TOO MUCH AND NEVER ENOUGH
HOW MY FAMILY CREATED THE WORLD’S MOST DANGEROUS MAN
MARY L TRUMP
Simon & Schuster, 240pp, £20
On publication day this indictment of Donald Trump by his niece Mary, a clinical psychologist, sold a recordbreaking 950,000 copies. She says Uncle Donald was always a wrong ’un, like his father, Fred – ‘a highfunctioning sociopath’ who believed that nice guys finish last. According to Fred, lying and cheating, in public and private life, was not only permissible, but praiseworthy. Everything Donald has done, says Mary, has been directed at an audience of one, his hardboiled, tyrannical father. Hence her description of the President as ‘Fred’s Monster’.
Mary Trump’s father, Fred Jnr, died young, having turned to drink when it became clear that he lacked the killer instinct demanded of a male Trump. His daughter is made of sterner stuff. The Guardian’s Lloyd Green said she ‘lacerates multiple sets of vital organs, her pen a stiletto’, and described her book as ‘salacious, venomous and well sourced’. In the Sunday Times Josh Glancy summed it up as ‘a ghastly tale laden with profound dynastic anguish; something like Succession crossed with Bleak House’.
The Financial Times’s Edward Luce also invoked Bleak House, but cautioned that ‘even in the darkest of Dickens’s novels, no family comes across quite as mendacious, grasping and avaricious as the Trumps. At times the reader will feel sorry for the young Donald. Who among us could cope with an upbringing like that? Then one remembers that he inherited $413 million and calls himself self-made.’ Trump’s ‘desolate childhood’ could well account for his behaviour, agreed Leo Robson in the New Statesman. Dysfunctional American dynasties like the Kennedys and the Gettys suffered from the same fateful combination of ‘privilege and neglect’.
And what did the President think of the book? Interviewed on Fox News, he acknowledged that his father ‘liked to win’, but strongly denied that he was a ‘psychopath’ ( sic). ‘That book is a lie,’ he said. Well, he would, wouldn’t he?