Dr. Steven Wruble is a board-certified child and adult psychiatrist in private in Manhattan and New Jersey.

He is also an accomplished singer-songwriter and storyteller, his new solo show Escape From Daddyland, is about to debut on Broadway.

His chapter is in a fascinating book I’m reading is titled  Trump’s Daddy Issues, and it caught my eye right away.

Like many psychologists and psychiatrists, he believes that Trump was shaped by his angry and ruthless father Fred, who taught him to be a “killer” and avoid, at all costs, being a “loser.”

Because Donald Trump has lost, in the biggest possible way, and for the first time in his life, he has failed his father for the very first time. And he doesn’t know what to do.

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Like so many others, I’m fascinated by the factors that brought Donald Trump to the Oval Office and into the hearts, minds, and tightening scrotums of many Americans.

This is important for me; in learning to understand him, I am learning to understand me and us better because we all made him happen, at least in the past four critical years.

I feel responsible. I was part of the system that created him and didn’t see him coming. Nobody in this country seems to want to take responsibility for anything.

What is it, I keep thinking, that put Donald Trump in the White House, and why is his grip on so many of us so tight?

Most of the people reading this just want him to go away. But I’m not weary yet. He’s too interesting and too important now to ignore. He’s bludgeoned his way in our heads and in our lives.

Two books have helped begin to understand the Trump bomb that fell on us – Mary Trump’s Too Much And Never Enough: How My Family Created The World’s Most Dangerous Man, and Yale’s Dr. Bandy Lee’s instant classic on the subject, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 37 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess The President.

For several months, I’ve been skipping back and forth, going through chapter by chapter, and returning to each. These mental health professionals wrote the book because they felt they had a moral duty to warn people about what they all had trained to see: he is dangerous.

Mary Trump’s book offers wonderful and professional insight – she is a trained clinical psychologist – into Trump. The psychiatrists and social scientists in Lee’s big fat book are a gold mine for people who want to understand rather than hate the unprecedented man in the White House.

To my surprise,  Donald Trump, a shady New York real estate operator, is turning out to be one of the most consequential Presidents in the history of the United States. For better or worse, he will leave his mark on us for a long time.

I think the clinical diagnosis of Trump and his Daddy issues are among the most important and revealing analyses that I’ve read about Trump. I’m sure his supporters would dismiss this stuff as just more liberal “snowflake” junk from their hero’s detractors, and that might be true.

But they are helping me understand, and that is valuable.

Trump is a perspective-creator. I’m learning to try to understand his Daddy issues without jumping on the Trump Crazy Train. I do a lot of stupid things, but I never watch any kind of cable news after it gets dark, and rarely before.

Anyone who thinks they can watch Tucker Carlson or Rachel Maddow at 10 p.m. at night and have a restful sleep needs some help.

Trump is a 24/7 Crazy Train. Be careful about getting on.

His extreme behavior comes from somewhere. I’d like to find the source. I’m getting there.

Trump’s obsession with being tough and never losing and turning on anyone who criticizes him or who he sees as disloyal is an almost perfect reflection of his father Fred, the psychiatrists say.

In Trump’s case, his Daddy issues have become America’s issues.

The Fred and Donald Trump story remind me that parenting is important, and bad parenting can do an awful lot of harm, not only to the affected child but in Donald Trump’s case, to the whole wide world.

I’m learning about Trump and his father, little of it good, all of it fascinating.

Mary Trump and the shrinks all agree on a couple of things: Donald Trump is narcissistic with extreme sociopathic traits, and he is a danger to us, and by dint of his great power, to the world beyond our divisions and bickering.

I’m working my way through Bandy Lee’s amazing book chapter by chapter.

For me, it’s a delicious feast. A Freudian at heart, I relish knowing how people are put together and who broke their shattered parts.

“Fathers and sons have a storied history of playing off each other as they grapple with their evolving separate and shared identities,” writes Dr. Wruble.

“We fumble through time doing our best to make sense of all that we witness and experience. I, like Donald Trump, grew up watching and interacting with a strong, proud, and successful father.”

We look up to our fathers for guidance, he adds, but at the same time, we also feel certain competitiveness with them as we fight for our individuality and separation.

Trump is important to understand for all kinds of reasons, one being that he has caught the imagination and loyalty of so many Americans.

Dr. Wruble has focused on several details that shed some light on Trump’s relationship with his father, and how it impacted his development.

