Anyone who’s watched Trump: An American Dream on Netflix knows that POTUS has never quite recovered from his father Fred not loving him.

Like father, like son, because Donald Trump Jr., the hunter who can never quite figure out how to stand normally for photos, still bears those wounds.

He’s grown to become the kind of person who retweets conspiracy theories about anyone who opposes his father, like when he retweeted Roseanne Barr’s false claim that George Soros, a Holocaust survivor, was actually a Nazi collaborator.

So, let’s look at some examples of how daddy never loved him.

GQ published a superb piece titled ‘The Real Story of Donald Trump Jr.‘, and it sheds light on his troubled upbringing.

We’ll start right at the beginning, with his birth:

According to his first wife, Ivana, Donald Trump was never keen on bequeathing his name to anybody. It was Ivana who wanted to call their newborn Donald junior. “You can’t do that!” Trump is quoted as saying in Ivana’s memoir, Raising Trump. “What if he’s a loser?”

Don tells his own story about coming into the world on December 31, 1977. “I like to joke that my dad wanted to be able to claim me as a dependent on his taxes for 1977,” he once told Forbes, “so he told my mom she had to have me before midnight and, if she didn’t, he’d make her take a cab home.” (Ivana wrote about her labor being induced by doctors [sic].)

The tone was set, because dad wasn’t really around all that often:

Largely absent from childhood tales is the father. “He would love them, but he did not know how to speak to them in the children’s way of thinking,” Ivana said of her ex-husband on The Wendy Williams Show last year.

“He was able to speak to them only when they came from university, when eventually he was able to speak business to them. Otherwise, he really did not know how to handle the kids.”

…a key Trump mantra, according to both Ivana and Don, neither of whom agreed to be interviewed for this story, was “Don’t trust anyone.” Trump would test his children on this maxim. “He’d say, ‘Do you trust me, your own father?’ ” Don once recalled. “We’d say, ‘Of course we do!’ And he’d say, ‘What did I just tell you? You didn’t take the lesson!’

Never trust your own father, suckers. If only his supporters would figure that out for themselves.

Then there was the messy divorce between Ivana and Donald, after the public blowout between his wife and his mistress, and how Don Junior became a pawn:

…as Trump engaged Ivana in an epic public feud, he dispatched a bodyguard to his triplex apartment with instructions to bring his elder boy down to his office. Don, still not talking to his father, descended with the bodyguard to the 28th floor, and a few minutes later, Ivana, who described all this in her book, got a phone call. It was Trump, looking for some leverage by announcing that he was going to keep Don and raise him alone.

“Okay, keep him,” Ivana said she told him. “I have two other kids to raise.”

A few minutes later—his bluff out-bluffed—Trump ordered his boy to be taken back upstairs. “Donald never had any intention of keeping his son,” Ivana wrote.

Of course, like all Trumps do, he eventually grabbed onto the golden spoon and started working for his father. That’s when he started singing his father’s praises in public, and doing whatever he could to gain his approval.

After all, he did marry the woman his father pointed at and said “Don, that’s the person you should marry”.

His now ex-wife Vanessa recalls how Donald introduced his son twice in a matter of minutes, and later referred to Don Jr. as “the one with the retarded dad”.

Sweet, sweet love.

Don Jr. even calls off his affairs on his father’s orders:

“Page Six” also unearthed an old affair Don allegedly had with flash-in-the-pan pop star Aubrey O’Day, whom he’d met on the set of Celebrity Apprentice. It had been Don’s father, “Page Six” claimed, who’d ordered that illicit relationship to end in 2011. According to another report, Trump’s fixer, Michael Cohen, had been called in to keep the story quiet. In Don’s marriage and in its breach, it seems it was his father who called the shots.

For her part, O’Day has declined interview requests but continues to fuel conversation. It was revealed that after the illicit romance supposedly ended, O’Day recorded a hardly veiled ballad called “DJT.” And days after news broke this past spring that Don had moved on to date Fox News host Kimberly Guilfoyle, O’Day wrote on Instagram, “He’s still searching for me in every other woman.”

Keen to see Audrey’s music video for the DJT? It was never released, but TMZ did get some of the footage:

Seems pretty clear what’s going on there.

They really are a damaged family.

Read GQ’s full piece here.

[source:gq]