The Trump father-son psychodrama
No doubt the president and his allies will dispute many details of Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man. The new book by President Donald Trump’s niece, Mary L. Trump, purports to be the ultimate insider’s account of a family where cruelty was passed down like an heirloom rocking chair from generation to generation.
But there is also a universality in her reminder that what fathers bequeath their sons is complicated – not least for those who would be president.
Mary Trump, who has a doctoral degree in clinical psychology, is the daughter of the president’s older brother, Fred Jr, who died at 42 from an alcoholrelated illness. According to her book, the family sent her father to hospital alone on the night of his death.
In her telling, Donald Trump’s character was warped by a desperate desire to win the nearly unattainable approval of his father, Fred Trump Sr. Nothing, including lying or cheating, was considered out of bounds. Mary Trump claims Donald Trump even enlisted a smarter kid to take his college admission exams for him.
All of which Mary Trump lays at the feet of her grandfather. ‘‘By limiting Donald’s access to his own feelings and rendering many of them unacceptable, Fred perverted his son’s perception of the world and damaged his ability to live in it,’’ she wrote.
We expect our presidents to be father figures, but our history is replete with examples of how they themselves never really escape the shadows of their own.
Some – John F. Kennedy comes to mind – were carrying out the ambitions of overbearing and controlling fathers. Others, such as George W. Bush, so idealised their fathers (Bush called the 41st president ‘‘close to perfect’’ in a eulogy) that at times their own decisions were called into question.
The younger Bush was not able to shake doubts over whether he went to war with Iraq because he viewed Saddam Hussein as a threat to Ameria’s security or because he saw the Iraqi leader as ‘‘a guy that tried to kill my dad at one time’’.
On the other hand, it was the absence of a father that complicated the struggles of others, including Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, to find their own identities.
Obama’s 1995 memoir, Dreams from My Father, is a voyage of self-discovery that culminates in Kenya, the homeland of Barack Obama Sr, where the future president realises ‘‘how even in his absence his strong image had given me some bulwark with which to grow up, an image to live up to or disappoint’’.
For Clinton, the death of his father in a car accident three months before he was born explains both the first-of-his-generation urgency of his ambition and perhaps the recklessness of his private behaviour. ‘‘His memory infused me, at a younger age than most, with a sense of my own mortality. The knowledge that I, too, could die young drove me both to try to drain the most out of every moment of life and to get on with the next big challenge.’’
Still, there are instances where presidents have found object lessons in the flaws of their fathers. Ronald Reagan believed his character was shaped at the age of 11, when he came home to the humiliating spectacle of his alcoholic dad passed out on his front porch.
‘‘I wanted to let myself in the house and go to bed and pretend he wasn’t there,’’ Reagan wrote. ‘‘... But someplace along the line to each of us, I suppose, must come that first moment of accepting responsibility. If we don’t accept it (and some don’t), then we must just grow older without quite growing up.’’
The boy took a fistful of Jack Reagan’s overcoat, and dragged him upstairs to bed.