Looking back with anger (and understanding)
It’s fair to say that President Donald Trump occupies a lot of bandwidth in the heads of those who pay any attention to American politics. Eschewing anything resembling introspection or simple curiosity about the country that elected him its 45th president, Mr. Trump can’t ever be counted on to return the favor. He doesn’t think about America as anything other than an endless opportunity for self-dealing and self-aggrandizement.
Mr. Trump’s relationship to America is strictly transactional, while his knowledge of its history, its people and its institutions remains superficial at best. He does excel at stirring the symbols and sentiments of the darkest parts of our history like a magus raising eldritch spirits straight out of H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos.
Nearly four years into a tumultuous presidency that has produced scores of journalistic exposes revealing the mendacity and ineptitude of his administration in excruciating detail, Mr. Trump has consistently remained the biggest enigma at the heart of a heartless enterprise — until now.
“Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man,” by Mary L. Trump, attempts to go where no other book about the president has successfully gone before — to the inner landscape of Donald Trump’s personality formation and the roots of what his harshest critics glibly describe as “malignant narcissism.”
Mary Trump is a psychologist, but she’s not the president’s shrink. It’s impossible to imagine Donald Trump subjecting himself to the invasive, yet supportive counsel of a psychiatrist or counselor.
Mary Trump is the president’s niece — the only daughter of his late older brother Freddy — so she has the benefit of decades of experience in that dysfunctional family, including years of proximity to Donald Trump, exposure to the family’s most closely guarded financial secrets and firsthand experience as the granddaughter of its cruel, dead patriarch Fred Trump.
Consequently, Mary Trump’s account of the stomach-churning psycho-drama of the Trump family is her uncle’s worst nightmare. It’s not the mind-numbing account of a former sycophant who refused to speak up when it would’ve mattered most. She’s not someone whose memoir can be easily dismissed as ax-grinding by a disgruntled former employee cashing in after being fired by tweet. She can’t be marginalized as a media-based purveyor of “fake news,” either.
Mary Trump is family — arguably the most courageous member of a rich, but savage clan whose guilt in helping to inflict Donald Trump on an unsuspecting nation might never be forgiven given the scale of destruction this soon-to-be one-term president has left in his wake. The first thing one notices while reading Ms. Trump’s relatively short book is how measured the author’s descriptions of events are even while describing acts of familial cruelty and neglect that must have enraged her.
Because Ms. Trump is a trained psychologist and a skilled writer, she’s able to create a space for understanding Donald Trump’s actions that even the most diligent political reporter writing from the outside looking into the Trump family dystopia would lack the insight to do. This isn’t to say she ever excuses her uncle’s actions, but Mary Trump does inadvertently generate sympathy for her subject at times by illustrating how emotionally damaged he was by Fred Trump at a young age. But that sympathy is quickly erased by the litany of cruelty DJT resumes in the next paragraphs.
“Too Much and Never Enough” is not an endless chronicle of salacious scandals, but it is a book of revelations. The headlines about Mr. Trump possibly paying someone to take the SATs for him occupy, at most, a few paragraphs in a book with dozens of tales far more damaging and interesting than the SAT cheating scandals now sending banal Hollywood stars and other members of the amoral elite to prison these days. It is an entertaining sprint through Donald Trump’s world of unearned glamour and fake accomplishments told by a family member who has the receipts and is smart enough to provide the full context for a con job now masquerading as the epitome of the American dream.
The one scene Mary Trump recounts that made me laugh the loudest was Donald Trump’s “eulogy” for his father at a service that summoned Manhattan’s elite for a solemn round of fake tears for the ruthless real estate baron: “Donald was the only one to deviate from the script. In a cringe-inducing turn, his eulogy devolved into a paean to his own greatness. It was so embarrassing that Maryanne [Trump, DJT’s sister] later told her son not to allow any of her siblings to speak at her funeral.”
Well, Freud did say something about the need to “kill one’s father” to proceed to adulthood, but this is ridiculous.
Because I’ve underlined practically every page of my review copy, a disciplined critique of this memoir is impossible. Instead of quoting every page, I’ll quote what I consider one of the book’s more salient insights:
“The walls of his very expensive and well-guarded padded cell are starting to disintegrate. The people with access to him are weaker than Donald is, more craven, but just as desperate. Their futures are directly dependent on his success and favor. They either fail to see or refuse to believe that their fate will be the same as that of anyone who pledged loyalty to him in the past. There seems to be an endless number of people willing to join the claque that protects Donald from his own inadequacies while perpetuating his unfounded belief in himself. Although more powerful people put Donald in institutions that have shielded him since the very beginning, it’s people weaker than he is who are keeping him there.”
If Donald Trump reads this book, Mary Trump should send him a bill for the world’s most public therapy session. I closed “Too Much and Never Enough” with the conviction that, for the first time, I have a proximate understanding of who Donald J. Trump is behind the bluster, the cruelty and the lying. Now I know why this book is the one he wanted least to be read by the public.
Donald Trump is a terrible person, but now the pathos, emotional neglect and parental bullying that warped his formative years has to be taken into consideration, too. He doesn’t want anyone to feel sorry for him because it subverts his personal myth of self-sufficiency. Pity is for losers! Readers will risk feeling pity for Donald Trump while reading this book, but that feeling goes away quickly — I swear.