-bearing, thin-skinned, determined, and not exactly great with the ladies - does this portrait of a child growing up in Fifties surburban New York sound like a certain grown-up (well, sort of grown-up) currently strutting the world stage? It was Aristotle who said "Give me the child until he's seven and I will show you the man", and Donald Trump, now 70, would certainly agree.
The 45th U.S. President insists he's much the same character now as he was when he was in junior school. According to Trump Revealed, a new biography compiled by Washington Post journalists who spoke to dozens of people who knew Trump as a child, he's not wrong. The psychological resemblance is uncanny, and not a little disconcerting.
Born in June 1946, Trump was the fourth of five children to Fred Trump, a ruthless Queens builder and property developer, and his Scottish-born wife, Mary, an immigrant who had fled poverty on the Isle of Lewis and met Fred at a dance in New York. Trump Sr was a dour, authoritarian patriarch who dressed in a jacket and tie even at home. A workaholic, he was already very rich by the time Donald arrived. They lived in a 23-room, red-brick, mock Georgian mansion in the well-to-do Jamaica Estates neighbourhood of Queens. They were the envy of their neighbours with a chauffeur, cook, colour television, intercom system and two Cadillacs with consecutive personalised number plates (virtually nobody had one back then but, of course, the showy Trumps had two).
A Facebook posting on Donald Trump's page: "#TBT With my family growing up- I'm on the left". Photo/Facebook
Donald - with his ten-speed Italian racing bike and a huge, elaborate model train set - made the local children green with envy.
He clearly left an impression on his neighbours, classmates and teachers because so many could remember at least one chilling anecdote about him 60 years later. When a ball bounced into their garden, he threatened to tell his father and the police about those responsible. Dennis Burnham, who lived next door, was a toddler when his mother briefly put him in a playpen in their garden. She returned a few minutes later to find the current U.S. president, then aged five or six, standing at his fence throwing rocks at the little boy. His mother warned Dennis to "stay away from the Trumps" as they didn't want him "beaten up" by the family bully.
Another local child, Steven Nachtigall, now a 66-year-old doctor, said he never forgot Trump, a 'loudmouth bully', once jumping off his bike and pummelling another boy. The disturbing image remained in his brain decades later, he said, because "it was so unusual and terrifying at that age". Young Donald - whose nicknames at school included Donny, The Trumpet and Flat Top (for the blond pompadour hairstyle he had even as a child) - picked mercilessly on his own little brother, Robert, a quiet and sensitive child.
The future property tycoon later liked to boast how he once stole Robert's building blocks and, so pleased with what he built, glued them together so his brother could never use them again. Bullies are usually cowards, but Donald had a gutsy side. Former babysitter Frank Biggs recalls taking the five-year-old to explore a sewer pipe that was being built in the neighbourhood. To his amazement, as dusk fell, the child followed him into the darkness without flinching.
With his siblings, Donald went to a smart private primary school called Kew-Fores, where he quickly became notorious for being unruly, going around with a gang of boys who pulled girls' hair and talked during class. "He was so headstrong and determined," recalled former teacher Ann Trees. "He would sit with his arms folded with this look on his face - I used the word surly - almost daring you to say one thing or another that wouldn't settle with him."
It's an image that anyone who saw one of the 2016 Republican presidential debates can easily imagine. Ditto, a former classmate, recalled a boy who would never admit he was wrong, no matter how trivial the subject. "He had a reputation for saying anything that came into his head," he added. Trump spent so much time in detention that the punishment was nicknamed 'DT' in his honour. When he was seven, he yanked classmate Sharon Mazzarella's pigtails. She chased him downstairs and smashed him over the head with her metal lunchbox. Trump admits he was a troublemaker at primary school. "I liked to stir things up and I liked to test people," he said years later. "It wasn't malicious so much as it was aggressive." Trump bragged for a long time that, aged eight, he almost got expelled for giving his music teacher a black eye "because I didn't think he knew anything about music". However, it later emerged he had exaggerated. The teacher, Charles Walker, remembered Trump as supremely attention-seeking. Told on his deathbed that Trump was running for president, he reportedly remarked that even at ten, Donny had been a "little s**t".
