One
evening in the 1960s, Donald J. Trump, still in
college but eager to make it big, met his older brother, Freddy, for dinner in
a Queens apartment complex built by their father.
Things
went bad fast.
As Freddy,
a fun-loving airline pilot with a gift for imitating W. C. Fields, joked with
his best friend at the table, his younger brother grew impatient. Grow up, get
serious and make something of yourself in the family business, Donald scolded.
“Donald
put Freddy down quite a bit,” said Annamaria Schifano, then the girlfriend of
Freddy’s best friend, who was at the dinner and recalled Donald’s tendency to
pick fights and storm out. “There was a lot of combustion.”
For Mr.
Trump, a presidential candidate whose appeal is predicated on an aura of
toughness, personal achievement and perpetual success, the story of Freddy, a
handsome, gregarious and self-destructive figure who died as an alcoholic in
1981 at the age of 43, is bleak and seldom told.
From The New
York Times, read it HERE
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