"When I look at myself in the first grade and I look at myself now, I’m basically the same. The temperament is not that different."
— Donald J Trump, IQ45, said at age 70.
In elementary school, Donny refused to acknowledge mistakes, even one so trivial as misidentifying a popular professional wrestler. No matter his pals’ ridicule, one recalled, he doubled down, insisting wrestler Antonino Rocca’s name was “Rocky Antonino.”
At the military academy where he attended high school, Donny was struck with a broomstick during a fight, he tried to push a fellow cadet out a second-floor window, only to be thwarted when two other students intervened.
Once when she left a next-door kid was in a playpen in a back yard adjoining the Trumps’ property, the mother returned to find Donny throwing rocks at her son. Donny stood was using the playpen for target practice.
In kindergarten, Donny was among a group of boys who pulled girls’ hair, passed notes and talked out of turn. “We threw spitballs and we played racing chairs with our desks, crashing them into other desks,” recalled Paul Onish, a classmate, describing himself and Trump as “probably the two worst.”
Donny spent enough time in detention, Onish said, that his buddies nicknamed the punishment “DTs” — short for “Donny Trump.”
“He had a reputation for saying anything that came into his head,” said Donald Kass, 70, a retired agronomist who was a schoolmate. When Trump misidentified Rocca, the pro wrestler, Kass recalled, “We would laugh at him and tell him he was wrong, and he’d say he was right. The next time, he would make the same mistake, and it would be the same thing all over again.”
In his memoir, “The Art of the Deal,” Trump wrote that his main focus as a youngster was “creating mischief.” As a second-grader, he wrote, he “actually” gave his music teacher [Charles Walker] a black eye because “I didn’t think he knew anything about music, and I almost got expelled.” ... At a 2009 reunion, the teacher said that Trump had never struck him.