It’s no state secret that Donald Trump was a boy with a bad temper and a mean streak in school. He attended a private prep school in Queens, NY named Kew-Forest School where his father happened to be a member of the Board of Directors.
Jerome Tuccille’s book Trump; The Saga of America’s Most Powerful Real Estate Baron (1985) offers some clues about Trumps early schooling.
Tuccile writes “the question of disciplining Donald was one that had to be handled delicately; Fred Trump was too valuable an asset to risk alienating him.” He describes Trump by saying he was “Overflowing with energy and a need to assert himself among his fellow students.” He states that Trump “squirted sodas at girls” and “flung erasers at teachers.
Source: Ron Paul Forums
By accounts, Donald was a middling student, capable but not outstanding. He left his middle school after finishing the 7th grade. By mutual agreement he left Kew-Forest before the start of the 8th grade year at age 13. He attended the New York Military Academy in Cornwall-on-Hudson, some 60 miles north of New York City from 1959 until 1964 when he graduated with a High School diploma. The school is only a short distance from West Point.
In November 2015 National Public Radio (NPR) broadcast a valuable story on Trump’s time at Kew-Forest, and then at New York Military Academy.
“We used to refer to our detention as a ‘DT’ — a ‘Donny Trump’ — because he got more of them than most other people in the class,” said Paul Onish, one of Trump’s grade school classmates. Onish calls Trump one of his best friends at the Kew-Forest School in Forest Hills, Queens. Trump attended the school through seventh grade, and the two of them got into trouble together constantly — talking out of turn during class, passing notes and throwing spitballs.
It was the late 1950s — and in the quiet, well-to-do community of Jamaica Estates, Queens, the nonstop antics became embarrassing for Trump’s parents. So right before eighth grade, Trump’s father sent him literally up the river to New York Military Academy in the Hudson Valley. Trump would spend the next five years there.
The New York Times published a profile of Trump by Michael Barbaro on September 8, 2015 which included excerpts from Michael D’Antonio’s biography, Never Enough: Donald Trump and the Pursuit of Success (2015), and access to some of the author’s interview notes with Donald Trump.
According to the book, Mr. Trump attended the New York Military Academy after years of rowdy and rebellious behavior at Kew-Forest, a more traditional prep school in Queens. Mr. Trump once recalled giving a teacher at Kew-Forest a black eye “because I didn’t think he knew anything about music.”
An exacting father, Fred Trump, schooled him in self-promotion and encouraged a lifetime of fighting. The senior Mr. Trump, a major real estate developer, counseled his son to “be a killer” and told him, “You are a king.” Mr. Trump memorably told Mr. D’Antonio that “when I look at myself in the first grade and I look at myself now, I’m basically the same.”
“The temperament is not that different,” he said. Mr. Trump’s preoccupation with winning — at anything and everything, big or small — dominated his youth. His mentor at the New York Military Academy, Theodore Dobias, called Mr. Trump “a conniver, even then.”
Again from the November 2015 NPR broadcast:
“My bed wasn’t really made right, and he ripped it,” said Ted Levine, another student who roomed with Trump at New York Military Academy. Trump tore Levine’s sheets off during inspections one morning. Levine’s bed hadn’t passed muster.
“Then I lost it. I totally lost it. So I think I hit him with a broomstick,” remembered Levine. “And he came back at me — with his hands. He was bigger than me. And it took three people to get him off me.” Levine was 4 feet 11 inches tall back then. Trump was 6 feet 2 inches. In the pecking order of young boys, that size gave Trump authority.
He had a way of laughing when others spoke that used to get on some of the guys’ nerves. “It made you feel like he was separating himself from you. It made you feel like there was an air of superiority. Just enough of a signal that he was laughing at you,” White {Battalion Commander; Top Cadet at school] said.
And maybe it was that quality that made it difficult to get close to Trump. “I don’t think he had a handful of loyalists, you know?” Levine, his former roommate, said. “Because he was so competitive that everybody who could come close to him he had to destroy.”
From the Washington Post on January 9, 2016 about Trump’s education:
From the moment 17-year-old Donald Trump was named a captain for his senior year at New York Military Academy, he ordered the officers under his command to keep strict discipline. Shoes had to be shined. Beds had to be made. Underclassmen had to spring to attention.Then, a month into Trump’s tenure in the fall of 1963, came an abrupt change.
