THE GREAT I-AM: Did it start when he was two years old?

THURSDAY, APRIL 24, 2025

In search of The Great I-Am: Last Friday evening, sure enough! There he went again!

The person once dubbed "The Great I-Am" made his latest unfortunate statement. As far as we know, his literal statement was false. Once again, here's what he said:

Donald J. Trump
@realDonaldTrump

This is the hand of the man that the Democrats feel should be brought back to the United States, because he is such “a fine and innocent person.” They said he is not a member of MS-13, even though he’s got MS-13 tattooed onto his knuckles, and two Highly Respected Courts found that he was a member of MS-13, beat up his wife, etc. I was elected to take bad people out of the United States, among other things. I must be allowed to do my job. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!

As far as we know, the highlighted statement is false. That said, it's being blared all over Red America. There he went again!

Should major organs in Blue America be addressing this latest misstatement? Tomorrow, we'll offer the pros and the cons regarding that undiscussed question. For today, we'll focus on this:

 He once was mocked as "The Great I-Am." Today, he's known as the sitting president.

It was his latest ridiculous claim—the latest in an endless succession of ludicrous but widely repeated misstatements. Is something "wrong" with this powerful person? 

Also, how in the world—how in earth—did he get to be this way?

How did he get to be like this? In Monday morning's report, we started pointing you at one insider's explanation. In the summer of 2020, she offered her assessment of that puzzle in a major best-selling book. 

Simon and Schuster, start packing your bags! The best-seller in question was this:

Too Much and Never Enough:
How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man
By Mary L. Trump

About The Book

In this revelatory, authoritative portrait of Donald J. Trump and the toxic family that made him, Mary L. Trump, a trained clinical psychologist and Donald’s only niece, shines a bright light on the dark history of their family in order to explain how her uncle became the man who now threatens the world’s health, economic security, and social fabric.

Mary Trump spent much of her childhood in her grandparents’ large, imposing house in the heart of Queens...

For the record, that's Mary L. Trump, Ph.D. She actually is "a trained clinical psychologist"—and she said she considers her famous uncle to be "the world's most dangerous man."

Setting that assessment to the side, how did her uncle get to be the way he currently is? How did he become a person who would emit endless streams of ludicrous claims, like the apparently bogus claim he launched on the world last Friday?

We don't want to bury the lede! Early in her massive best-seller, Mary Trump asserted that, in her view, President Trump's father, Fred Trump, was "a high-functioning sociopath." 

She noted the widely-accepted fact that the children of sociopaths will often have a hard way to go. Be that as it may, she also offered his assessment of her uncle, the president:

Prologue

[...]

None of the Trump siblings emerged unscathed from my grandfather’s sociopathy and my grandmother’s illnesses, both physical and psychological, but my uncle Donald and my father, Freddy, suffered more than the rest. In order to get a complete picture of Donald, his psychopathologies, and the meaning of his dysfunctional behavior, we need a thorough family history.

In the last three years, I’ve watched as countless pundits, armchair psychologists, and journalists have kept missing the mark, using phrases such as “malignant narcissism” and “narcissistic personality disorder” in an attempt to make sense of Donald’s often bizarre and self-defeating behavior. I have no problem calling Donald a narcissist—he meets all nine criteria as outlined in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5)—but the label gets us only so far.

[...]

Does Donald have other symptoms we aren’t aware of? Are there other disorders that might have as much or more explanatory power? Maybe. A case could be made that he also meets the criteria for antisocial personality disorder, which in its most severe form is generally considered sociopathy but can also refer to chronic criminality, arrogance, and disregard for the rights of others...

The fact is, Donald’s pathologies are so complex and his behaviors so often inexplicable that coming up with an accurate and comprehensive diagnosis would require a full battery of psychological and neuropsychological tests that he’ll never sit for.

So the niece assessed. 

The fact that Mary Trump stated those views doesn't mean that those views are accurate, true or correct. Also, assessments concerning "mental illness / mental disorder" are, on a conceptual basis, more complex than are assessments of most matters of "physical illness." 

That said, Mary Trump has the background of a trained specialist—and she has a second background as a member of the president's family. She was prepared to say that her uncle is the world's most dangerous man—but also that he seems to check the boxes for what we would call a "sociopath."

In her well-written, largely undiscussed book, she said that we should fear the adult—but she was also able to pity the child. Based upon family history which was apparentlty largely passed down by her aunt Maryanne (Donald Trump's older sister), she traces the story of the dangerous man back to his father's alleged sociopathy, but also to his mother's very serious medical issues, which began when the world's most dangerous man was just two years old.

