President Donald Trump got unusually personal while talking about his late brother, Fred Jr., to the Washington Post, saying that he does “regret having put pressure on him.”
Fred Jr. had no interest in running the family business, expressing his passion for flying airplanes instead.
When his brother’s alcoholism, the cause of his premature death, really started to manifest, Trump fretted that the pressure he and his father put on Fred Jr. contributed.
Running the business “was just something he was never going to want,” Trump said. “It was just not his thing. . . . I think the mistake that we made was we assumed that everybody would like it. That would be the biggest mistake. . . . There was sort of a double pressure put on him.”
The President seems to have a true fondness for his late brother, saying that he often traveled from Manhattan to the family home in Queens to spend time with Fred Jr. while he was in decline from his heavy drinking.
“I dealt with it,” Trump said. “We went out to dinner a lot. I’d sometimes come home and go to lunch with him.”
Trump, who does not often admit regrets, has cited his brother before as the reason he abstains from drinking. He once told CNN that Fred Jr. was “a much nicer guy than me, to be totally honest with you.”