The tall, confident senior with a shock of blond hair was removed from that coveted post atop A Company and transferred to a new job on the school staff — another prestigious assignment, but one with no command responsibilities. He moved out of the barracks and into the administration building, swapping jobs with a fellow high-ranking senior [Specht] who took command of Trump’s old group.
White, who as battalion commander was NYMA’s top-ranking cadet and the top member of the staff that Trump was switched to, recalls being shocked when the school commandant called him into his office to announce that Trump would be taking Specht’s spot. The move took place “to get him out of the barracks,” recalled White. “What was I going to say? That was the order.”
Specht, Trump’s replacement, immediately cracked down on hazing in A Company, Ains said. “He would come around to the different rooms at any time and make sure that the students were studying and that they weren’t being interfered with by any older cadets,” Ains said.
Specht said he remembers well the moment the school commandant gave him the news. “Colonel Angello called me down and said, ‘You’re going to go to A Company, and Donald is taking your position on the staff as a captain,’ ” Specht recalled. Specht said Angello referred to a “hazing incident” in A Company as he explained that “the school has decided that they are going to make a switch.”
Trump’s former roommate Ted Levine had some more to say to the Business Insider in 2015:
Levine also spent some time living with Trump. He said there were “a couple stories,” but he wasn’t “going to repeat them.” Still, Levine suggested there was some discord between him and Trump.
“OK, a couple of fights, but you know, that’s common ground in that school. [It was] a little ‘Lord of the Flies,'” Levine said. Levine said fighting was “common” at the school.
“There were a lot of very strong people up there, and it was very competitive,” Levine recalled. “Everyone had fights there … like if the bed wasn’t made right.”
There was a long history of hazing at New York Military Academy which was officially discouraged but tolerated in a limited and controlled way by school authorities. The Aines incident was one of the relatively few that was formally reported to the school administration for resolution.
There is no evidence Donald Trump was directly involved in any way in the 1963 Aines incident. To be crystal clear, the only point is that he was the cadet’s commanding officer at the time of the hazing incident, and the school administration removed him from command and gave him a staff assignment elsewhere in the school.
The problem of abusive hazing at New York Military Academy was not solved in the 1960’s. As recently as 2005 two lawsuits against the school were reported in the New York Times. The school was declared bankrupt in early 2015 and temporarily shut down. It was later sold to a group of Chinese investors and reopened in the late fall of 2015 with a handful of students.
For the second time in the last two years, the military academy here is facing an ugly lawsuit that accuses the school of allowing its students to be abused.
In 2003, the academy was sued by Cristina Kerr of Florida, whose son had been at the academy for nine days when he woke up with blood pouring out of his nose and face. While sleeping, he had been clubbed over the head with a bicycle lock inside a tube sock, a practice known at the school as a “lock n sock.” He suffered a broken nose and lost a tooth and left the school. The suit was settled last June for $290,000.
Three students were expelled and pleaded guilty to charges of assault or attempted assault in town and family courts.
Hazing was abolished at the U.S. Military Academy (West Point) in 1990.
In any case, Trump seems to have taken to the strict discipline and rigid schedule of the program at the military school, earning promotion as a senior cadet. He was a better than average athlete and became Captain of the baseball team.
Later in life he polished his considerable verbal skills in business and on TV. There is no record of physical violence directed towards others as an adult. He confines his temperamental outbursts and bullying tactics to verbal attacks, threats of lawsuits, financial retribution, and business maneuvers.
He has sublimated his childhood hyper aggression and bullying to verbal taunting and insults. This trait has been a noted personality feature for some considerable time. Consider his Twitter tirades made public for all to see against those he imagines have demeaned or slighted him: business rivals, love partners, reporters, media celebrities, writers, foreign governments, religious denominations, and elected politicians to name a few groups on the receiving end.
When his acerbic comebacks and critical volleys are focused on his roles as a brash public celebrity, TV star, and businessman, it is an entertaining show, but not of particular public policy import, except to those attacked and people interested in celebrity and business culture.
When Trump escalates his verbal assaults on a wider basis as a contestant for the Republican nomination for President, it is another matter. Lately, Trump has added a new ingredient to his campaign mix. He has increasingly taken to taunting and abusing protestors at his public political rallies in order to gas up his crowds.
