A loner by choice
President Trump is increasingly isolated in the White House, alienated from Congress and cut off from old associates and allies, said journalist Michael Kruse. But throughout his life, he’s trusted no one.
I SOLATED?” READ THE subject line. “Friend,” Donald Trump wrote recently to supporters in a fundraising email. “The fake news keeps saying, ‘President Trump is isolated.’... They say I’m isolated by lobbyists, corporations, grandstanding politicians, and Hollywood. GOOD! I don’t want them,” he fumed.
Sent on Aug. 28, two days after Hurricane Harvey inundated Houston, Trump’s defiant appeal acknowledged the mounting perception that eight months into his first term, he’s never been politically more lonely. He’s at odds with Congress—including leaders and members of his own party—and his deal making with Democrats is angering some of his most ardent conservative supporters. He’s been abandoned and censured by art leaders, business leaders, and world leaders. His Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida is bleeding bookings. And he’s losing favored aides because of the actions of his own chief of staff, Gen. John Kelly, who restricts access to the president with the diligence of a border guard. Last month, The New York Times described Trump as a “solitary cowboy,” reminding readers he once called himself the Lone Ranger.
His critics might see his growing isolation as a product of his political inexperience. But it’s merely a continuation of a lifelong pattern of behavior for Trump. Take away the Pennsylvania Avenue address, the neverending list of domestic and international crises, and the couldn’t-be-higher geopolitical stakes—and this looks very much like... Trump throughout his entire existence. Isolated is how he’s always operated.
The middle son of a stony, workaholic father with whom he had an “almost businesslike” relationship, Trump is a double divorcé, a boss with a professed distaste for having partners or shareholders, a television-tethered, hamburger-eating homebody, and a germophobe who has described shaking hands as “terrible,” “barbaric,” and “one of the curses of American society.”
He’s been a loner most of his life. At New York Military Academy, everybody knew him, but few of his fellow cadets knew him well. In college, he made no friends he kept. After he moved to Manhattan, he lived in a sealed-off triplex penthouse, relied on a small, family-first cadre of loyal- ists, and mainly made more enemies than allies. At his casinos in Atlantic City, he was adamant about not mingling with the gambling masses. “He was and is a lonely man,” Jack O’Donnell, a former Trump casino executive, told me. “One of the loneliest people I’ve ever met,” biographer Tim O’Brien said in an interview. “He lacks the emotional and sort of psychological architecture a person needs to build deep relationships with other people.” It’s been this way always, because he’s always been foundationally, virulently untrusting. “There’s a wall Donald has that he never lets people penetrate,” a former associate told me. Trump has a dark, dour view of humanity. He considers the world “ruthless,” “brutal,” and “cruel.” Seen through this zero-sum, dog-eat-dog lens, friends aren’t friends—there’s no such thing. “They act nice to your face, but underneath they’re out to kill you,” he wrote in his 2007 book, Think Big. “They want your job, they want your house, they want your money, they want your wife.” Why he’s like this is the subject of vigorous discussion among psychology experts. The deep-seated influence of his formidable father? The wound of the alcohol-fueled death of his more mild-mannered older brother? Simple genetics? Trump is not selfreflective—“I don’t like to analyze myself because I might not like what I see,” he told a biographer several years back—but he can be self-aware. And on this front, he’s been quite clear, and consistent. “My business is so all-encompassing, I don’t really get the pleasure of being with friends that much, frankly,” he said to one interviewer in 1980. T HE FIRST PEOPLE who really noticed Trump’s tendency to withdraw were his classmates. As a teenager at New York Military Academy, he often disappeared into his solo room in the barracks after dinner. “The reason I went in the first place,” Trump himself would say later, “was that I didn’t get along with a lot of people.” Pictures in yearbooks show Trump morphing from a gangly boy to a sturdy young man, but this much didn’t change: Classmate Doug Reichel characterized him to me as “very distant.” “I don’t know anyone that he was particularly close to,” said Ernie Kirk, another classmate, who is now an attorney in Georgia. “He was so competitive,” according to a former roommate, “that everybody who could come close to him he had to destroy.” “You just couldn’t be friends with him,” said Sandy McIntosh, who was two years younger but knew him from home too, because their families both had cabanas at the Atlantic Beach Club on Long Island. Trump wouldn’t laugh at his jokes, or anybody else’s, McIntosh recalled. “And you think of humor as a basic, empathic way that friendships are formed—and he just didn’t.”