Mary
Trump’s Book Shows How Donald Trump Gets Away With It
The problem with a
fraud as big as this president is that once you start collaborating with him,
it’s impossible to get out.
JULY 13, 20205:52 PM
Too Much and Never Enough, Mary
Trump’s devastating indictment of how the Trump family created, as her subtitle
characterizes him, “the world’s most dangerous man,” hits bookstores this week.
Its publication coincides with—as she predicted—record-shattering COVID-19 cases, a fragile economy, and a half-formed government plan to open schools this fall at any
cost. By now you have doubtless ingested the greatest hits of her family gossip: Donald Trump
ogled his own niece in a bathing suit and sought to fill one of his books with
hit lists of “ugly” women who had rebuffed him; Donald Trump paid someone to
take his SATs; Maryanne Trump Barry, a retired federal appeals court judge,
once described her brother as a “clown” with no principles; Donald Trump was a
vicious bully even as a child; Freddy Trump—the author’s father—died alone in a
hospital while Donald went to a movie. The details are new, and graphic, yes,
but very little about it is surprising: The president is a lifelong liar and
cheater, propped up by a father who was as relentless in his need for success
as Donald Trump was to earn his approval. Check please.
What
Mary Trump describes here is not just her uncle’s addiction to adulation, fame,
money, and success, but a nation’s—or some part of a nation’s—unfathomable
addiction to him.
But not quite. What is new and surprising is also that Mary
Trump, who has a Ph.D. in clinical psychology, has given us a granular portrait
of Trump’s profound impairment: She says that her uncle has all nine clinical
criteria for narcissism, although she insists that this diagnosis is only the
tip of the psychological iceberg—he may also suffer from antisocial personality
disorder, sociopathy, and/or dependent personality disorder, along with an
undiagnosed learning disability that likely interferes with his ability to
process information. I leave it to the mental health experts to determine
whether some or all of that is accurate. But what Mary Trump surely adds to the
growing canon of the “Trump is unwell” book club is not limited to family
gossip or mental health diagnostics: At bottom, Too Much and Never
Enough may be the first book that stipulates, in its first pages, that
the president is irreparably damaged, and then turns a clinician’s lens on the
rest of us, the voters, the enablers, the flatterers, the hangers-on, and the
worshippers. It is here that Mary Trump’s book makes perhaps the most enduring
contribution to the teetering piles of books that have offered too little too late, even while telling
us that which we already knew. Because Mary Trump begins from
the assumption that other analysis tends to end with: Donald Trump is lethally
dangerous, stunningly incoherent, and pathologically incapable of caring about
anyone but himself. So, what Mary Trump wants to know is: What the hell is
wrong with everyone around him? As she writes in her prologue, “there’s been
very little effort to understand not only why he became what he is but how he’s
consistently failed up despite his glaring lack of fitness.”
The book is thus actually styled as an indictment not of
Donald Trump but of Trump’s enablers. The epigraph is from Victor Hugo’s Les
Misérables, and it’s emphatically not about Donald John Trump at all:
“If the soul is left in darkness, sins will be committed. The guilty one is not
he who commits the sin, but the one who causes the darkness.” Mary Trump blames
Fred Trump for Donald Trump’s pathology, although she doesn’t claim that her uncle
is a tragic victim of abuse. She blames his family that propped him up (also
her family, it should be noted), and then in concentric and expanding circles,
the media that failed to scrutinize him, the banks that pretended he was the
financial genius he was not, the Republican Party, and the “claque of
loyalists” in the White House who continue to lie for him and to him in order
to feed his insatiable ego and self-delusion. Even the phrase “too much and
never enough” is perhaps deliberately borrowed from the language of addiction,
and what Mary Trump describes here is not just her uncle’s addiction to
adulation, fame, money, and success, but a nation’s—or some part of a
nation’s—unfathomable addiction to him.
The bulk of the book focuses on the tale of Mary and her
brother Fritz’s abandonment by the rest of the Trump clan. Her father, Freddy,
the scion and namesake, failed to be the storybook heir to her grandfather’s
real estate empire, instead collapsing into a tragic black hole of alcoholism,
illness, and despair. Donald Trump, Freddy’s younger brother, not only helped
push Freddy down but also stepped on his sinking shoulders on his way into the
empty, Freddy-shaped space to become his father’s successor. And as Freddy’s
parents and three other siblings altered their lives and priorities in order to
orbit around Donald, Mary and her brother were eventually written out of the
wills, the empire, and the family story, as payback for their father’s
perceived weakness and failures. This is all tragic in its own right, but it
also makes Mary, who has been let down by the so-called adults in the room
almost since her infancy, perfectly positioned to explain and translate what
happens to otherwise high-functioning adults—her aunt Maryanne, a competent
federal judge; the lawyers and accountants tasked with fulfilling Donald’s
whims and hiding his failings; the sycophants and Republicans and evangelical
Christians who support his campaign unquestioningly; and the officials who now
populate the Senate, the Cabinet, and the Oval Office. All of them appear to be
reasonably mentally sound. Yet they all cover for Donald, at the expense of
real suffering and genuine human loss, just as the Trump clan ignored Freddy’s
disintegration and death. Mary Trump’s childhood trauma has become America’s
trauma, and she really wants to know how that came to be. Again.
