Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen thinks Donald Trump has never faced family-related “character-building” moments, after apparently forgetting that the Republican presidential candidate lost a brother to alcoholism.
In a column published Tuesday, Cohen said that Trump is “a rich kid who has always had it easy” and “has an adolescent’s contempt for the suffering of others.”
Cohen’s reasoning is based on several instances in which Trump has mocked others, including a reporter who happens to have a physical disability. (Trump denies he was intentionally mocking the reporter’s handicap.)
Trump, Cohen wrote, “has never had the character-building setbacks that sometimes season the callow — Franklin D. Roosevelt’s polio or Robert F. Kennedy’s loss of his brother John, for instance. These are the sorts of things that reduce the rich to the powerlessness of the poor. Trump has none of that. He lives in a pre-Copernican world of his own. The sun revolves around him.”
Trump has, however, often spoken about the loss of his older brother Freddy and the impact it had on his life.
In January, the New York Times reported on Trump’s brother’s death and its significance to the billionaire businessman. “In a telephone interview last week, Mr. Trump said he had learned by watching his brother how bad choices could drag down even those who seemed destined to rise,” wrote the Times. “Seeing his brother suffering led him to avoid ever trying alcohol or cigarettes, he said.”
People magazine also interviewed Trump on the issue. “He was a great guy, a handsome person,” Trump said of his brother, according to People. “He was the life of the party. He was a fantastic guy, but he got stuck on alcohol. And it had a profound impact and ultimately [he] became an alcoholic and died of alcoholism. He would tell me, ‘Don’t drink ever’… He understood the problem that he had and that it was a very hard problem.”
On other occasions that Trump has referred to his late brother, who died in the early 1980s, he has said his story is the reason why he does not ever drink, smoke or do drugs. He has also credited it for much of his life’s success.
Cohen did not return a request for comment.
