On March 11, 2026, twelve days into a war he started in the Middle East, Donald Trump called an American news website for a five-minute interview.

“Practically nothing left to target,” he said of Iran.

“Any time I want it to end, it will end.” Then, in the same breath: “They are paying for 47 years of death and destruction they caused.

This is payback.

They will not get off that easy.”So the war is over, and also there is more payback coming, and he can end it any time he wants, and it’s ahead of schedule.

He has said all of these things, sometimes within hours of each other, often within the same sentence.

The war hasn’t ended.In early March, he had posted on Truth Social: “There will be no deal with Iran except UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER!” Then signed off with “MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN (MIGA!)”The Dow, the Wall Street scoreboard, dropped 900 points.So to really understand what is actually happening in Donald Trump’s mind as he runs this war, I decided to peer into his childhood.

And there, hidden amid tones of academic literature and careful journalistic assessments, I found a thirteen-year-old boy struggling to live up to the demands of a domineering father.THE CHILD WHO WOULD BE PREZFred Trump, Donald’s father, was a real estate developer and a bully.

Transactional.

Allergic to weakness in his children and in himself.

He built an empire of apartment blocks across Brooklyn and Queens, accumulated hundreds of millions of dollars, and ran his family the same way he ran his buildings: on the principle that sentiment was a liability and strength was the only currency worth holding.

Donald Trump with his parents Fred Trump and Mary Anne MacLeod Trump.

(GettyImages) When Donald was thirteen, Fred packed him off to New York Military Academy, a strict boarding school.

Donald’s mother, Mary Anne Trump, was also a distant figure as she dealt with serious health problems after childbirth.

She would later reveal she was relieved when Donald was sent away, because by then he had become “belligerent and uncontrollable.” The relief was telling.

The message Fred sent with that enrolment was simpler than any explanation he ever offered: whatever you are right now is not enough.

Go and come back harder.That moment sits at the centre of everything that came after and, watching a lot of this unfold from very close proximity was a young woman named Mary.THE NIECE WHO KNOWSDonald Trump’s niece, Mary Trump, is a clinical psychologist who has taught trauma, psychopathology, and developmental psychology at graduate level.

She grew up on the edges of this family and observed it closely over decades.In her 2020 book Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man (Simon & Schuster), she describes Fred Trump as a “high-functioning sociopath” who “seemed to have no emotional needs at all.” A copy of “Too Much and Never Enough” by Mary L Trump, a memoir offering a critical account of the Trump family dynamics.

(GettyImages) In a FrontlinePBS interview, she described the worldview Fred passed to his children: “Life is a zero-sum game.

There’s one winner.

Everybody else is a loser.”She described watching Donald absorb this lesson, doing “everything in his power to become the killer, the tough guy,” deliberately avoiding kindness because “all of those things, in my grandfather’s universe, spoke to an unforgivable weakness.” Donald Trump sits alongside his first wife Ivana Trump and his father Fred Trump at a high-profile public event in New York in 1988.

(GettyImages) In clinical terms, Fred Trump was what attachment researchers call a dismissive-avoidant parent.

A dismissive-avoidant parent treats emotional needs as weakness and shuts them down consistently.

Not necessarily with cruelty, but with a steady systemic message: your feelings are inconvenient and they do not matter here.The concept comes from attachment theory, built on the work of John Bowlby and developed further by researchers like Mary Ainsworth.Decades of research show a consistent pattern in children raised this way.

They develop what psychologists call compulsive self-reliance — they learn to perform strength rather than feel it.

The shame that builds underneath doesn’t disappear.

It surfaces later, usually as rage or contempt directed outward.Mary Trump describes a household where Donald watched his older brother Freddy be slowly destroyed by their father — humiliated, dismissed, eventually broken by alcoholism and an early death.

Donald learned, fast, which version of a son Fred Trump wanted.

The combination left him, in Mary Trump’s clinical assessment, without any sense that he or anybody else had intrinsic worth.

Worth was produced.

Demonstrated.THE EPISODIC MANIn June 2016, Dan McAdams — Henry Wade Rogers Professor of Psychology at Northwestern University — published a cover essay in The Atlantic titled “The Mind of Donald Trump.” In a subsequent peer-reviewed paper in Clio’s Psyche (2021), McAdams noted the essay had been read by an estimated 3.5 million people that summer.

Four years later he expanded the analysis into The Strange Case of Donald J.

Trump: A....