Trump was more successful at sports than he was in class. He adored baseball and, needless to say, played it aggressively. He loved to hit balls directly at the fielders rather than away from them. A team-mate recalled lending Trump his bat once, only to see him do badly and furiously smash it on concrete, cracking it and not bothering to apologise. Trump's home life offers clues to his fierce competitiveness and limited social skills at school.
A portrait of Trump in 1983. Photo/Getty Images
Moustachioed Trump Sr was a tight-fisted and dour disciplinarian who was determined to toughen up his sons so they could follow him into a life as a ruthless, cost-cutting businessman. The children were banned from having pets or calling each other nicknames at home, and were urged to earn pocket money by collecting empty bottles for their deposits. Donald and his brothers needed to be 'killers' in everything they did, he urged.
Young Donald and his school pal Peter Brant, who became a publishing tycoon, found some freedom by sneaking into Manhattan on Saturday mornings and mooching around the big city. West Side Story, the musical about warring gangs, was a Broadway hit at the time and the two boys emulated the hoodlums by buying flick knives in a shop where they normally bought stink bombs and fake vomit.
Trump hardly seemed that serious a rebel, but when his authoritarian father discovered his knife collection and the secret Saturday trips, he decided drastic action was needed.In 1959, 13-year-old Donald was packed off to New York Military Academy, a strict Army-style boarding school 70 miles outside the city. Some have speculated that Trump never got over such a harsh banishment by the father he tried so hard to emulate. Off went that hairdo for a crewcut as Trump had to knuckle down to a harsh regime ruled by a drill sergeant who smacked students in the face if they disobeyed him, and punished academic under-achievers by making them box each other.
Offences included unpolished shoes, "not walking properly" and "holding hands with a young lady". Years later, that drill sergeant, Theodore Dobias, recalled how Trump "just wanted to be first in everything - and he wanted people to know he was first".
It was the sort of place where the stocky, athletic and hyper-competitive Trump could thrive, and he did. He loved to compete for medals for best-made bed or shiniest shoes, earning a reputation as intensely meticulous, just as his Scottish-born mother had been.
Boasting loudly of each of his father's new business successes, he assured other students he would be famous one day.
Promoted steadily up the cadet ranks to become a captain - a sort of senior prefect - he loved wielding his authority, although he was famously soft-spoken. He once ordered a cadet to be whacked on the backside with a broomstick for performing a drill badly.
On inspection duty, he found an unmade bed and hurled the sheets on the floor. Its incensed owner, Ted Levine, recalls hitting Trump with a broom, whereupon furious Donald tried to push him out of a second-floor window before they were separated by other cadets. Trump, Mr Levine recalls, would threaten to "break" anyone who defied him.
Trump Revealed is a new biography compiled by Washington Post journalists. Photo/Getty Images
part two
He had a lighter side, though, loving to listen to Elvis Presley and Johnny Matthis on his record player. The man now famous for his orange perma-tan would occasionally screw an ultra-violet lightbulb into an overhead socket and tell his room-mate that it was time to get a tan. "We're going to the beach!" he'd joke.
Trump appalled millions during the presidential election campaign last year when his ugly bragging about groping women was exposed. Suffice to say it wasn't the first time he has denigrated them. In his last year at boarding school, he earned a reputation for inviting pretty girls on to campus and ostentatiously showing them around (the boys weren't allowed out of school grounds).
"They were beautiful, gorgeous women, dressed straight out of [the smart department store] Saks Fifth Avenue," said George White, a former classmate. Trump wasn't quite so generous in return, once telling White that one of his own female visitors was a "dog". Even so, Trump was named "Ladies' Man" in his final school yearbook, posing for a photo with a young woman who was recently identified as a school secretary.
