‘He Is
and Always Will Be a Terrified Little Boy’
Mary
Trump has not indicted her uncle. She has indicted the whole family. And that
could give it a "seismic imprint."
07/13/2020 04:30 AM
EDT
Michael Kruse is a senior staff writer at POLITICO
and POLITICO Magazine.
Donald Trump is the damaged product of an absent mother and a
sociopathic father.
That’s in essence Mary Trump’s assessment in her
ultra-anticipated instant bestseller that’s due out Tuesday—Too Much and
Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man.
For
anybody who’s done the reading these past five years—from Wayne Barrett’s biography that was published in 1992 to Gwenda
Blair’s multigenerational study from 2000 to psychology experts’
more recent efforts to explain this president—it’s a takeaway that’s not
altogether unfamiliar. And the glut of books about Trump and his aberrant
administration has contributed almost inevitably to a tendency to treat even
the most hyped fresh releases as cash-grab ephemera to speed-read for damning
tidbits and just as quickly forget amid the ruthless whirl of crises.
But hold up here for a sec—for the most devastating, most valuable
and all-around best Trump book since he started running for president. In the vast Trump
literature, this one is something new.
That’s because of the unprecedented access, and its pathos, which
is because of the source—the president’s only niece, the 55-year-old daughter
of his oldest brother, who died at 42 in 1981 in her estimation as a result of
a pathological, decades-long destruction at the hands of his own twisted kin.
Mary Trump,
to be sure, is a partisan (a registered Democrat who’s expressed public
admiration for Hillary Clinton) with an ax to grind (she and her brother were all but excised
from passed-down riches), and she writes, too, with palpable sadness and anger
stemming from the long-ago loss of her father. The White House, meanwhile,
predictably has dismissed her account as rife with “falsehoods” and
“ridiculous, absurd allegations.” But she also holds a Ph.D. in psychological
studies. And in these taut 211 pages, she puts us in new rooms, shows us new
scenes with new details and lets us hear from members of the president’s
nuclear family who have been conspicuously and obstinately mum. She is, after
all, and by blood still, one of them—and “the only Trump,” as she
puts it, “who is willing” to dish on what she calls “my malignantly
dysfunctional family.”
Too Much and Never Enough (at least on its own) is
not likely to hurt the president politically. (There’s plenty else at this
point that’s doing that.) It’s not going to lead immediately to any legal
jeopardy he doesn’t already face. It’s almost certainly not going to “take
Donald down,” either, as she characterizes her impetus—first, she reveals, by
having been foundationally helpful to a Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times investigation, then by writing the rest of what she herself
has written. But what this book does do is help us understand him,
offering the most incisive rendering yet of why he is the way he is.
No matter
what happens in November, historians will have to contend with the influences
that forged the personality of one of the most consequential presidents
ever—and in Mary Trump’s telling, the current occupant of the Oval Office, the
man just shy of 63 million voters thought was the most
preferable choice to lead their nation, is “a narcissist” whose “pathologies
are so complex and his behaviors so often inexplicable that coming up with an
accurate and comprehensive diagnosis would require a full battery of
psychological and neuropsychological tests that he’ll never sit for,” whose
“deep-seated insecurities have created in him a black hole of need that
constantly requires the light of compliments that disappears as soon as he’s
soaked it in.” She says he is “a petty, pathetic, little man.” She says he is
“ignorant” and “incapable” and “lost in his own delusional spin.” She says deep
down he “knows he has never been loved.” She says his reelection “would be the
end of American democracy.”
I asked Trump biographers—people who’ve spent extended periods of
their lives attempting to plumb his psyche—what they thought of her book.
Michael D’Antonio told me he found it “chilling.”
And Tim O’Brien?
He believes it’ll be “indelible.”
