Too Much and Never Enough review: Mary Trump thumps Donald
Mary Trump’s tellall will not make her uncle’s re-election bid any easier. The president’s latenight walk of shame is already a classic campaign moment. His niece’s allegation that he paid someone else to take his college entrance exams resonates as true, because of his reported disdain for reading and capacity to inadvertently invent new words like “swiffian”.
Adding insult to injury, Maryanne Trump Barry, Trump’s sister, appears to be the key source for this smorgasbord of dysfunction. She is a retired federal judge who left the bench with an ethics cloud over her head. Fittingly, as Mary Trump lacerates multiple sets of vital organs, her pen a stiletto, she thanks her aunt “for all of the enlightening information”.
It is score-settling time, Trumpstyle. Go big or go home. Few are spared.
Too Much and Never Enough doubles as mesmerizing beach reading and a memorable opposition research dump, in time for the party conventions. Think John Bolton-quality revelations, but about Trump’s family. It is the book Michael Wolff, the author of Fire and Fury, likely wishes he had written but isn’t kin so he couldn’t. It is salacious, venomous and well-sourced.
Sadly, it is also a book born of tragedy and pain. The author’s father, Fred Trump Jr, died in his early 40s. He drank hard, was jettisoned by his father and siblings, and treated as a cautionary tale. Mary Trump is angry, not selfpitying. Although she casts her book as a warning to the American public, it is 200-plus pages of revenge served with the benefit of time and distance. Yet the narrative remains compelling.
Fred Jr found joy in flying and serving his country. He was a member of the national guard and a TWA pilot. In most homes, that would be deemed an achievement. But the Trumps were not most folks. Fred Sr saw his oldest son as weak. His brother Donald humiliated him, his mother Mary stood by and watched. As for Fred Jr’s military service, Trump père found little value there. As for Donald, “bone spurs” were his path to avoid Vietnam.
When Fred Jr was dying, in 1981, the future president thought it an opportune time to go to the movies. Past became prelude. When Roy Cohn, Trump’s friend and consigliere, was dying of Aids a decade later, Trump walked away again. A stunned Cohn reportedly remarked: “Donald pisses ice water.”
But it was the aftermath of Fred Sr’s death that put Mary Trump and the older generation on a collision course. Fred Jr’s two children were cut out of Fred Sr’s will. Maryanne and her brothers did their best to thwart their claims to an inheritance.
Tensions spiraled, then subsided. The matter was settled, and the parties filed a stipulation in surrogate’s court. Ostensibly, the agreement barred disclosure regarding Fred Sr and his legacy. Maryanne was an executor of the estate. Ironically, she has emerged as her niece’s muse. The judge leaked like a sieve.
According to Too Much and Never Enough, Trump and Cohn played a pivotal role in Maryanne’s elevation to
the federal bench. At the time, she was only an assistant federal prosecutor, an unusual launchpad to a federal judgeship. Strings were pulled. When Maryanne had the temerity to tell Trump his presidency was failing, her niece now writes, he reminded her that he made her. Like Fred Sr, Trump brooks no hint of disloyalty.
A New York Times investigation in the origins of Trump’s wealth brought the past roaring back. Questions surrounding the family fortune abounded. Tax evasion appears as one possibility. After resisting overtures for assistance from Susanne Craig of the Times, Mary Trump began to cooperate. In the process, she came to doubt the rationale for her own settlement.
As for Aunt Maryanne’s role in the mess, Mary Trump lumps her in with the rest of them: “They all knew where the bodies were buried because they buried them together.”
This may be the first time a family member of a sitting president has publicly accused him of paying a surrogate to take the SATs – a claim the alleged surrogate’s widow denies. Looking back, Trump’s obsession with Barack Obama’s college transcripts appears to have been a fusion of envy, projection and racism. As an institution of learning, Trump University was truly created in its namesake’s image.
Amid all this, mockery is unavoidable. And as Mary Trump observes, the president hates to be mocked. Think of Stormy Daniels dishing about Toad and Mario-Kart – an image best forgotten.
The author also stresses that Trump’s prejudices mirrored his parents. Both Trump and his father were sued by Richard Nixon’s justice department, for housing discrimination. Mary Trump also contends that Fred Sr regarded “Jew” as a verb and was “scandalized” when “the first Italian American family moved into the neighborhood”. Trump’s mother, she writes, derided Elton John as a “little faggot”. The author was in a same-sex relationship at the time.
Trump’s nostalgia for all things Confederate approaches the organic.
In his view, hoisting the Confederate battle flag is free speech but Colin Kaepernick taking a knee is blasphemy. As an election strategy, it doesn’t seem to be working. Below the Mason-Dixon line, Trump trails Joe Biden in Florida and North Carolina and is in a tight fight in Georgia.
In this cycle, race-based appeals energize communities of color and repel suburbia. Trump generally turns off college-educated women.
There’s more, of course. Mary Trump writes that if the president “can in any way profit from your death, he’ll facilitate it, and then ignore the fact that you died”. As her book appears, Covid-19 cases are exploding, the pandemic moving to the country’s interior. More than 200,000 Covid-related deaths are projected by election day. The Grim Reaper’s scythe is unsheathed.