Even in his late teens, Trump -possessing a confidence that convinced other cadets he viewed school as simply a step towards greater things - saw his future mapped out. It was a future following his father into making a fortune as a property developer. Put in charge of the academy's drill team for New York City's Columbus Day parade, Trump - wearing full uniform and white gloves - marched along Fifth Avenue to St Patrick's Cathedral, where he shook hands with the city's Catholic cardinals. However, clearly his mind was on higher things. "You know what?" he whispered to a school mate. "I'd really like to own some of this real estate some day."
Of course, we all know he did. Leaving school, he avoided the Vietnam War draft, not just once but five times, and followed his father into the business. "When I look at myself in first grade [aged six] and I look at myself now, I'm basically the same," Trump told a biographer. "The temperament is not that different."
From most other adults, such an observation would sound endearing. Now, as he stands with his finger on the nuclear trigger, as President of the United States, it's more than a little terrifying.
He had a lighter side, though, loving to listen to Elvis Presley and Johnny Matthis on his record player. The man now famous for his orange perma-tan would occasionally screw an ultra-violet lightbulb into an overhead socket and tell his room-mate that it was time to get a tan. "We're going to the beach!" he'd joke.
Trump appalled millions during the presidential election campaign last year when his ugly bragging about groping women was exposed. Suffice to say it wasn't the first time he has denigrated them. In his last year at boarding school, he earned a reputation for inviting pretty girls on to campus and ostentatiously showing them around (the boys weren't allowed out of school grounds).
"They were beautiful, gorgeous women, dressed straight out of [the smart department store] Saks Fifth Avenue," said George White, a former classmate. Trump wasn't quite so generous in return, once telling White that one of his own female visitors was a "dog". Even so, Trump was named "Ladies' Man" in his final school yearbook, posing for a photo with a young woman who was recently identified as a school secretary.
Even in his late teens, Trump -possessing a confidence that convinced other cadets he viewed school as simply a step towards greater things - saw his future mapped out. It was a future following his father into making a fortune as a property developer. Put in charge of the academy's drill team for New York City's Columbus Day parade, Trump - wearing full uniform and white gloves - marched along Fifth Avenue to St Patrick's Cathedral, where he shook hands with the city's Catholic cardinals. However, clearly his mind was on higher things. "You know what?" he whispered to a school mate. "I'd really like to own some of this real estate some day."
Of course, we all know he did. Leaving school, he avoided the Vietnam War draft, not just once but five times, and followed his father into the business. "When I look at myself in first grade [aged six] and I look at myself now, I'm basically the same," Trump told a biographer. "The temperament is not that different."
From most other adults, such an observation would sound endearing. Now, as he stands with his finger on the nuclear trigger, as President of the United States, it's more than a little terrifying.
I look forward to it
Columbo
Never again
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/news/article.cfm?c_id=2&objectid=11863033
Book reveals: Even as a child Donald Trump was a horror
The 45th U.S. President insists he's much the same character now as he was when he was in junior school. Photo/Getty Images
A pint-sized bully who loved to pull girls' hair and once lobbed rocks at a toddler in his playpen. A loud-mouthed classroom know-all who could never admit he was wrong and boasted of giving the music teacher a black eye. And a sporting show-off who yearned to hear the crowd's applause . . . but who would smash his baseball bat in fury if he didn't win, according to Daily Mail.
Arrogant, over-bearing, thin-skinned, determined, and not exactly great with the ladies - does this portrait of a child growing up in Fifties surburban New York sound like a certain grown-up (well, sort of grown-up) currently strutting the world stage? It was Aristotle who said "Give me the child until he's seven and I will show you the man", and Donald Trump, now 70, would certainly agree.
The 45th U.S. President insists he's much the same character now as he was when he was in junior school. According to Trump Revealed, a new biography compiled by Washington Post journalists who spoke to dozens of people who knew Trump as a child, he's not wrong. The psychological resemblance is uncanny, and not a little disconcerting.
