Book almost makes you feel bad for Trump
Niece shows how president was also his dad’s victim
Mary L. Trump, the president’s only niece, has almost pulled off the impossible in her new tell-all book about her terrible family: She has almost turned President Donald J. Trump into a sympathetic figure.
In “Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man,” he is among the many victims of his abusive father, Fred Trump, who ran the family like it was a reality TV show on which only the most gratuitously cruel contestant gets to eat.
As for maternal affection, that didn’t happen, either. At one point, Donald’s mother, Mary, admits to the author that she was relieved when she could finally ship his bratty self off to military school.
Since nearly every character in this extensive catalog of bad behavior is a miserable and hobbled human, daddy’s thoroughly dishonest favorite — whose only real skill was getting his made-up self-praise printed as fact in the New York tabloids — does not even rate as the worst of his clan.
There are a few exceptions: the author’s sad, gentle, alcoholic father, who is treated like Harry Potter in his own home; the author’s brother and mother, who are likewise routinely victimized; and Marla Maples, Trump’s second wife, who only has a cameo in the book but stands out as the only person outside the author’s immediate family who is not completely bloodless — “She was just two years older than I was and about as different from Ivana as a human being could be. Marla was down to earth and soft spoken where Ivana was all flash, arrogance and spite.”
The real faker
Essentially, the Trumps were the Borgias without art, constantly plotting, cheating and, in Donald’s case, getting bailed out and bankrolled by Fred, who was so delighted in his second son’s flashy, phony narrative that he was willing to keep propping him up.
If you’ve ever wondered, as most of us have, how our 45th president became someone who seems to enjoy caging children and mocking disabilities, who doesn’t understand sacrifice or any noble impulse, who doesn’t know what you say to someone who’s grieving and who envies dictators their reeducation camps, it’s all here, as told by a witness with an eye for detail and a Ph.D. in clinical psychology.
But the result isn’t, as the author imagines, to “take down” Dangerous Donald. Instead, her account humanizes him: He doesn’t know what love is because his parents didn’t. He has to hear constant praise because he knows he has spent his whole life faking it.
There are no true surprises in this depressing book.
(What, Donald Trump really paid someone to take his SAT test? No way. He and his dad really enjoyed a running commentary on “ugly women”? You’re kidding. First wife Ivana was so cheap that she regifted goody baskets on Christmas but even then plucked out the good stuff first? Shocker.)
Maybe the best single paragraph about what “being Trump” has meant to the author is this one, about the night she spent in Donald Trump’s Washington hotel before an awkward family dinner at the White House in 2017: “My room was also tasteful. But my name was plastered everywhere, on everything: TRUMP shampoo, TRUMP conditioner, TRUMP slippers, TRUMP shower cap, TRUMP shoe polish, TRUMP sewing kit, and TRUMP bathrobe. I opened the refrigerator, grabbed a split of TRUMP white wine, and poured it down my Trump throat so it could course through my Trump bloodstream and hit the pleasure center of my Trump brain.”
Justifiable bitterness
In the end, her narrative is almost unbelievably all one way. Even Donald’s mother, her “Gam,” is fine with seeing the author, her namesake, cheated of her inheritance, though Mary was the only one who had bothered to sit with Gam after her husband died. You do have to wonder how much of this tidiness has been colored by her justifiable bitterness.
But if you somehow still think of Donald J. Trump as a whiz in business, or even a decent deal-maker, this book could be instructive.
And if you think your relatives are toxic, well, step aside for the Trumps.
Melinda Henneberger is an editorial writer and columnist for The Kansas City Star and a member of the USA TODAY Board of Contributors.