Donald Trump is My Grandfather
Who is he to you?
I came to a realization as the votes came in on Tuesday night: Donald Trump is my grandfather. Not literally, but the similarities are rather striking. I had wondered why it was that I remembered hating Trump since about 1992. I had wondered why my skin would crawl when he would smirk and say something vile about another person.
My grandfather, or, as he was nicknamed long before my birth, Dadada, was not a “good person” by anyone’s standards. He could pretend to be for brief periods, but the real him was always under the surface. He portrayed himself as a kind grandfather who loved his family and God more than anything else. In his mind, he was a good person. But that perception wasn’t very honest — kind of like him.
I don’t know the year Dadada’s bad deeds first caught up with him. I know that I’m the early sixties he was part of a multi-state car theft/organized crime ring. He went to prison and upended the lives of his wife and children. He did time in a federal prison and a state prison.
Aside from drinking and some drug abuse involving “uppers” and “downers” — and some abuse of his family — I don’t know much of what he did after prison until the late seventies when he called a television station. He was angry because something that aired had offended my grandmother, also known as Mamama, and he was so angry that he threatened to blow it up. He didn’t serve time for that because he said he was an alcoholic and blamed the outburst on the drinking. He swore he’d never drink again. (He went back on that either on or before the late summer/early fall of 1991, when he drank brandy at a restaurant he took me to.)
He had other hobbies he picked up over the years between prison and his death. Assembling guns, which he couldn’t legally own given his history, and collecting gun parts is a major one. (Leaving them in paces around the house/in cars as “reminders” or pointing them at us were other beloved hobbies.) There was also an older hobby that he didn’t share with luckier members of the family. He had an enjoyment of young (preschool-age) girls. I don’t know how many members were unlucky. I’ve always been too afraid to ask, especially since saying negative things about the dead never goes well with that side of the family.
When Mamama died in 1991, my grandfather needed someone to take care of him. We were having financial issues, so we moved in. Aside from the early traumas, we didn’t have an awful relationship before we lived in the same house. After we moved in, I found out that sugar-coating bad things would never be my forte.
I was 2 when the sexual abuse started. I was 8 when the emotional abuse started. The six years were linked by more than just the victim. The effect of the first was the “cause” of the next. You see, kids who are molested before a certain age tend to struggle with issues of obesity & body image.
When we moved in with him, the first thing he attacked was my appearance. I was never as good as my oldest cousin. She was a cheerleader. She was beautiful. I was just into ballet and tap and I was fat. I didn’t have the silky brown hair, mine was light auburn and wavy. My skin didn’t tan, it freckled. Everything about me physically was not enough. He told me that because of my appearance I would never be loved. As my peers went into puberty with relatively high self-esteem, my self-esteem was already tanked.
It wasn’t just my appearance that he attacked. He said I was immoral and lacked proper values because I didn’t like the television series Avonlea and wouldn’t watch episodes with him; instead I would take my homework to my bedroom and work on that. He didn’t like when I would argue with him every time that he picked a fight; he told me that good children respect their elders and don’t talk back to them.
Dadada didn’t like my friends, especially the ones who weren’t white. My mom babysat for one of my closest friends for a while, until one day when I was about 10 years old. We were on the couch watching Full House reruns and doing our homework when he called her the “n-word” — my mom told her mom and they decided it would be the last time that she came to my house while he was there. He would never admit that he was racist.
He didn’t like my mom — part of the time. On Christmas Eve of 1992, he ridiculed her. My mom has bipolar disorder, and her mood swings are impacted by the change of seasons. At Christmas, she would be weepy and sleep day & night. That year he decided that he would sit in the living room and call her crazy repeatedly for about 8 hours. Eventually, they had an extremely unpleasant fight, which led to us being “homeless” for a while. At one point, he had decided that he would use one of his illegally-possessed guns to hold to her back & pull the trigger. She didn’t know that the gun was unloaded, and it is an experience that she still gets upset talking about. He would brag about how she took care of him and how much he loved her & could live without her when we were in public settings. When we came home, she would be at his mercy.
He didn’t get along with my father. There were unresolved issues that stemmed from the years of abuse and neglect his father had dished out during childhood. My dad was, for the most part, able to avoid him since he had to work 80 hour days at Radio Shack.
Like Trump, Dadada had his nicknames for everyone. When my dad was home, Dadada would just call him “the boy” — to his face and when he was just talking about him. I was “the baby” until my cousin had her first child, then I became “the girl” for the last year of his life. I had no real identity with him. Between the way I was treated and the dehumanizing effect of that name, it was almost impossible to feel like I had some level of value in the world.
I don’t know that the man was legally allowed to vote, but he did. After we had moved in with him, he voted for Perot. When my dad was a kid, he had voted for George Wallace for President. (We still have the campaign button that he’d kept for the final two, almost three, decades of his life.) I know he had no morals and I don’t think he had any real sense of values, but he always felt like he was an outsider and he wanted to blame a “them” for problems that were of his own making. Like Trump.
He was a bizarre and angry man. He racked up a lot of debt in his life, including through illegal means. He found ways of lying to get out of trouble most of the time, and when that didn’t work, he would try to work the system to his advantage. He was a criminal, a con man and a thief, but he would lie about it and spin it to sound like he was a victim of the system. (I was 9 when figured out that a “vacation” he talked about taking years ago was his time in prison.) He was a sexual predator. He was loud and obnoxious. He had no sense of right and wrong. He was untrustworthy, but he always managed to find people who thought they could. He convinced himself he was a patriot — more of one than anyone else in the world — and he loved showing off with his flag in front of neighbors, so they would think better of him.
Dadada was a sociopath. Donald Trump is a sociopath. When I feel that shock of fear travelling down my spine when I see Trump, it’s because I’ve lived with that fear. I know to recognize that kind of monster; I learned that sort of survival instinct as a child. I worked my ass off trying to tell people that it was not worth the promise of jobs or “so much winning” to give in and vote for him. I guess it’s something that they couldn’t believe because they were unfamiliar with that sort of personality or maybe they thought that he would be different. But I know that there are others who, like me, recognized that Donald Trump was not a good person and they probably have someone (they know or who is a stranger) that they compare him to — whether they realize it or not. So I hope that they will speak up and speak out about why Trump is so feared and hated in this country and throughout the world.
“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” — Edmund Burke
Please respond with your own stories or with your own reasons for why this election bothers you.
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