Trump got shipped off to military school. Now we all pay the price.
Young Donald Trump was anything but happy to be sent to military school. His father, Fred, had had it up to here with his son's disobedience. Trump was 13 and being shipped to New York Military Academy, a boarding school about an hour north of the city, near the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.
From the moment Trump arrived in 1959, a stocky teen suddenly stripped of the conveniences of wealth, he was looking for a lifeline, scrambling for something he could master.
Trump was never going to be a stellar student. He played on sports teams and did well, but he found his true home by mastering military rituals and discipline. He had no interest in going to actual war — he managed to win four deferments and a medical waiver to avoid service during the Vietnam conflict — but he was drawn to the school's strict rules and instant accountability. He liked setting the pace for other cadets, he liked putting on white gloves and full-dress uniform, and he loved the pageantry — especially the parades.
And so, six decades later, on Saturday, we will all get a hefty dose of Trump's boyhood fantasy of military showmanship. This combined 79th birthday party and wild ego trip — a wayward president's version of an aging dad buying the red sports car — could cost taxpayers up to $45 million and threatens to rip the District's streets to smithereens.
Just as Trump did in high school, when he was put in charge of a special NYMA drill team to march in New York City's Columbus Day parade, now, as leader of the vaguely free world, he will star as drillmaster in chief. There will be tanks! Men in lockstep! Helicopters! The Army's Golden Knights parachuting down to the Ellipse to present an American flag to El Presidente himself!
It's a grand old American tradition to put a fair amount of energy into living out high school fantasies, but this is ridiculous.
It is also thoroughly in character for Trump.
As a child, Trump, by his own account, was something of a terror. He has boasted that he once gave a teacher in elementary school a black eye. He defied his father's directive to stay in Queens, instead sneaking onto the subway with a friend to buy switchblades in Manhattan.
But his father had the last word: Off to NYMA with you. By all accounts, Trump's start at military school was rough. There was no family cook, no private bathroom, no mother to excuse his misbehavior. Instead, he lived in boot-camp-style barracks, marched on the 300-acre campus's sprawling parade grounds and learned to obey the adults — or else. Trump was just one more plebe, one more subject to the drill sergeant, Theodore Dobias — known as 'Doby.'
Dobias smacked students with his open hand if they committed an infraction. He ordered misbehaving cadets to fight each other. He rode Trump hard, pushing the rich kid from Queens to make his bed, shine his shoes, clean the sink.
Trump studied Dobias's tactics and adopted many as his own, his classmates said. Trump loved wielding authority — one student called him 'Mr. Meticulous' — and when Trump became a junior supply sergeant in Company E, he relished ordering punishments for younger cadets.
When one student broke formation, Trump allegedly delivered whacks on the rear with a broomstick. When another boy left his bed unmade, the young disciplinarian tore the sheets off the bed, threw them on the floor and fought the boy, trying to push him out a second-story window, the former schoolmate, Ted Levine, told The Post years later.
That Columbus Day parade in 1963 was in many ways a culmination of Trump's military career. He was in charge, front and center, back on his home turf. But when the NYMA boys got to Fifth Avenue — passing exactly the spot where the developer's son would one day build his own Trump Tower — they saw a group of Catholic schoolgirls were lined up to lead the parade. Trump had been told his contingent was going to be in front.
'Leave this to me,' Trump told Dobias. He went and found someone in charge, had a little talk and came back victorious. He led the parade.
It made him feel large. Many years later, Trump would boast that although he didn't serve in the military, he believed he had received more military training in high school than actual service members did.
'I felt that I was in the military in the true sense because I dealt with those people,' he told biographer Michael D'Antonio.
High school fantasies die hard. Most of us keep them to ourselves. On Saturday, all 340 million of us get to live Trump's.
Somebody, please, buy the old man a pair of white gloves for this birthday. It'd make him so happy, maybe he'd leave us alone for a bit.
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