General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: "I view Mr. Trump's fear, lust and sloth and I do not envy him." [View all]potone
(1,701 posts)as that he was raised to have no sense of responsibility to other people. FDR was born to wealth, as were members of the Kennedy family, yet all of them had a sense that their own privileged background meant that they owed it to other people to try to help them. This was in part the way they were raised; it was also the result of their openness to experience. This may have been true of all of them, but it was especially true of RFK. He went from being a brash and arrogant man to one who was deeply shaken by what he saw in the course of his presidential campaign, when he toured the south and saw communities in which African-Americans had neither electricity nor running water. He was deeply shocked and shamed by the experience, as he was by the death of MLK. I will never forget the speech he gave the night MLK died, in which he had to tell a black audience about MLK's death, and he quoted Aeschylus' Agamemnon. I was too young at the time for that speech to register, but I heard it later, and I was deeply moved by it, and by his ability to extemporaneously come up with the right words to comfort a shocked and grief-stricken audience who had just lost their greatest champion and voice for hope.
Trump's father, from what I have read (which isn't much, I admit) sounds like a thoroughly nasty piece of work who raised his son without any morals or sense of purpose other than making money by hook or by crook. It is not surprising that he turned out as he has, a needy, insecure, narcissistic bully who can't bear to have anyone disagree with him or to possess more knowledge than he has. This, in my opinion, is what makes him so very dangerous.