At last month’s Future Investment Initiative Priority Summit, Donald Trump was on stage talking, as he often does, about winners and losers, when he unexpectedly gave the losers a rare shout-out. “It’s a good thing to have a lot of losers,” he told the crowd. “I hang around with losers, actually, because it makes me feel better.” He paused for a wave of laughter before continuing: “I hate guys that are very, very successful and you have to listen to their success stories. I like people that like to listen to my success.”
For the most part, the MAGA acolytes who call Trump “Daddy” are male. And it’s men that the president has always fixated on and obsessed about: larger men, more powerful men, more beloved men.
“Surely he isn’t talking about me” is what I’m guessing went through the heads of the likes of JD Vance, Marco Rubio, Pete Hegseth, Lindsay Graham and Trump’s other loyal lapdogs when they heard the clip. But of course he was. The proof was on their feet.
Plenty has been written about the gifts of footwear bestowed on the president’s inner circle of cabinet members, agency heads, right-wing media mouthpieces and assorted others. The black Florsheim oxfords are a loyalty test wrapped in a humiliation ritual: In public, and generally with media present, Trump asks, or attempts to guess, his recipients’ shoe sizes and sends each one a pair, often in a shoebox bearing his signature. Photos of the unfortunate Rubio, feet swimming in shoes several sizes too big for him, underscore that this has nothing to do with largesse: The shoes signal who belongs to Trump. And for younger cabinet members he calls “kids,” like Rubio and Vance, they point like ugly neon arrows to the one thing that reliably explains Donald Trump: the father wound.
Trump likes it when supporters call him “Daddy,” as Tucker Carlson did at a 2024 rally when he predicted that a second Trump term would be a symbolic and punitive homecoming of the patriarchy. With unsettling relish, Carlson playacted Daddy Trump: “You’ve been a bad girl. You’ve been a bad little girl, and you’re getting a vigorous spanking right now.” Carlson’s use of a girl and not a boy was strategic, but for the most part, the MAGA acolytes who call Trump “Daddy” are male. And it’s men that the president has always fixated on and obsessed about: larger men, more powerful men, more beloved men. It’s men he wants to always be back on their heels. And the men closest to him aren’t his colleagues or collaborators. There is only one role for them in the psychodrama of his presidency: They are his failsons.
Like losers, failsons are a necessity in Trump’s world, to intimidate and torment and embarrass. He owes the life he has to a failson: his older brother, who died from complications of alcoholism at 43. Their father, Fred Trump, also saw men as either winners or losers, and he wanted his sons to be “killers.” Fred Trump Jr., known as Freddy, wasn’t interested: too good-natured, too open-minded and insufficiently tribal, Freddy joined a Jewish fraternity in college and nurtured a dream of becoming an airline pilot rather than joining the family business. Trump joined his father in ridiculing and hectoring Freddy, dismissing his aspiration by saying pilots were just bus drivers in the sky.
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It wasn’t Donald Trump’s first instance of what psychiatry calls identifying with the oppressor, but it’s the only one he’s ever acknowledged had terrible consequences, admitting in a 2020 Washington Post interview that he regrets “putting pressure” on Freddy over his career choices. But his value to his father depended on his willingness to do so. Tony Schwartz, the ghostwriter of Trump’s book “The Art of the Deal,” told “Frontline” that Donald’s relationship with Fred “accounts for a lot of what he became . . . [H]is father was a very brutal guy. He was a tough, hard-driving guy who had very, very little emotional intelligence, to use today’s terms.”
Donald Trump became the larger-than-life embodiment of the phrase “hurt people hurt people” because his father’s bullying — of Freddy, but also of anyone he saw as a personal or business obstacle — was normalized, even lionized. How else to become valuable to his father than by showing that he could bully too? Per Michael D’Antonio, author of 2015’s “Never Enough: Donald Trump and the Pursuit of Success,” Trump acknowledged that Fred was “very tough” and “very difficult” and someone who “would never let anything go.” Perhaps most salient to Trump’s development, D’Antonio suggested, was that the elder Trump “all but banished his son when he was barely 12 years old.”
Donald’s attempts to get the attention of his exacting father by way of what Trump’s niece Mary Trump wrote in her 2020 book “Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man” were “displays of narcissism, bullying and grandeur” — in other words, mirrors of Fred’s own behavior — didn’t go down as the younger Trump hoped. “They finally made my grandfather take notice, but not in a way that ameliorated any of the horror that had come before.”
When Fred packed Donald off to military school — not because he wanted to knock those qualities out of him, but to ensure that he harnessed them productively — Trump thrived in a militaristic environment where bullying was not only tolerated but encouraged. At New York Military Academy, he found a new father figure in a drill sergeant and World War II veteran named Theodore Dobias, who shared Fred Trump’s view that if you weren’t a winner, you were a loser; he regularly issued open-handed slaps to the face of cadets who displeased him. One of Trump’s former NYMA classmates told D’Antonio that Dobias regularly set up makeshift boxing rings so that “cadets with poor grades and those who had disciplinary problems [would] fight each other, whether they wanted to or not.” The drill sergeant himself allegedly recalled Fred Trump as “very tough” and “very rough on the kid.”
