Mary Trump's Hauntingly Credible Assessment of Her "Dangerous" Uncle Donald
Michael D’Antonio is the author of the book "Never Enough: Donald Trump and the Pursuit of Success." His next book, "The Hunting of Hillary: The Forty Year Campaign to Destroy Hillary Clinton," will be out later this month. The opinions expressed in this comment are yours.
No one will fully explain Donald Trump: cruelty, vanity, insecurity turned into massive overconfidence. However, in "Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man" ("Too Much and Never Enough: How my family created the most dangerous man in the world"), his niece Mary L. Trump is closer Let no one describe the creation of a seemingly heartless person who won his way to the White House.
On page after page of this book, to be published next Tuesday, the author relies on her perspective as her source and her experience as a psychologist to reveal the family dynamics produced by a person capable of the kind of acts scandalous that Trump has committed. After all, this is a man who used insult, racism, and lies to gain and maintain power. A president whose leadership contributed to deadly fiascos involving child asylum seekers, hurricane victims, and now a pandemic made even worse by his clumsiness. Through it, he seems immune to feelings of regret, grief, and empathy.
The president's brother tried unsuccessfully to block publication of the book, claiming that a legal agreement made to resolve a dispute prohibited it. At the time, Robert Trump, calling his niece's actions "a disgrace," said: "Your attempt to sensationalize and mischaracterize our family relationship after all these years for your own financial gain is a travesty and injustice to remember. from my late brother, Fred, and our dear parents. "
Whatever older Trumps feel, Mary Trump gathers enough family memories and knowledge to make a plausible case for her assessment of the president and her clan. I didn't speak to her when I was researching the biography I wrote about Trump, but I find her account compelling. Her grandfather's description of her lines up with what others told me about his cold and demanding nature. Likewise, her description of how Fred Sr. backed Donald Trump during the years his son made a series of bad business decisions rings true to the public record and what many sources told me. Overall, it seems to me to be an accurate report.
On a personal level, Mary Trump saw a precedent for Donald Trump's coldness in the way her uncle treated his own father while he died. Donald Trump has always spoken of Fred Trump Jr., his older brother, as a man dejected by alcohol addiction. This is true. Mary Trump also alleges that Fred Jr. was abused by his father, whom Mary considers a "high-functioning sociopath," and by Donald Trump, who was an old-school chip. Together they made Fred Jr. miserable, she writes.
Trump pushed him aside to become the heir apparent to the family business and Fred was sidelined, she says. All of this was consistent with the value system of the head of the family. According to Mary Trump, the old Trump considered human softness as shameful and weakness as unacceptable. He taught his children to "be tough at all costs, lying is okay, admitting they are wrong or apologizing is weakness." In life "there can be only one winner," Fred Trump used to say, according to her account, "and everyone else is a loser." This attitude may explain the author's claim that while Fred Jr. died of heart disease, the family waited a week before seeking medical help.
Decades later, Mary Trump says she sees the dysfunction she witnessed when he was a young member of the Trump clan unfolding on a national scale during the pandemic. Rather than act quickly to address covid-19, the president has refused to take responsibility for early mistakes or to adapt significantly as things get worse. Unable to face even a hint of failure, he has offered distractions and denials until he seems to have lost interest. Recently, the Washington Post reported that the White House may be waiting for people to get used to illness and death.
"As thousands of Americans die alone, Donald touts the gains of the stock market," writes Mary Trump. While my father lay dying alone, Donald went to the movies. If he can somehow profit from your death, he will facilitate it, and then ignore the fact that you have died ... The fact is that Donald is fundamentally unable to recognize the suffering of others. Telling the stories of those we have lost would bore him. "
In one of the most famous episodes in the history of the Trump family, Mary Trump and her brother sued after discovering that, as heirs to her father, they were denied a portion of Fred Sr.'s estate.
The lawsuit was eventually settled out of court, but the harsh feelings that arose did not go away. Mary Trump wrote that she received a reminder of where her father was with her family when, after the death of her grandmother, he was not mentioned as one of her children in the published obituary.
By writing and publishing her book now, decades after the dispute over her will was resolved, Mary Trump has opened herself up to the possibility that the president and her allies will subject her to further vilification. Kellyanne Conway, the president's adviser, has already beaten her up a bit, pointing out that her books "are unverified, no one is under oath." She also warned against "a rush to give credibility to whoever receives the president that day."
In fact, Mary Trump has wide credibility, due to her life that she spent dealing with the extended Trump clan, including her powerful uncle. This credibility is amplified by her professional qualifications and by the mixture of fierce honesty and decency that she seems to display throughout the book as she reveals the good and the bad. Her decency can be seen in her compassion for Donald Trump who, as a very young child, he writes, was deprived of the care of a mother due to his many illnesses and whose father was unable to offer loving care. "Donald's main source of comfort and human connection was taken from him," she writes. He was left in the care of the household staff and a disinterested father, he adds, "Donald suffered hardships that would mark him for life."
One suggestion of how the development of Donald Trump was arrested in childhood comes in an anecdote that Mary Trump shares about an incident that occurred from inside the White House. Invited to a family celebration after the election, she catches the sound of a family story about one of Donald's young brothers throwing a bowl of mashed potatoes on the head of the future president. She watches to see if old Trump can finally laugh at himself. Instead, she recalls her, he crossed his arms over his chest and frowned.
In the same part of the book, Mary Trump points out that the president's older sister, Maryanne Barry, a former judge of the Federal Court of Appeals, considered him an unprincipled "clown." The author also describes that when her uncle was campaigning for president, she heard echoes of Trump's family dinners in the way the candidate mocked and belittled others. "That kind of casual dehumanization of people was common at Trump's table," she writes.
Mary Trump is reluctant to give the president a formal diagnosis. However, she notes his narcissism and suggests that she seems to fit many of the criteria for a severe diagnosis of antisocial personality disorder. "He is and always will be a terrified child," she says. It is her concern for the harm a terrified person could do, she writes, which makes her call him "the most dangerous man in the world" and forces her to tell the truth that he knows. The result is an insightful and well-crafted memoir, written by someone familiar with the Trump story inside and out, and that he wrote it despite family pressure to stop it.
