'Drawn and gloomy' Trump is facing his biggest fear — and it's not prison: columnist

While Fred Trump may have not have been the most loving father, one thing he instilled in his son is that it's much better to be a "killer" than to be a loser, the former president's biographers have said.

It was a lesson Donald Trump learned well, and he's "charmed and conned, schemed and marauded his way through life on a scale his old man could hardly have imagined," according to an Atlantic article from columnist David Axelrod Monday.

From his time as a New York real estate mogul to becoming president of the United States, Trump has scoffed at the legal and social guardrails that contain regular people, but his first criminal trial is a sign that time is coming to an end, according to Axelrod.

"You could see that realization etched in the former president’s drawn and gloomy face captured in photos that emerged last week from Manhattan’s fabled Criminal Courts Building," Axelrod wrote in his latest piece for The Atlantic.

"You could sense it in his frenetic comments to reporters in the hallway outside Judge Juan Merchan’s courtroom, where Trump robotically recited the now-familiar word salad — 'scam,' 'witch hunt,' 'hoax' — but did so with a trace of desperation, even fear."

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Trump has a history of surviving potential career-ending controversies, but now he's trapped in more perilous straits. He and his supporters dismiss his New York hush money criminal trial as being part of a politically motivated "witch hunt," but deep down he knows the potential consequences he faces, Axelrod writes.

'All of this appears to weigh on Trump as he sits in a courtroom for the first time as a criminal defendant, away from the campaign trail and cameras, in a setting and scenario he cannot control. A man who was bred to believe that the rules don’t apply to him — and who presents himself as peerless — is left to sit silently, by edict of the court, as a jury of his peers decides his fate."

Trump must know, "That a potential reckoning he has spent a lifetime eluding could be coming" as he sits and watches his criminal trial get underway, Axelrod continues, adding that Trump could become the one thing his father instilled in him to fear the most — becoming a "loser."

Read the full op-ed over at The Atlantic.