The biography was written by a team of Washington Post journalists, who interviewed dozens of people who knew the President as a child. And the picture they paint is of a young tearaway who was an absolute terror to deal with. Interviewees recall that the US President already displayed at an early age many of the features that characterise his behaviour today.
He is variously described as an attention seeker, who loved the spotlight, an arrogant know-it-all, never able to admit he was wrong, and a bad loser.
As a young child, the future President went to a private primary school called Kew-Fores with his siblings.
He quickly acquired a reputation for unruly behaviour and went around with a gang of boys who pulled girls’ hair.
He was punished so often with detention, that the punishment was nicknamed “DT” in his honour.
Former teacher Ann Trees remembers a headstrong and wilful child.
She recalled: “He would sit with his arms folded with this look on his face — I used the word surly — almost daring you to say one thing or another that wouldn’t settle with him.”
A former classmate revealed that Trump would make things up and never admit he was wrong, no matter how trivial the subject.
He said: “He had a reputation for saying anything that came into his head.”
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The teacher, Charles Walker, remembered Trump as a supreme attention-seeker.
When informed on his deathbed that Trump was running for President, he reportedly remarked that even at ten, Trump had been a “little s**t”.
Trump’s home life and relationship with his father may help to explain the President’s fierce competitiveness and limited social skills at school.
Fred Trump, a successful property dealer, was determined that his sons would be able to succeed in the highly competitive and ruthless world of business.
He urged his sons to be “killers” in everything they did.
To help toughen him up physically and mentally, his father sent young Trump to the New York Military Academy.
The Academy is a strict Army-style boarding school 70 miles outside New York, renowned for its harsh discipline.
Some experts believe that Trump was deeply affected by this harsh banishment and never got over it, feeling rejected by a father he tried so hard to emulate.
Revealingly in an interview with another biographer, Trump admitted he has changed little since childhood.
He said: “When I look at myself in first grade [aged six] and I look at myself now, I’m basically the same. The temperament is not that different.”