Donald is the fourth of five children. His oldest sister is a retired federal circuit court judge, and his oldest brother Freddie Jr. died at the age of forty-three from complications due to alcoholism.

According to a New York Times profile and also to Mary Trump’s book, it was apparent to those who watched Fred Trump with his children that his intensity was too much for Freddie Jr. to tolerate.

As Donald watched his brother’s tragedy unfold, he came forward and became his father’s only trusted protege in his building empire.

Dr. Wruble says he can only imagine that following a brother who drank himself to death didn’t leave Donald much room to do anything but fill the void where his older brother had failed.

Before focusing on Manhattan, Trump and Fred spent many years working together until Donald moved on to create his own company. Donald had bigger plans for himself than Queens.

Friends of the family told the Times that they see the ruthless and demanding Fred in Donald,  they reveal constant and often palpable need to please and impress Fred, who ruled the family with an iron hand.

Even today, Donald Trump seeks his father’s approval, a framed photo of Fred faces him on his cluttered White House desk.

“None of the Trump siblings emerged unscathed from my grandfather’s (Fred) sociopathy and my grandmother’s illness, both physical and psychological, but my uncle Donald and my father Fredy suffered more than the rest, writes Mary Trump.

Donald, she said, grew up to meet some of the criteria for dependent personality disorder, the hallmarks of which include an inability to make decisions or take responsibility, discomfort with being alone, and going to extreme lengths to gain support from others.

As the son of a strong and dominant father, I can relate somewhat to Trump’s increasingly obvious “Daddy issues.” His need to please, his need for unconditional love and support, his intolerance, even rage, at disobedience, and the notion that there is nothing worse in the whole world than losing.

The mechanisms Trump used to cope with such a demanding and domineering person, writes Dr. Wruble, are evident today. As the creator and owner of his own company, Trump was able to exact total control and loyalty in abnormal ways for a President.

Many of Trump’s supporters were drawn to him because he was a businessman, not a politician. But that is also one of his biggest problems; he insists on forcing a tycoon’s management style onto a vast and diverse government that employes millions of people.

“Transferring his strategies and expectations to the culture of government has been frustrating for him, and his responses to that frustration have been eye-opening,” writes Dr. Wruble. “He doesn’t appear to have the flexibility to switch gears in order to deal with the function of his job as president.”

Reading through this literature, the origins of Trump and Trumpism begin to take shape, especially when it comes to Trump’s “Daddy Issues.

As with almost all adults, Trump’s early development created the erratic and defensive human we are all witnessing today. Children need to receive love and attention to feel secure, but they receive only the love and attention that their parents are capable of providing.

Fred Trump’s intensity and ferocity left its mark on the entire family, and in time, on the entire country.

Despite their working together so closely, the tension between father and son caused Donald psychological wounds that still fester, says Dr.Wruble.

To compensate, Donald Trump puffs himself up to project a macho image that appeals to many of his followers. But it’s empty at the core, a defense against his fear of seeming week and ineffectual like his brother.

As President, he is expected to handle issues more delicately than a high-powered real estate developer. The strengths that got him elected president don’t ensure success in the White  House.

Trump’s base, say the shrinks, see in him the strength to be powerful in ways they didn’t see in themselves and/or in past leadership. They may not be aware the president Trump appears to question his own ability to deliver what they are seeking.

Evidence of this can be seen in his use of lying, distortion, marginalizations, and the firing of anyone he fears is disloyal.

“It’s unfortunate,” Dr. Wruble wrote in his chapter, “that our president has not figured out how to heal himself or at least learn how to do his job without being defensive and aggressive with those who disagree with him. I feel for the young parts of the president trying desperately to help him swim through rough waters despite the fear of drowning. What most concerns me is whether we Americans can tread water long enough to come together and avoid being pulled under.”

You don’t really need to be a psychiatrist to see the other side of the coin regarding this question of fathers. If Trump is still desperate to please his father, then it seems logical that millions of his followers see him as their father, and they are equally anxious to please him.

Like Fred, the idea of him losing is simply not possible for them.

Fred Trump casts a long shadow. Like Fred and his son, many of his followers are also intense, intolerant, obsessed with winning, or better put, never losing.

In Donald Trump, they have their own father surrogate, the fierce in unyielding protector and guide.

In their minds, he can’t lose either. The problem is, if there are no losers, then there can’t be any winners either.