It's not the Trumpish mob today, just Donny himself and his patriarchal audience of one, Fred Trump, who funneled most of his fortune into propping up the myth of The Donald. Mary Trump gave us the inside picture of the entire dysfunctional Trump family's finances and emotional emptiness, explaining in large part how her crazy uncle got that way under the same forces that drove brother Freddy into alcoholism and an early and bitterly neglected death.
If the soul is left in darkness, sins will be committed. The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but the one who causes the darkness.
Victor Hugo, Les Miserables
My father had withered and died beneath the cruelty and contempt of my grandfather. I had lost him when he was only forty-two and I was sixteen.
Fred seemed to have no emotional needs at all. In fact, he was a high-functioning sociopath. Symptoms of sociopathy include a lack of empathy, a facility for lying, an indifference to right and wrong, abusive behavior, and a lack of interest in the rights of others.
Donald responded to his mother's absence due to illness, and his father's neglect, due to total lack of interest, with increasing bullying, disrespect, and aggressiveness. Unfortunately, this got Fred's attention and approval, and then hardened into Donald's permanent character.
Fred Trump came to validate, encourage, and champion the things about Donald that rendered him essentially unlovable and that were in part the direct result of Fred's abuse.
I can only give a tip-of-the tongue taste of the disasters that flowed through the Trump family in what follows. You'll have to read Mary Trump's book for her version of the story, and a good deal more if you want to understand it in detail.