The technique is now a standard routine at virtually every campaign rally, and the insulting and bullying language is becoming more and more purple and inflamed. His supporters love it, and Trump dishes it out liberally.
November 22, 2015 “Maybe he should have been roughed up,” Trump said during a Sunday morning call-in appearance on “Fox & Friends.” “It was absolutely disgusting what he was doing.”
February 1, 2016 “So if you see somebody getting ready to throw a tomato, knock the crap out of ’em, would you? Seriously. Okay? Just knock the hell — I promise you, I will pay for the legal fees. I promise. I promise.”
February 22, 2016 “There’s a guy throwing punches, nasty as hell, screaming and everything else when we’re talking, and we’re talking out — we’re not allowed, the guards are very gentle with him, he’s walking, like, big high fives, smiling, laughing — I’d like to punch him in the face,”
February 29, 2016 When the activists were being escorted out, Trump said they “were the enemy.”
March 4, 2016 The Republican presidential front-runner told a Warren, Michigan audience on Friday that he’s tired of political correctness when it comes to handling protesters. He was interrupted several times during his remarks by yelling protesters, as he often is at his events. During one interruption, Trump said, “Get him out. Try not to hurt him. If you do I’ll defend you in court.” “Are Trump rallies the most fun?” he then asked the crowd. “We’re having a good time.”
March 7, 2016 As a young man in a hooded Duke University sweatshirt was removed from the rally, Trump said, “Looks like a nice little guy actually. Go home to mommy … He’ll go home to mommy now.” And as another protester extended his middle finger to the crowd, Trump said, “He puts up his hand. He puts up the wrong finger. We’re supposed to take it nowadays.”
March 10, 2016 “See, in the good old days this didn’t use to happen, because they used to treat them very rough,” he said. “We’ve become very weak.”
March 10, 2016 He’s spoken fondly of the “good old days” when police could rough protesters up without fear of backlash. “But today,” he said Wednesday in Fayetteville, “they walk in and they put their hand up and they put the wrong finger in the air … and they get away with murder. Because we’ve become weak.”
March 11, 2016 “And I thought it was very, very appropriate,” he added. “He was swinging. He was hitting people. And the audience hit back. And that’s what we need a little bit more of. Now, I’m not talking about just a protestor. This was a guy who should not have been allowed to do what he did. And frankly, if you want to know the truth, the police were very, very restrained.”
Trump refines the best punch lines from location to location, and recycles them to acclaim from his pent-up crowds. They have responded with increasing levels of intimidation and violence directed against protestors inside the rally venue. In general these protestors have gained admittance to the events in exactly the same way the majority of supporters did, by registering online ahead of time and receiving free tickets from the Trump Campaign.
This deteriorating situation reminds me of the story about A Man and a Dog. About thirty years ago I first heard a dog-bite story that made a marked impression on me. The version I was told goes like this:
A Man and a Dog*
A passerby was walking on the street in front of a farmhouse where an old man in overalls was sitting in his rocking chair reading the paper, and nodded to him All of a sudden a snarling hound leaped out of the farmer’s front yard over the fence and bit the passerby on both arms, drawing blood.
When the stranger finally got the dog off his mangled limbs, he turned to ask the farmer who was still rocking in his chair on the porch, “Why didn’t you stop your dog from biting me?”
The farmer just looked at him for a moment and replied:
First off, I didn’t see whether or not that dog bit you at all. Second, if that dog did bite you, you probably did something wrong to make him mad. Thirdly, if that dog did bite you, and if it wasn’t your fault, you don’t look hurt that bad. And fourth, if that dog did bite you, and if it wasn’t your fault, and if you are hurt pretty bad, well then, it ain’t my dog. I just like to sit on this porch in the afternoon and watch for strangers to come by.
Technically, Trump may not own the metaphorical snarling dog at his rallies. But he feeds it uncooked red meat nearly every day, and regularly beats the dog with a verbal stick.
Maybe it’s time for someone to tie up the dog and stop abusing it.
The nominating process for President of the United States could use a bit more civility and dignity while we work out our political differences as fellow citizens. Other Republican candidates hold many of the same positions on issues as Trump, and they also hold large public rallies, but there is no comparable tumult with their supporters. The Trump Boil is a unique and unpleasant feature.
*I couldn’t find an exact internet reference to the Man and a Dog story as it was told to me. The closest I could find was this shortened version.