A pint-sized bully who loved to pull girls’ hair and once lobbed rocks at a toddler in his playpen. A loud-mouthed classroom know-all who could never admit he was wrong and boasted of giving the music teacher a black eye. And a sporting show-off who yearned to hear the crowd’s applause . . . but who would smash his baseball bat in fury if he didn’t win.

Arrogant, over-bearing, thin-skinned, determined, and not exactly great with the ladies — does this portrait of a child growing up in Fifties surburban New York sound like a certain grown-up (well, sort of grown-up) currently strutting the world stage?

It was Aristotle who said ‘Give me the child until he’s seven and I will show you the man’, and Donald Trump, now 70, would certainly agree. The 45th U.S. President insists he’s much the same character now as he was when he was in junior school.

According to Trump Revealed, a new biography compiled by Washington Post journalists who spoke to dozens of people who knew Trump as a child, he’s not wrong. The psychological resemblance is uncanny, and not a little disconcerting.

. . .

‘When I look at myself in first grade [aged six] and I look at myself now, I’m basically the same,’ Trump told a biographer. ‘The temperament is not that different.’
As he stands with his finger on the nuclear trigger, as President of the US, it’s more than a little terrifying.