Born in June 1946, Trump was the fourth of five children to Fred Trump, a ruthless Queens builder and property developer, and his Scottish-born wife, Mary, an immigrant who had fled poverty on the Isle of Lewis and met Fred at a dance in New York. Trump Sr was a dour, authoritarian patriarch who dressed in a jacket and tie even at home. A workaholic, he was already very rich by the time Donald arrived. They lived in a 23-room, red-brick, mock Georgian mansion in the well-to-do Jamaica Estates neighbourhood of Queens. They were the envy of their neighbours with a chauffeur, cook, colour television, intercom system and two Cadillacs with consecutive personalised number plates (virtually nobody had one back then but, of course, the showy Trumps had two).
A Facebook posting on Donald Trump's page: "#TBT With my family growing up- I'm on the left". Photo/Facebook
Donald - with his ten-speed Italian racing bike and a huge, elaborate model train set - made the local children green with envy.
He clearly left an impression on his neighbours, classmates and teachers because so many could remember at least one chilling anecdote about him 60 years later. When a ball bounced into their garden, he threatened to tell his father and the police about those responsible. Dennis Burnham, who lived next door, was a toddler when his mother briefly put him in a playpen in their garden. She returned a few minutes later to find the current U.S. president, then aged five or six, standing at his fence throwing rocks at the little boy. His mother warned Dennis to "stay away from the Trumps" as they didn't want him "beaten up" by the family bully.
Another local child, Steven Nachtigall, now a 66-year-old doctor, said he never forgot Trump, a 'loudmouth bully', once jumping off his bike and pummelling another boy. The disturbing image remained in his brain decades later, he said, because "it was so unusual and terrifying at that age". Young Donald - whose nicknames at school included Donny, The Trumpet and Flat Top (for the blond pompadour hairstyle he had even as a child) - picked mercilessly on his own little brother, Robert, a quiet and sensitive child.
The future property tycoon later liked to boast how he once stole Robert's building blocks and, so pleased with what he built, glued them together so his brother could never use them again. Bullies are usually cowards, but Donald had a gutsy side. Former babysitter Frank Biggs recalls taking the five-year-old to explore a sewer pipe that was being built in the neighbourhood. To his amazement, as dusk fell, the child followed him into the darkness without flinching.
With his siblings, Donald went to a smart private primary school called Kew-Fores, where he quickly became notorious for being unruly, going around with a gang of boys who pulled girls' hair and talked during class. "He was so headstrong and determined," recalled former teacher Ann Trees. "He would sit with his arms folded with this look on his face - I used the word surly - almost daring you to say one thing or another that wouldn't settle with him."
It's an image that anyone who saw one of the 2016 Republican presidential debates can easily imagine. Ditto, a former classmate, recalled a boy who would never admit he was wrong, no matter how trivial the subject. "He had a reputation for saying anything that came into his head," he added. Trump spent so much time in detention that the punishment was nicknamed 'DT' in his honour. When he was seven, he yanked classmate Sharon Mazzarella's pigtails. She chased him downstairs and smashed him over the head with her metal lunchbox. Trump admits he was a troublemaker at primary school. "I liked to stir things up and I liked to test people," he said years later. "It wasn't malicious so much as it was aggressive." Trump bragged for a long time that, aged eight, he almost got expelled for giving his music teacher a black eye "because I didn't think he knew anything about music". However, it later emerged he had exaggerated. The teacher, Charles Walker, remembered Trump as supremely attention-seeking. Told on his deathbed that Trump was running for president, he reportedly remarked that even at ten, Donny had been a "little s**t".
Trump was more successful at sports than he was in class. He adored baseball and, needless to say, played it aggressively. He loved to hit balls directly at the fielders rather than away from them. A team-mate recalled lending Trump his bat once, only to see him do badly and furiously smash it on concrete, cracking it and not bothering to apologise. Trump's home life offers clues to his fierce competitiveness and limited social skills at school.
A portrait of Trump in 1983. Photo/Getty Images
Moustachioed Trump Sr was a tight-fisted and dour disciplinarian who was determined to toughen up his sons so they could follow him into a life as a ruthless, cost-cutting businessman. The children were banned from having pets or calling each other nicknames at home, and were urged to earn pocket money by collecting empty bottles for their deposits. Donald and his brothers needed to be 'killers' in everything they did, he urged.