The section of the book that has garnered the most attention
is likely Mary’s claim that Trump cannot be evaluated for pathologies because
he is “in the West Wing, essentially institutionalized” and that he has in fact
“been institutionalized for most of his adult life. So there is no way to know
how he would thrive, or even survive, on his own in the real world.” We are not
used to seeing entities like the White House described in this way—a “very
expensive and well-guarded padded cell”—as a means of protection for the broken
man inside rather than as a platform from which a leader can change the world.
And her ultimate point is that even a shattered psyche, buffered from the real
world, can still do irreparable damage to it. But the most interesting
assessments she offers are reserved for those inside the “institutions,” the
people who might have saved us and certainly have not, from the nuclear family,
to the Trump businesses, to New York’s bankers and powerful elites, to Bill
Barr, Mike Pompeo, and Jared Kushner. They all knew and know that the emperor
has no clothes, even as they devote their last shreds of dignity to effusive
praise of his ermine trim and jaunty crown.
He
fails up, in other words, because everyone around him, psychologically normal
beings all, end up so enmeshed with his delusions that they must do anything
necessary to protect them.
Mary Trump seems to answer the question of why they do this
in a section late in the book about Donald Trump’s father, Fred Trump. In
describing Fred’s growing realizing that his fair-haired boy, Donald, was a
fraud, Mary explains that, yes, Fred himself was a master at fattening his
wallet with taxpayer funds, committing tax fraud to benefit his children. (Mary
admits she was the one who leaked the family tax information to the New York Times in 2018 for its
blockbuster story.) But as it became clear that Donald had no real
business acumen—as his Atlantic City casinos cratered and his father unlawfully
poured secret funds into saving them—Mary realized that Fred also depended on
the glittery tabloid success at which Donald excelled. Fred continued to prop
up his son’s smoke-and-mirrors empire because, as Mary writes, “Fred had become
so invested in the fantasy of Donald’s success that he and Donald were
inextricably linked. Facing reality would have required acknowledging his own
responsibility, which he would never do. He had gone all in, and although any
rational person would have folded, Fred was determined to double down.”
Mary Trump’s words there could just as easily be true for
John Kelly, Kellyanne Conway, John Bolton, Mitch McConnell, Susan Collins, or
Melania Trump. And as Mary Trump is quick to observe, the sheer stuck-ness of
his enablers means that Trump never, ever learns his lesson. Being cosseted,
lied to, defended, and puffed up means that Donald Trump knows that, “no matter
what happens, no matter how much damage he leaves in his wake, he will
be OK.” He fails up, in other words, because everyone around him, psychologically
normal beings all, ends up so enmeshed with his delusions that they must do
anything necessary to protect them. Trump’s superpower isn’t great vision or
great leadership but rather that he is so tiny. Taking him on for transactional
purposes may seem like not that big a deal at first, but the moment you put him
in your pocket, you become his slave. It is impossible to escape his orbit
without having to admit a spectacular failure in moral and strategic judgment,
which almost no one can stomach. Donald Trump’s emptiness is simply a mirror of
the emptiness of everyone who propped him up. It’s that reflection that becomes
unendurable. This pattern, as Mary writes, “guaranteed a cascade of
increasingly consequential failures that would ultimately render all of us
collateral damage.”
Nobody, not even Mary, who signed on briefly to ghostwrite
one of his books, ends up just a little bit beholden to Donald Trump and that
includes his rapturous supporters who still queue up, maskless, to look upon
his greatness. As she concludes, his sociopathy “reminds me that Donald isn’t
really the problem at all.” That makes hers something other than the 15th book
about the fathoms-deep pathologies of Donald Trump: It is the first real
reckoning with all those who “caused the darkness.”
Mary Trump is, among other things, a brisk and gifted
writer, and she is a fact witness to, and also a victim of, a family that
elevated a mediocre and vicious man, at the expense of justice, fairness, and
truth. Her real beef is not with her uncle Donald, who has always been exactly
as we have long known him to be; that’s why a smattering of new details about
his business failures and meanness were never really the point of this book.
We’ve read that book before. The perspective of this book is made possible
exactly because Mary Trump was one of the first children to be written out of
the will, cast out of the family, and denied the support and love that should
have been hers, as a result of her father’s perceived failures. It is this—because
she was ousted rather than being forced to remove herself—that allows her to
see clearly why everyone else stuck around. And what she reveals is a
devastating indictment of all the alleged adults who stick around Donald Trump,
who came together to fail America, to leave vulnerable populations to fend for
themselves, and who continue to lie and spin to pacify his ego. They do it
because they can’t admit the payoff is never coming, and to save themselves
from the embarrassment of having to admit they were catastrophically wrong.
