Too Much and Never Enough : How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man
Mary L. Trump 2020, Simon and Schuster
There have been so many tell-all books about this leaking, sinking ship of a president that the market is pretty much saturated. By the time it was John Bolton’s turn to make a buck off the room where it happened, I had reached my overload point. We know Trump is a dirtbag, corrupt, stupid and probably crazy. If America survives him, he’ll go down as the worst president in history. What more is there to say?
Mary Trump, niece to Trump and a survivor of a viciously dysfunctional family, had quite a bit to say. Quite aside from the fact that she is a member of a family seemingly straight out of Dynasty or Dallas, she is a literate and informed observer (a clinical psychologist) and best of all, she’s a pretty good writer. In the introduction, she came up with this striking phrase: Mike Pence continued to lurk on the other side of the room with a half-dead smile on his face, like the chaperone everybody wanted to avoid.
No wonder Trump fought like a wolverine to prevent the book from being published. He realized that Mary knew a lot of the family secrets, and further, learned that she was the main source on the Pulitzer-prize winning series in the NY Times showing that for much of his life, Trump was a tax cheat and a liar. At least some of the information in her possession is what Trump is fighting frantically to keep from appearing before a grand jury, information that would get most people thrown in jail.
Mary discusses a lot of things; the coldness and lack of emotional support within the family, the scheming and the arrogant abuse of power. They are one of the most corrupt and disagreeable families in America, and that’s saying something in this gilded age of bent and broken plutocrats.
One of the most arresting vignettes in the book deals, not with Donald, but Donald’s daddy, the cold and manipulative Fred Trump. A landlord straight out of the Penny Dreadfuls of the early 20th century, he was famed for his viciousness and racism. Woodie Guthrie even wrote a song about him, “Old Man Trump.” It wasn’t flattering.
Mary writes: When one tenant repeatedly called the office to report a lack of heat, Fred paid him a visit. After knocking on the door, he removed his suit jacket, something he usually did only right before getting into bed. Once inside the apartment, which was indeed cold, he rolled up his shirtsleeves (again, something he rarely did) and told his tenant that he didn’t know what they were complaining about. “It’s like the tropics in here,” he told them.
Notice the blatant gaslighting, the bullying approach, the almost gleeful malice?
Now we know where Donald gets it from. He treats the nation the same way Fred treated that poor unknown tenant, and like dead Fred, Donald is willing to lie, cheat, steal and blow smoke up the asses of anyone if it gives him a victory, no matter how picayune.
He’s an awful man from an awful family. Mary details how Fred and Donnie teamed up to turn Freddie, the older son, into a doomed drunk because he preferred being a commercial pilot to the parasitic and toxic existence of most of the Trump family.
This is the best of all the tell-all books to date. Donald Trump is not just an emotionally damaged and sociopathic man: he is a monster. As we’re all learning, to our regret.