Young Donald and his school pal Peter Brant, who became a publishing tycoon, found some freedom by sneaking into Manhattan on Saturday mornings and mooching around the big city. West Side Story, the musical about warring gangs, was a Broadway hit at the time and the two boys emulated the hoodlums by buying flick knives in a shop where they normally bought stink bombs and fake vomit.
Trump hardly seemed that serious a rebel, but when his authoritarian father discovered his knife collection and the secret Saturday trips, he decided drastic action was needed.In 1959, 13-year-old Donald was packed off to New York Military Academy, a strict Army-style boarding school 70 miles outside the city. Some have speculated that Trump never got over such a harsh banishment by the father he tried so hard to emulate. Off went that hairdo for a crewcut as Trump had to knuckle down to a harsh regime ruled by a drill sergeant who smacked students in the face if they disobeyed him, and punished academic under-achievers by making them box each other.
Offences included unpolished shoes, "not walking properly" and "holding hands with a young lady". Years later, that drill sergeant, Theodore Dobias, recalled how Trump "just wanted to be first in everything - and he wanted people to know he was first".
It was the sort of place where the stocky, athletic and hyper-competitive Trump could thrive, and he did. He loved to compete for medals for best-made bed or shiniest shoes, earning a reputation as intensely meticulous, just as his Scottish-born mother had been.
Boasting loudly of each of his father's new business successes, he assured other students he would be famous one day.
Promoted steadily up the cadet ranks to become a captain - a sort of senior prefect - he loved wielding his authority, although he was famously soft-spoken. He once ordered a cadet to be whacked on the backside with a broomstick for performing a drill badly.
On inspection duty, he found an unmade bed and hurled the sheets on the floor. Its incensed owner, Ted Levine, recalls hitting Trump with a broom, whereupon furious Donald tried to push him out of a second-floor window before they were separated by other cadets. Trump, Mr Levine recalls, would threaten to "break" anyone who defied him.
Trump Revealed is a new biography compiled by Washington Post journalists. Photo/Getty Images
Are the media that desperate that they have to resort to talking about his childhood as a way of portraying him in a negative light? Seems they are just throwing anything onto the page to try and make it stick.
kxk
SAPIOSEXUAL
Poor Angela, no wonder she looks so puzzled by him, 11 times she had to explain EU
So what have you observed about Trump during his travels???
- Trump is most comfortable with despots, tyrants and dictators
He looks very happy bowing, dancing and grovelling in the Middle East
-Trump is most uncomfortable with sophisticated Europeans
He has to shove em, and manhandle em, he is way too touchy or grasping. Forcing them to turn away, and try to avoid him...
- Melania can't stand him
- Melania got big bucks to spend on her wardrobe, and she looked trophy wife overdressed
- The Pope hates him and called him fat
He does not comprehend Europe
....He crunched hands, shoved shoulders and struck poses. He scoffed chocolates, ignored protocol and harangued heads of state. He denied saying things he had said, then said things that showed he did not understand.
Trump's big trip began well – but in Europe his flaws were painfully exposed
Once he reached Brussels, Trump seemed to abandon Obama’s foreign policy rule of ‘don’t do stupid shit’, and his inability to work by consensus was stark
Over the past nine days, as the Trump White House went on the road around the Middle East and Europe, the rest of the world learned first hand what America already knows: this is a presidency unlike any other in history.
Trump left the US under the shadow of a wide-ranging investigation into contacts between his aides and Russia before and after the November presidential election. In his absence from Washington, that shadow has only grown longer and darker.
The latest in the string of daily developments was a report on Friday night that Jared Kushner asked the Russians to set up a secret channel of communication with the Trump transition team, bypassing US diplomatic and intelligence channels. It was a stunning revelation, given that Kushner is not just the president’s son-in-law but his closest foreign policy adviser. When Trump met Israeli prime minster Benjamin Netanyahu, for example, Kushner was in the room but national security adviser HR McMaster was left outside.