Pity the child, she was able to say. At the start of Chapter One, she takes us back to the late 1940s. Her uncle is two years old as these events take place:

CHAPTER ONE: The House

“Daddy, Mom’s bleeding!”

They’d lived in the “House,” as my grandparents’ home was known, for less than a year, and it still felt unfamiliar, especially in the middle of the night, so when twelve-year-old Maryanne found her mother lying unconscious in one of the upstairs bathrooms—not the master bathroom but the bathroom she and her sister shared down the hall—she was already disoriented. There was blood all over the bathroom floor. Maryanne’s terror was so great that it overcame her usual reluctance to disturb her father in his bedroom, and she flew to the other end of the house to rouse him.

Fred got out of bed, walked quickly down the hall, and found his wife unresponsive. With Maryanne at his heels, he rushed back to his bedroom, where there was a telephone extension, and placed a call.

Already a powerful man with connections at Jamaica Hospital, Fred was immediately put into touch with someone who could get an ambulance to the House and make sure the best doctors were waiting for them when they arrived at the emergency room...

Shortly after Mary arrived at the hospital, she underwent an emergency hysterectomy after doctors found that serious postpartum complications had gone undiagnosed after Robert’s birth nine months earlier. The procedure led to an abdominal infection, and then further complications arose.

The niece's tale invites us to pity more than one child. "Maryanne spent the night crying alone in her room while her younger siblings remained asleep in their beds, unaware of the calamity," she writes. After that, also this:

She went to school the next day full of dread. Dr. James Dixon, the headmaster of Kew- Forest, a private school she had begun attending when her father joined the board of directors, came to get her from study hall. “There’s a phone call for you in my office.”

Maryanne was convinced that her mother was dead. The walk to the principal’s office was like a walk to the scaffold. All the twelve-year-old could think was that she was going to be the acting mother of four children.

There's more than one child to be pitied here. That said, the life of the president's mother had been saved. Here is the fuller account:

Mary would undergo two more surgeries over the next week, but she did indeed make it. Fred’s pull at the hospital, which ensured that his wife got the very best doctors and care, had probably saved her life. But it would be a long road back to recovery.

For the next six months, Mary was into and out of the hospital. The long-term implications for her health were serious. She eventually developed severe osteoporosis from the sudden loss of estrogen that went with having her ovaries removed along with her uterus, a common but often unnecessary medical procedure performed at the time. As a result, she was often in excruciating pain from spontaneous fractures to her ever-thinning bones.

According to Mary L. Trump, Mary Trump—the president's mother—never did fully recover. A bit later, she offers this account:

Mary never completely recovered. Restless to begin with, she became an insomniac. The older kids would find her wandering around the House at all hours like a soundless wraith. Once Freddy found her standing at the top of a ladder painting the hallway in the middle of the night. In the morning her children sometimes found her unconscious in unexpected places; more than once, she ended up having to go to the hospital. That behavior became part of the life of the House. Mary got help for the physical injuries she sustained but none for whatever underlying psychological problems made her put herself into high-risk situations.

We invite you to pity the children thrown into this circumstance. 

In the wake of this medical incident, an unfortunate state of affairs obtained inside The House. According to this nation's folk wisdom, "Motherless child sees a hard time when mother is gone." According to Mary L. Trump, this situation now obtained: 

During and after her surgeries, Mary’s absence—both literal and emotional—created a void in the lives of her children. As hard as it must have been for Maryanne, Freddy, and Elizabeth, they were old enough to understand what was happening and could, to some extent, take care of themselves. The impact was especially dire for Donald and Robert, who at two and a half years and nine months old, respectively, were the most vulnerable of her children, especially since there was no one else to fill the void. The live-in housekeeper was undoubtedly overwhelmed by the sheer volume of housework. Their paternal grandmother, who lived nearby, prepared meals, but she was as terse and physically unaffectionate as her son. When Maryanne wasn’t in school, much of the responsibility of taking care of the younger kids fell to her. (As a boy, Freddy wouldn’t have been expected to help.) She gave them baths and got them ready for bed, but at twelve there was only so much she could do. The five kids were essentially motherless.

"The five kids were essentially motherless." In the judgment of the clinical psychologist, the impact would have been especially dire for the fourth of the five Trump children, who was then only two years old.

So it started, Mary Trump writes, though it's also true that the child of a sociopath may be facing mental health danger under any circumstance. (Sociopathy can have "some or even a strong genetic basis." standard sources seem to say.)

In the family history she offers, Mary L. Trump goes on to describe the deeply unattractive way Fred Trump, the president's father, related to his children as the sole functioning parent. That complex story takes us up to the time when the current sitting president received an unflattering nickname and was even shipped off to "reform school."

