Credit: Dangerous Minds / Bernard Gotfryd

It only takes one look at Donald Trump to know that this is a man seething with daddy issues.

Everything about him is built around being noticed by his equally vile father, Fred Trump, and you can tell by just how hard Trump tries to frame himself as a “self-made man”. All it took was a “small loan of a million dollars” from his father to make him the man he is today. A “small loan” of one million dollars. I suppose when you’ve been a millionaire since you were in grade school, a single million must feel like the most insignificant of chump change.

Which leads us back to the obvious fact that Trump wouldn’t have had those millions of dollars in the bank when he was still in short trousers if it wasn’t for the fact that his dad was Fred Trump. A man who was an arsehole even by the standards of landlords, if you can believe it. A man who, famously, caught the ire of one Woody Guthrie, who wrote the song ‘Old Man Trump’ about Fred’s blatant racism and the way he prevented people who weren’t white from buying his property.

Some people really are rotten through to their core, and Fred Trump really does seem to be proof of that. However, while we all pay for that, some small comfort can be taken that sometimes, people who deserve it can be a victim of their cruelty in the meantime. It’s not often, and it doesn’t make their treatment of innocents justified, but from time to time, they can occasionally take out their own anger on those who are just as guilty as they are.

All this to say that while he was alive, he did bully and degrade his worthless son as much as he could.

What was the relationship like between Donald and Fred Trump?

For one thing, Donald was never the favourite. The golden boy was his older brother, Fred Jr.

A man who seemingly never wanted anything to do with the family business, preferring instead to be an airline pilot before drinking himself to death at the age of 43. Thus, Don saw an in for himself by trying to be everything his older brother wasn’t. Ruthless, ambitious, and completely under the thumb of his father.

Fred showed his gratitude by making Donald the president of his real estate company in 1971. Just in time for their first major lawsuit to hit, when Trump’s racist leasing practices finally came back to bite them. Fred had taken a backseat as company chairman, leaving his son to actually do some work for a change. To help in the case, Fred brought in an old friend, assistant to Joe McCarthy and mafia lawyer Roy Cohn. A man who would change Donald’s life forever.

This was the first lawsuit that Trump faced, and, like the vast, vast majority of cases he would face, it was settled out of court. The company accepted some slap-on-the-wrist disciplinary measures to make sure they were considering all applicants to their properties equally, but they were back in court for racial discrimination before the year was out. Fast forward to June 1999, when Trump Sr finally shuffled off this mortal coil at the too-old age of 93, there was only one thing that Donald could say about the man who’d given him everything he had.

“It was good for me,” he said of the death of his father. “This way, I got Manhattan all to myself!”