Trump is undeterred. He falsely claims the situation is improving and demands schools re-open while his White House looks to numb us into submission. A modern-day Moloch, the president expects the nation to sacrifice itself. Not everyone appears willing, least of all his niece.
Too Much and NeverEnough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man (Simon and Schuster £20) by Mary L. Trump is available for £17.40 from the Guardian Bookshop. Delivery charges may apply.
an end to it. Jarosław Kaczyński and his underlings insist that the Russians were behind the crash, or that political rivals in Warsaw, including Applebaum’s husband, allowed the president to fly in a faulty plane, or that it was an assassination. Repeating the lie was the price of admission to Law and Justice’s ruling circles and the public sector jobs they controlled. As Applebaum noted in the Atlantic magazine: “Sometimes the point isn’t to make people believe a lie – it’s to make people fear the liar.” Acknowledge the liar’s power, and your career takes off without the need to pass exams or to display an elementary level of competence.
Other friends from the party showed their fealty to the new order by promoting antisemitic conspiracy theories. The darker their fantasies became, the more airtime Polish state broadcasters gave them. “They had not suffered or been ‘left behind’ in any way,” Applebaum says. Yet they happily worked for propaganda sites that targeted her family. Because she is married to a political opponent of Law and Justice, and because she writes critical pieces in the international press, Applebaum, who had faced no racism in Poland until Law and Justice came to power, was turned by the regime’s
tian climate changed, added Schwenzer. “Mars is relatively small and so it would have cooled down more quickly than Earth after the hot, primordial creation of the solar system 4.6 billion years ago.
“Seas, lakes and rivers would have formed there before they did on Earth and so life may have arrived on Mars before it did on our world. Its grounds for hope, if nothing else. Now we want to find evidence that it did arise and possibly may still be thriving underground.”
Nasa’s robot rover Perseverance bristles with devices for scrutinising the soil of Mars for signs of microbelike life. One of these, called Sherloc, will zap rocks with an ultraviolet laser to identify signs of organic material or minerals that formed in watery environments, for example.
However, it will be the rocks that Perseverance collects for subsequent return to Earth that offer the best chance to find life, extant or extinct, on Mars, say researchers. These will have to be carefully selected by mission controllers as Perseverance trundles around Jezero Crater in order to give researchers back on Earth the best chance of finding of evidence of life in them. That selection will be crucial for it will shape the direction of Mars science for decades to come.
Nor will it be easy to get those samples back to Earth. “You can’t just shoot these back to Earth in one go. It’s going to take lots of niggly, complicated manoeuvres to do that,” said science writer Nick Booth whose book, The Search for Life on Mars, co-written with Elizabeth Howell, was published last month.
According to the plan devised by US and European space scientists, Perseverance will collect soil samples, place them in small metal tubes, seal them and leave them at designated sites. Then a second robot, to be built by the European Space Agency and known as a fetch rover, will land on Mars, visit these sites, and load the samples into a football-sized canister which it will place in a rocket that will blast it into orbit round Mars. Then a second robot spaceship will capture the canister, head back to Earth, and release it so that it lands, by parachute, in the Utah desert.
There is a great deal that could go wrong, researchers acknowledge, but if we are to discover if there once was life on Mars, and possibly still exists there, this is the kind of ambitious, expensive task that will have to be undertaken, they say.
The crucial point is that finding life on Mars goes beyond revealing the secrets of our own planetary backyard. “It is still not understood how the first replicating metabolising structures that we’d call ‘alive’ arose,” said Astronomer Royal Martin Rees. “This process could be a rare fluke, one that only happened once in our Galaxy - here on Earth. On the other hand, it could be common and it turns out that life is widespread across the cosmos.”
And that is why Mars is of such fascination to scientists – for if they detect living beings in a second location in our own Solar system that would suggest life is not a fluke and is likely to have emerged on billions of planets in our galaxy. Hence the urge to head to Mars. To find out if we are alone or not in the cosmos.
However, there’s one key caveat, added Rees. “We would have to be sure that the origins of life on Mars and life on Earth were completely independent of each other and that poses a problem - for it is possible that meteorites and asteroids crashing on Mars billions of years ago during the birth of the solar system could have sent rocks carrying primitive Martian life into space and some could have reached Earth. These could have seeded our planet. By that token, all lifeforms on Earth, including humans, would have actually originated on Mars. We are all Martians, in short!”
Seeing red
•1964 The US probe Mariner 4 made the first successful fly-by of Mars, returning the first close-up pictures of its surface. They revealed a seemingly cratered, dead world – astronomers had hoped to see signs of vegetation and life.
• 1976 The US landed two Viking probes. Biological tests suggested, to most scientists, that the planet was lifeless.
• 1997 The US Pathfinder probe carried a tiny, robotic rover called Sojourner to the Ares Vallis region.
•2003 Britain’s sole attempt to land a craft on Mars, Beagle 2, was intended to seek evidence in the soil of past life.
It was carried there on Europe’s Mars Express spaceship in December 2003, after which Beagle 2 disappeared. The mission was declared lost in February 2004.
• 2012 Nasa’s car-sized rover Curiosity landed with the aim of investigating the planet’s climate and geology over the next two years. The craft is still in operation after spending thousands of Martian days exploring the surface.