In Monday's report, we showed you the passage in which Donald Trump, then maybe 11 or 12, came to be mocked as "The Great I-Am" by his brother, Freddy, who was eight years older. According to Mary L. Trump, the future president's behavior was already rather unattractive at this point in time. 

In Chapter Three of her best-selling book, she describes the state of play as adolescence drew on:

CHAPTER THREE: The Great I-Am

[...]

Encouraged by his father, Donald eventually started to believe his own hype. By the time he was twelve, the right side of his mouth was curled up in an almost perpetual sneer of self-conscious superiority, and Freddy had dubbed him “the Great I-Am,” echoing a passage from Exodus he’d learned in Sunday school in which God first reveals himself to Moses.

[...]

Though Donald’s behavior didn’t bother [his father]—given his long hours at the office, he wasn’t often around to witness much of what happened at home—it drove his mother to distraction. Mary couldn’t control him at all, and Donald disobeyed her at every turn. Any attempt at discipline by her was rebuffed. He talked back. He couldn’t ever admit he was wrong; he contradicted her even when she was right; and he refused to back down. He tormented his little brother and stole his toys. He refused to do his chores or anything else he was told to do. Perhaps worst of all to a fastidious woman like her, he was a slob who refused to pick up after himself no matter how much she threatened him. “Wait until your father comes home” had been an effective threat with Freddy, but to Donald it was a joke that his father seemed to be in on.

Finally, by 1959, Donald’s misbehavior—fighting, bullying, arguing with teachers—had gone too far. [The private] Kew-Forest [school] had reached its limits. Fred’s being on the school’s board of trustees cut two ways: on the one hand, Donald’s behavior had been overlooked longer than it otherwise might have; on the other, it caused Fred some inconvenience. Name-calling and teasing kids too young to fight back had escalated into physical altercations. Fred didn’t mind Donald’s acting out, but it had become intrusive and time consuming for him. When one of his fellow board members at Kew-Forest recommended sending Donald to New York Military Academy as a way to rein him in, Fred went along with it. Throwing him in with military instructors and upperclassmen who wouldn’t put up with his shit might toughen up Fred’s burgeoning protégé even more. Fred had more important things to do than deal with Donald.

I don’t know if Mary had any say in the final decision, but she didn’t fight for her son to stay home, either, a failure Donald couldn’t help but notice. It must have felt like a replay of all the times she’d abandoned him in the past.

Over Donald’s objections, he was enrolled at NYMA, a private boys’ boarding school sixty miles north of New York City. The other kids in the family referred to NYMA as a “reform school”—it wasn’t prestigious like St. Paul’s, which Freddy had attended. Nobody sent their sons to NYMA for a better education, and Donald understood it rightly as a punishment.

The essentially motherless child had been renditioned to what his siblings called "a reform school." According to Mary L. Trump, his behavior had exceeded the bounds of what was tolerable at the local private school he attended, even though his wealthy father sat on the school's board.

In that passage, Mary Trump describes the conduct of the 12-year-old child. A fairly obvious complaint could be made about this familiar, unflattering portrait:

He talked back. He couldn’t ever admit he was wrong; he contradicted [his mother] even when she was right; and he refused to back down. He tormented his little brother and stole his toys. 

A person could wonder if that unflattering portrait had perhaps been "reversed engineered"—had perhaps been composed, intentionally or otherwise, with the familiar behaviors of the sitting president in mind.

Was that passage "reverse engineered?" Everything is possible! That said, the young person in question was sent off to NYMA, which he attended through his high school graduation. 

(Years later, as reported by Slate, he made ludicrous claims about the athletic greatness he displayed while playing first base on that school's baseball team. Such conduct rarely stops.)

Last Friday, the person in question made his latest odd claim. It seems fairly clear that his claim was  false on the literal level, and that a second, more fanciful interpretation of what he had conceivably meant was also simply absurd.

There the president went again, making his latest ludicrous claim. When he did, braindead adepts repeated his claim on the Fox News Channel, and the permissive organs of Blue America agreed to just stare into air.

To her credit, Mary Trump is able to pity the child. She also said that we should fear the dangerous adult who emerged from her family's tortured history.

By the age of 12, he was being mocked as "The Great I-Am." Today, at the age of 78, major organs of Blue America afford him a much wider berth.

His latest claim was almost surely false. It's being bruited all over Red America, but then again, so what? Over here in Blue America, this latest familiar misconduct has been almost completely ignored.

Should the organs of Blue America find a way to confront this practice? Tomorrow, we'll examine that question—though by tomorrow, without any doubt, the beat will have gone on.

Many citizens believe what the president said. "Something we were withholding made us weak," Robert Frost once alleged.

Tomorrow: A few things we've perhaps been withholding