Donald Trump was a horrible child who threw cake at birthday parties

Trump threw cake at birthday parties as a child.
(Image credit: Ralph Freso/Getty Images)

A young Donald Trump is described as the ultimate enfant terrible in a Thursday article at Slate describing the candidate's history of interaction with women:

He was the archetypal brat. His father, himself a successful real estate developer, endlessly expressed a belief in his son's greatness. "You are a king," his father would tell Donald, according to his biographer Michael D’Antonio. His son took that to mean he could set his own rules. In elementary school, he gave one teacher he didn't like a black eye; others were pelted with erasers. At birthday parties, he would fling cake. [Slate]

When a teenaged Trump was shipped off to military school — an experience he has said made it so he "always felt" he'd been a soldier — he reportedly enjoyed the competitive, discipline-based environment.

Once, when it was his turn to to do dorm inspections, Trump ripped the sheets off another student's bed because he didn't think it was made correctly. "Then I lost it. I totally lost it," that student, Ted Levine, recalled to NPR. "So I think I hit him with a broomstick, and he came back at me — with his hands. He was bigger than me. And it took three people to get him off me."

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Bonnie Kristian

Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.