The Trump family’s pastor, Norman Vincent Peale, was another father figure. Peale’s 1952 book “The Power of Positive Thinking” is often credited with kicking off the self-help movement, and its sunny precepts put a gloss on a capitalist prosperity Gospel. Like Ayn Rand with a Bible, Peale painted the world as so evil and so twisted that caring about anyone other than oneself was a waste of time and potential. (D’Antonio wrote, “As he gazed upon a congregation full of executives and go-getters, Peale did all he could to help them shut out concerns about community or social justice so they could pursue their ambitions.”)
And then, of course, there was Trump’s most notorious substitute daddy, the legal attack dog Roy Cohn. The sideman of red-baiting senator Joseph McCarthy, Cohn modeled for Trump how to manipulate the media: You attack, you deny; when they hit, you hit back 10 times harder. For Trump, the main problem that dogged his first term in office was the lack of Roy Cohn: Trump wanted everyone in his administration to work on behalf of him, not on behalf of the country, and anyone who stood up to him was a loser who was shown the door and savaged in the press.
Trump’s surrogate fathers didn’t teach him how to be a man; they taught him how to be them — dishonest, disloyal cheaters who claimed that they were the real victims. (Testifying before the Senate Banking Committee in 1954, Fred Trump shed crocodile tears at being accused of unethical behavior, telling the committee that suggesting he had cheated was “very wrong, and it hurts me.”) But if these fathers were influential to Trump, they couldn’t change the fact that his own father continued to starve him of confidence and approval.
And now Trump does the same to the provisional failsons — Hegseth, Vance, Rubio and others — who have, in his second term, replaced the actual sons he spent his first term hectoring and humiliating, who are now kept mostly out of sight after high-profile failures. Still, when Don Jr. spoke at 2025’s Turning Point USA summit, shortly after Charlie Kirk’s death, he put his father on speakerphone to greet the audience, allowing the president to demonstrate that no bus is too small to throw his firstborn under. After praising Charlie and Erika Kirk to the skies, Trump asked the audience if Don Jr. “is doing a good job,” promising to fire him if he hears otherwise.
Trump has made his daddy issues everyone’s problem, and — as evidenced by the fact that he’s currently beefing with the Pope, father of fathers — he can’t keep himself from making them worse.
Don Jr. is Donald Trump’s Freddy, the child to whom he gave his name but not his love, who could only disappoint him. According to her 2017 memoir, it was Ivana’s idea to name their first child Donald, much to her husband’s dismay: “What if he’s a loser?” Like Freddy, Don Jr. longed for the chance to take a different path: Reportedly, the happiest times of his childhood were the summers he spent with his maternal grandparents in Czechoslovakia. His grandfather, Milos, taught Don Jr. to camp and to hunt, imbuing him with both a love of the outdoors and the approval he never got from his father.
Don Jr. hoped to prove himself anew with Trump’s first presidential run but made a hash of that right out of the gate, flimflammed by a Russian operative who promised dirt on Hillary Clinton. The now-infamous “If it’s what you say I love it” meeting at Trump Tower in 2015 included Paul Manafort and Jared Kushner because, as Trump fixer Michael Cohen later testified, Trump didn’t trust his son’s judgment. And the cabinet members closest in age to Don Jr. are now his stand-ins, there to take heat and humiliation for Daddy. Trump seems in particular to revel in undermining his vice president (whose own childhood was fatherless, albeit in a vastly different way), regularly making Vance jump through hoops for no reason other than making him look like a buffoon.
“The action most inimical to fathers is to view their sons as disposable,” wrote Joshua David Stein in a 2017 Fatherly piece, written in the wake of Trump’s admission that he helped his son draft false statements about the Trump Tower meeting to a New York Times reporter. Stein pointed out the obvious flaw in the official White House response that Trump had helped Junior “as any father would”: It made sense only in the unimaginable parallel world Trump had normal relationships with any of his kids.
Trump has made his daddy issues everyone’s problem, and — as evidenced by the fact that he’s currently beefing with the Pope, father of fathers — he can’t keep himself from making them worse. People Leo’s Easter-adjacent homilies found him asserting that Jesus “does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them” and that Christianity “has not infrequently been distorted by a desire for domination, entirely foreign to the way of Jesus Christ.” The Pope didn’t call Trump out by name, but he clearly saw himself in the man’s words. And, just as Cohn taught him, he hit back 10 times as hard, posting an image of himself as Jesus on Truth Social, and only deleting it when members of his base made clear that they do have a line in the sand, and it’s blasphemy.
Identifying with the oppressor was a habit observed by Sigmund Freud’s daughter, Anna, when she observed World War I veterans and noticed that in processing violence and trauma, they came to unconsciously mimic their tormentors, adopting their bearing and their behaviors as a way to feel control. Donald Trump learned this from his father, and from the father figures who followed; he learned to leverage it for his own purposes. The result is — well, we can all see the result: A president who salves his father’s wound by making sure the rest of us never forget how much it hurts.
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