“There were a lot of mob movies before ‘The Godfather,’ but ‘The
Godfather’ gave us a very specific understanding of being in a mob family
because it was this rich, detailed, inside account of how a family
dysfunctioned together,” he said. “There was nothing new in
‘The Godfather’ about how mobsters rolled, but the portrait it painted was so
searing and rich and authentic that it defined our understanding of a criminal
family. And, yes, there have been other books about the Trump
family—Wayne’s, mine, Gwenda’s—but none of us captured his family life in the
way that she has.” O’Brien predicted Mary Trump’s work will have “a seismic
imprint.” “It gives,” he said, “the deepest understanding of his family
dynamics that anyone has provided, and how that shapes his psychosis, and why
he’s such a dangerous leader.”
I was especially
interested in the book because of a story I wrote in 2017. It was about the president’s
mother—and why he had talked about her so much less than he had talked about
his father.
Here’s how I started it:
“When Donald Trump moved into the Oval Office in January, he
placed on the table behind the Resolute Desk a single family photo—of Fred Trump, his father. Sometime in the spring, White
House communications director Hope Hicks told me recently, the president added
one of his mother, Mary Trump. When, exactly, and why, Hicks couldn’t or
wouldn’t say.“
On the fourth page of her book, this Mary Trump
supplies the answer. She visited the White House the first week of April of
that year, invited to a dinner to celebrate the birthdays of the president’s
sisters, Maryanne (who was turning 80) and Elizabeth (75). The gathered clan
entered the Oval.
“Maryanne,” the president said, “isn’t that a great picture of
Dad?”
“Maybe,” she responded, “you should have a picture of Mom, too.”
“That’s a great idea,” the president declared—“as though,” writes
Mary Trump, “it had never occurred to him.”
Reporting in 2017, I had tried to zero in on a distinct window of
time when Donald Trump was a toddler, considering it not only an important
moment for the purposes of my story but potentially one of the most important
moments in the totality of his life. He was born in 1946, and his little
brother, Robert, arrived two years later, their mother’s fifth and final
child—final because she suffered severe complications after the birth:
hemorrhaging, an emergency hysterectomy, an abdominal infection and a series of
subsequent surgeries. She almost died. It took many months for her to recover
and in some ways she never did.
I was cautious in how I treated this because psychologists I
talked to were cautious in how they talked about it. They steered clear of
family specifics, sticking instead to what’s known about the salience of a
mother’s love for any child at that critical, formative age, and the potential
psychological havoc of the lack of it.
In this book, Mary Trump has no such restraints.
The first
sentence of the first chapter is this: “Daddy, Mom’s bleeding!”—a 12-year-old
Maryanne wailing for help upon finding her disoriented mother on a
blood-covered floor in one of the upstairs bathrooms in the Trumps’ big house
in Queens. “For the next six months, Mary was into and out of the hospital,”
she writes, and the “long-term implications”
included “severe osteoporosis from
the sudden loss of estrogen” and “excruciating pain from spontaneous fractures
to her ever-thinning bones.” This exacerbated what was her somewhat stony
nature to begin with: “… she was the kind of mother who used her children to
comfort herself rather than comforting them. She attended to them when it was
convenient for her, not when they needed her to. Often unstable and needy,
prone to self-pity and flights of martyrdom, she often put herself first.”
She was “emotionally and physically absent,” she writes.
“The five kids,” she says, “were essentially motherless.”
Similarly unsparing are her descriptions of the president’s
father. The book actually reads at times like a portrait principally of him,
sketching Fred Trump as a callous, sneering, domineering, lying, cheating,
vindictive, workaholic bigot. (He didn’t rent apartments to die Schwarze, which
is how he referred to Black people, employing his first language of German. He
also frequently used the phrase “Jew me down,” a pejorative term for haggling
for a lower price.) He was in the end, in the words of Mary Trump, a
“torturer,” “an iron-fisted autocrat,” “a high-functioning sociopath” who
equated kindness with weakness and favored his second son at the disastrous
expense of his four other children—particularly his namesake, Fred Jr., or
Freddy, who “wasn’t who he wanted him to be” and was “dismantled” because of
it.
She reveals as well by far the most intimate, even poignant
glimpses at his late-in-life Alzheimer’s, describing a wig-wearing husk, coming
downstairs in the evenings in “a fresh dress shirt and tie but no pants, just
his boxers, socks and dress shoes,” asking what’s for dinner over and over,
steadily forgetting the names and faces of everybody in his family—everybody,
evidently, except Donald. “I don’t know if he remembered Dad,” Mary Trump
writes, “because I never once heard him mention my father in the years after
his death.”
