GENE THERAPY
Mary Trump calls out the media in her book about The Donald.
Hot criticism of the media over the way it handles the 45th president cleaves perfectly along predictable lines: To the right the coverage is excessively, shamefully negative, way over-the-top, but on the left, where it’s impossible to overstate Donald Trump’s treachery, there is never enough pejorative vitriol.
Simultaneously then, it’s too much and never enough.
That might be a good title for a book.
Dozens of books have been written on the man the New York tabloids once loved to call The Donald, a handful of which he pretended to write, but I’ve only actually read four of them (or four more than he has). Bob Woodward’s “Fear” is the best of that narrow sample, and Michael Wolff’s “Fire and Fury” is the worst, but I doubt that Mary Trump’s “Too Much and Never Enough” can ever be matched for its coherent perspective and clinical framework of her uncle’s behavior.
In carefully sculpting this blistering portrayal of a family so perfectly willing to damage each other that no one should be surprised at its lack of regard for anyone else, much less any capacity for empathy, Mary Trump further delivers some sharp rhetorical elbows to the media, even as her cooperation with The New York Times begat a 2018 Pulitzer-winning article about her family’s financial skulduggery and helped launch her book project.
“When Donald became a serious contender for the Republican Party nomination and then the nominee,” she writes on page 200, “the national media treated his pathologies (his mendacity, his delusional grandiosity), as well as his racism and misogyny, as if they were entertaining idiosyncrasies beneath which lurked maturity and seriousness of purpose.”
As it happens in “Too Much and Never Enough,” Mary Trump never really brings the full weight of her doctorate in advanced psychological studies to bear in these pages, preferring to describe a spectrum of familial pathologies onto which the reader can place the narrative as it’s interpreted. While Donald Trump emerges essentially undiagnosed and, according to Mary, undiagnosable, the media is not similarly spared.
“When he hit the New York real estate scene, he was touted as a brash selfmade dealmaker,” she writes. “‘Brash’ was applied to him as a compliment, to imply self-assertiveness more than rudeness or arrogance, and he was neither self-made nor a good deal-maker. But that was how it started — with his misuse of language and the media’s failure to ask pointed questions.”
That’s a media criticism that would only metastasize into the pointless exercise that his now daily forays into the White House briefing room have become. The media sits dutifully through a stream of misinformation, disinformation and abject nonsense for the presumed opportunity to ask a question of no apparent purpose. Mr. Trump believes things are true because he says them and believes things are false because he doesn’t like them. What is the point of asking someone like that a question?
But Mary’s media criticism is more pointed.
“It’s easy to sound coherent and somewhat knowledgeable when you control the narrative and are never pressed to elaborate on your premise or demonstrate that you actually understand the underlying facts,” she writes. “It is an indictment (among many) of the media that none of that changed during the campaign, when exposing Donald’s lies and outrageous claims might actually have saved us from his presidency. On the few occasions he was asked about his positions and policies (which for all intents and purposes don’t really exist), he still wasn’t expected or required to make sense or demonstrate any depth of understanding.”
In the media’s defense, part of that might spring from the notion that it’s pretty clear Donald doesn’t really know much about anything, but closer to the bone is Mary’s observation that rather than expose her uncle, the media is more intent on taking advantage of him for its own purposes.
It’s been pointed out in this space many times that the national media, particularly the unrelenting ratings zombie that is cable news, would rather continue spreading Mr. Trump’s version of everything than risk ignoring him and losing the ratings. It damages both the profession and the definition of truth itself, and Mary saw this very early.
“Fred [her grandfather] kept propping up Donald’s false sense of accomplishment until the only asset Donald had was the ease with which he could be duped by more powerful men,” she writes. “There was a long line of people willing to take advantage of him. In the 1980s, New York journalists and gossip columnists discovered that Donald couldn’t distinguish between mockery and flattery and used his shamelessness to sell papers.
“That image and the weakness of the man it represented were precisely what appealed to [TV producer] Mark Burnett. Both Donald and the viewers were the butt of the joke that was The Apprentice. By continuing to enable Donald, my grandfather kept making him worse: more needy for media attention and free money, more self-aggrandizing and delusional about his ‘greatness.’ Nobody has failed upward as consistently and spectacularly as the ostensible leader of the shrinking free world.”
In a family where the only currency was, well, currency, Donald Trump appears to have been the victim of catastrophic emotional neglect, a role he embraces to this day, the perpetual victim. But along with his grandfather and others, the media has been there to enable him, almost every step of the way.