When a family member who hates you and takes you apart in a new book happens to be a clinical psychologist, you know you’re in trouble. So it is in Mary L. Trump, Ph.D.’s “Too Much and Never Enough, How My Family Created The World’s Most Dangerous Man.”
While Dr. Trump dumps on Uncle Donald, her book does not address why or whether he is “the world’s most dangerous man,” just that he’s a world-class meanie and phony who happens to be the president. So the title misrepresents the book, like a caption unconnected to the photo it purports to describe.
Mary is Donald’s niece, the daughter of Fred Trump, Jr., the oldest of the five children of Fred and Mary Trump. She is, among other things, a well known character in law and literature: the disinherited granddaughter.
Her grandparents had five children, Fred Jr., Maryanne, Elizabeth, Donald and Robert. Mary’s father, an alcoholic, died at age 42 after failing as an executive in his father’s company and thereafter as a pilot for TWA.
Upon her grandfather’s death from Alzheimer’s complications in 1999, Mary discovered that she and her brother Fred III were cut out of his will. This fact, together with the total support of the omission of Mary and her brother from the will by all and each of Fred Trump’s surviving children, and his widow, is what motivates her book and her hatred of all of them.
The book starts with Dr. Trump’s excited analysis of the parenting dynamics of her grandparents during the fifties and sixties. It appears that Fred was a largely absent parent and that he was only interested in the boys anyway. Thunderclap!
Mother Mary Trump, described as a tough Scot from the Isle of Lewis, was only interested in the girls. Double thunderclap!
Donald was mean to his kid brother Robert and stole his toys. Appalling!
From there Dr. Trump contends that all of Donald’s misbehavior and demand for approval throughout his life emanates from his unrequited need and desire to be like his father, the Rosebud in the piece.
And Fred, described by Dr. Trump as a “sociopath,” mistakenly thinks Donald is a genius loaded with charm and very good with the politicians Fred’s real estate business needs to make out in Brooklyn and Queens where he builds many substandard apartments in buildings with gorgeous lobbies to entice his working class tenants.
In acts of supreme stupidity, this successful boroughs builder later repeatedly bails out the beloved Donald when he screws up in Atlantic City.
Fact finders know that many parental shortcomings and childhood incidents yield three possible inferences: the good, the bad, and the indifferent. With Dr. Trump, they are all bad.
I wonder what Dr. Trump would do with those paragons of parenting and marital devotion, Joe and Rose Kennedy. Teddy cheated at Harvard and was considered a sexual predator in his youth. And he became The Lion of the Senate!!
Jack wanted to be like his deceased brother Joe, the apple of his father’s eye, but he never could measure up. He became president of the United States and not even “the world’s most dangerous man” of his day.
Following Dr. Trump’s analysis of her grandparents, uncles and aunts, she turns to a narrative culminating in her disinheritance and her retention of a lawyer to fight her case, a person who gets dumped on too. In the course of the legal battle her lawyer gets a lot of Fred Trump company and personal financial documents.
Years after the estate battle ended, Dr. Trump delivers these to the New York Times which publishes a 14,000-word piece in October 2018 taking apart the financial machinations of her uncles and aunts, chapter and verse thanks to her. They get the Pulitzer Prize. She gets nothing.
Not so fast! Her book sold 950,000 copies in the first week and she got a whole hour with Rachel Maddow. Not bad.
I have nothing but contempt for Donald J. Trump. But Dr. Trump’s book is an unimportant event that does not advance the responsible opposition that Trump deserves and the American people need.