Like Donald Trump we all deal in family storytelling

Nick Curtis
Natasha Pszenicki
WEST END FINAL

Get our award-winning daily news email featuring exclusive stories, opinion and expert analysis

I would like to be emailed about offers, event and updates from Evening Standard. Read our privacy notice.

Ah, c’mon guys, let’s cut Donald Trump some slack. Which one of us hasn’t falsified basic family history for financial gain, political advantage, or just for fun? “My father is German, was German,” the US President told Nato General Secretary Jens Stoltenberg in a White House meeting this week, disregarding the fact that his dad, Fred, was born in New York. Fred’s father, Friedrich, was indeed German, but left for America aged 16.

Was Trump shamelessly buttering up his European allies in the hope they would lower their guard before he socked them with a demand for increased defence contributions? Was he doubling down on the lie about his dad’s Teutonic nativity, having previously uttered it at a Nato summit in Brussels last year? Or was he just seeing how far he could warp the contours of reality and credulity, an ongoing work of performance art that has already seen him claim to be the champion of the working man, a victim of the deep state and — most recently and most audaciously at his delayed State of the Nation address — a feminist.

I prefer to think the Donald was just indulging in the sort of familial myth-making, history-massaging and backstory-bending that we all go in for from time to time. My mother-in-law, a talented actress, was a mistress of this art. She once claimed to have been watching the news of John F Kennedy’s assassination while pregnant with my wife. When we pointed out that the dates didn’t marry up, she replied, without pausing: “That’s right, it was the Aberfan disaster.” Those dates didn’t fit either, but it served my mother-in-law’s belief that her daughter’s birth should be accompanied by an earth-shaking drama of some sort.

I have a friend who, Trumpishly, claims to be Irish or Welsh depending on the company he finds himself in (he was born in Sussex). Another friend and I, both thoroughgoing metropolitan ponces, used to lay claim to working-class heritage based on family heirlooms. Mine was a knuckleduster supposedly taken off a crook by a policeman great-uncle in Burton-on-Trent. His was a work lamp belonging to his grandfather, a northern coal miner. But the knuckleduster turned out to have been made by my grandfather to show his brass-turning skills. And my friend’s grandad turned out to be a mine inspector. Positively bourgeois.

I’ve never worked out where these myths came from, but their existence reminds me that we should keep talking to our nearest and dearest. I’d always believed that my brass-turning grandfather had spent his life working as a brewer’s assistant in Burton. Only in later years did my dad reveal he’d been wounded as a young man in the First World War; since my grandfather never spoke of it, my dad didn’t either.

Sometimes the family truth can be stranger than the fictions we construct. Though not, I suspect, in Trump’s case.

Create a FREE account to continue reading

eros

Registration is a free and easy way to support our journalism.

Join our community where you can: comment on stories; sign up to newsletters; enter competitions and access content on our app.

Your email address

Must be at least 6 characters, include an upper and lower case character and a number

You must be at least 18 years old to create an account

* Required fields

Already have an account? SIGN IN

By clicking Create Account you confirm that your data has been entered correctly and you have read and agree to our Terms of use , Cookie policy and Privacy policy .

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged in

MORE ABOUT