over an entire country—was even greater. The Kims had scores of villas, resorts, armies of servants, a standing military, and the latest in consumer items. Trump boasted about challenging authority. He “punched” his music teacher when he was in the second grade because, as he described it, “I didn’t think he knew anything about music, and I almost got expelled,” according to the Washington Post journalists Michael Kranish and Marc Fisher, who wrote Trump Revealed, an authoritative biography of the forty-fifth U.S. president.
Although the extant information about Kim Jong Un suggests that he maintained a low-key profile, at least when he was in Europe, Trump acted the part of a brash, young, confident future heir to a real estate fortune. He was known for driving luxury cars around town and campus, cavorting with beautiful women, throwing parties, and bullying his peers and elders alike. Like Kim Jong Un, though, Trump was a mediocre student at best. Trump Revealed quoted a classmate at the University of Pennsylvania who said Trump “wasn’t a dumb guy….I don’t think he ever studied for an exam….He did what it took to get through the program.” Athletic prowess and a competitive streak marked both men: Trump found success on the playing field, excelling at dodgeball, basketball, football, and soccer. His favorite sport was baseball. Kim’s sport was basketball; his aggressiveness on the court was consistently noted by his classmates in Switzerland. And both were raised in masculine environments. Trump attended the New York Military Academy, where cadets were required to fire mortars and clean an M1 rifle, while Kim’s entire world and identity were wrapped up in the military-first milieu in North Korea. Physical and verbal abuse and casual brutality were part of their respective worlds, and weakness was a dirty word.
They both had fathers who were larger than life, whom they revered and sought to emulate, but in their own way. Fred Trump, the patriarch, was less flamboyant and “stern, disciplined,” according to Timothy O’Brien, who wrote another meticulously researched biography of Donald Trump. His critical look into the dark crevices of Donald Trump’s life and his exposure of the truth hidden beneath layers of decades-old mythology provoked his subject into filing a $5 billion libel suit against him.
Unlike his father, the younger Trump was flashy and drawn to celebrity, with an insatiable appetite for praise and attention. In his dogged determination for self-aggrandizement, he harnessed the power of media, charming and browbeating reporters and image-makers, producing consumer goods from self-help books on business to vodka, ties, and suits in order to create a brand that embodied the ethos of luxurious excess, even though he was at times deeply in debt and a less than spectacular business success than he claimed. He placed his name on trophy real estate in Manhattan, which for the native of Queens, a less prestigious outer borough of New York City, represented his arrival in what he considered in The Art of the Deal to be “the center of the world.” In dotting the landscape—and the skies and seas with his ill-fated airline and yacht—and penetrating American homes with his branded consumer items, Trump asserted in his 2000 book, The America We Deserve, that “it was no surprise to me that 97 percent of the American people knew who I was.” Barbara Corcoran, one of New York City’s most successful real estate brokers, said, “He bullshitted…but by bullshitting…he made it sell. I don’t know of anyone who is a better marketer.” Tony Schwartz, the ghostwriter for The Art of the Deal, told Jane Mayer of The New Yorker, “More than anyone else I have ever met, Trump has the ability to convince himself that whatever he is saying at any given moment is true, or sort of true, or at least ought to be true.” Schwartz told Mayer that he regretted perpetuating the mythology.
Mythology, of course, was the Kim family business. Like Trump, who joined his family’s business and became president of Trump Management when he was twenty-five, Kim was just shy of twenty-eight when he took over North Korea upon his father’s death. (In April 2017, Trump, as the newly elected U.S. president, expressed empathy for Kim, even as his regime was testing ballistic missiles and threatening the United States. Perhaps reflecting on his own experience, in an interview with Reuters he commented that Kim was young when he became North Korea’s leader: “He’s 27 years old. His father dies, took over a regime. So say what