The White House’s primary aim for the tour was to achieve Barack Obama’s touchstone goal: “Don’t do stupid shit.” For a few days, that seemed to work. The Saudi and Israeli legs of the trip were tightly controlled, Trump stuck to his scripted remarks, and the president made his keynote counter-terrorism speech in Riyadh in a deliberate and determined manner.
It was only when Air Force One reached Brussels that the caravan began to lose its way. That was perhaps inevitable for both policy and personal reasons. With King Salman and Netanyahu, there was a shared list of priorities and talking points: a view that Iran was a primary enemy, the desirability of huge US arms contracts, denunciations of terrorism. Trump was the centre of attention, literally treated like royalty and assured the things he did and said were “historic”.
In Europe, Trump had to play a different role: a senior member of a group seeking to act in concert and by consensus. But Trump does not do collegial, a fact that was grasped before in Europe but is now viscerally understood after the president shoved the Montenegrin prime minister out of the way to get front and centre of a Nato leaders’ photo-op.
These are the ways of a man without curiosity. He does not read books, and listens fitfully and reluctantly to others. He is reportedly fed up with McMaster because he goes on for too long about world affairs. The briefing papers McMaster’s team drew up before this trip had to be condensed to a few bullet points on a single page for each issue, and even then Trump grew bored of reviewing them before departure, and groused about how long the whole excursion would take.
The lack of preparation began to show when he reached Brussels. At Nato, his prepared remarks at a 9/11 monument were largely a retread of his campaign speech about the alliance, which in turn was constructed around a misunderstanding of how it works. He accused the US allies gathered alongside him (in the shadow of a shattered fragment of the World Trade Center) of being deadbeats who had not paid their club dues.
In terms of the common expenses of running Nato headquarters and infrastructure, this was simply not true. When it comes to the goal of Nato members spending 2% of their GDP on defence, the deadline is 2024, and the European allies have been increasing their expenditure since the Russian annexation of Crimea. And they have been contributing in other ways, including by way of blood and human lives in Afghanistan.
Trump’s denunciation of the Germans at a European Union meeting for being “bad, very bad,” because of the large number of German brand cars sold in the US, showed his comprehension of the global auto trade was just as shaky. The vast majority of German cars sold in the US are made there by American workers. For example, the BMW plant in South Carolina is the company’s largest anywhere in the world. It is also the biggest exporter of cars from the US.
Trump lack of grasp of the realities of geopolitical alliances and global trade is a reminder that he came to office at the age of 70, having spent his entire adult life in a single business, real estate – a business he inherited, and which was built on bluster, gaming the legal system and forming partnerships of convenience with equally ruthless operators.
By the time they reach three score and ten, people generally do not change their ways, and Trump’s grand tour has served a reminder of that. He has not suddenly transcended the world of real estate to become a statesman. He is just going about the work of a president as if it is an extension of his real estate business.
To the Belgian prime minister, he explained his antipathy to the EU because of obstacles he met while trying to send up golf courses in Europe. The same failure to adapt is likely to be a big factor in the Trump family’s troubles with Russia. Both the president and Kushner have grown up going from one deal to another, looking for finance wherever it came from, in secret when necessary.
They evidently assumed affairs of state could be conducted in the same way. What is yet to be proven, but which should become clearer once they return to the US to face further investigation, is whether they will be proved wrong in that assumption, or whether the United States will be suborned and remade in the image of the Trump Organisation.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/may/27/donald-trump-foreign-trip-europe
And - Melania is the boss
Is it that or is it people desperately trying to understand the psychology behind the man?
Columbo
Never again
Well if they are it is not a very good way to do it. I mean for one thing you change too much from the ages of 14 and 70. The other thing is that they interview people who have their own skewered versions of events.
Columbo
Never again
A silly video.
Columbo
Never again
http://globalnews.ca/news/3487328/donald-trump-anthem-twitter/
Wow god forbid an American President actually shows some passion.
Wow god forbid an American President actually shows some passion.
oddjob
Well-Known Member
But it captures the truth somehow.