“Fred,” she writes, “dismantled his oldest son by devaluing and
degrading every aspect of his personality and his natural abilities until all
that was left was self-recrimination and a desperate need to please a man who
had no use for him,” she continues. “Fred destroyed Donald, too, but not by
snuffing him out as he did Freddy; instead, he short-circuited Donald’s ability
to develop and experience the entire spectrum of human emotion. By limiting
Donald’s access to his own feelings and rendering many of them unacceptable,
Fred perverted his son’s perception of the world and damaged his ability to
live in it.”
The upshot, in her judgment: “Having been abandoned by his mother
for at least a year, and having his father fail not only to meet his needs but
to make him feel safe or loved, valued or mirrored, Donald suffered
deprivations that would scar him for life,” leading to “displays of narcissism,
bullying, grandiosity,” she concludes. “The rigid personality he developed as a
result was a suit of armor that often protected him against pain and loss.”
She calls her uncle—the 45th president of the United States—“an
epic tragedy of parental failure.”
A few years back, on
a reporting trip to New York, I rode the subway out to the end of the F line in
Queens and walked the half a mile to Jamaica Estates to take a look at what in
the book is dubbed “the House”—the more-than-4,000-square-foot, 23-room,
red-brick manse, set showily atop a hill, the biggest home on the block.
Inside, it was “formal,” “stiff,” “staid” and “cold,” friends of
Fred Jr. have told me, recollections Mary Trump confirms. “The House,” she
writes, capitalizing it like this throughout, giving it a special, sort of
sinister air, “seemed to grow colder as I got older.”
She takes us in, past the neglected cement slab of a porch, into
the library with studio family photos on the shelves but no books, down into
the basement with fluorescent lights and black-and-white tile, “an old upright
piano that stood largely ignored because it was so badly out of tune it wasn’t
even worth playing,” and “my grandfather’s life-sized wooden Indian chief
statues that were lined up against the far wall like sarcophagi,” as she
describes.
“When I
was down there by myself,” she writes, in a quiet kind of interlude midway
through the text, “the basement—half illuminated, the wooden Indians standing
sentinel in the shadows—became a weirdly exotic place. Across from the stairs,
a huge mahogany bar, fully stocked with barstools, dusty glasses, and a working
sink but no alcohol, had been built in the corner—an anomaly in a house built
by a man who didn’t drink. A large oil painting of a black singer with
beautiful, full lips and generous, swaying hips hung on the wall behind it.
Wearing a curve-hugging gold-and-yellow dress with ruffles, she stood at the
microphone, mouth open, hand extended. A jazz band made up entirely of black
men dressed in white dinner jackets and black bow ties played behind her. The
brasses glowed, the woodwinds glistened. The clarinetist, a sparkle in his
eyes, looked straight out at me. I would stand behind the bar, towel slung over
my shoulder, whipping up drinks for my imaginary customers. Or I would sit on
one of the barstools, the only patron, dreaming myself inside that painting.”
It’s these types of keen peeks into private places that
give this book its oomph.
We’re in the House.
We see Freddy dump a bowl of mashed potatoes on the head
of a 7-year-old Donald. We see Donald hide from Robert his favorite Tonka truck
toys. We see Robert kick a hole in a door.
We see their restive, insomniac mother, wandering “at all
hours like a soundless wraith,” her children sometimes finding her come morning
“unconscious in unexpected places.”
We see Fred chide Freddy without mercy, mocking him for
wanting a pet, for playing a practical joke—for saying he is sorry. We see him
deputize Donald in the degradation. “You know,” the second son tells the first,
“Dad’s really sick of you wasting your life”—at a time when Freddy was a pilot
in his 20s for TWA, having chosen to not follow in his father’s footsteps in
the real estate business, and Donald was barely out of military school. “Dad’s
right about you; you’re nothing but a glorified bus driver,” Donald says. “He
says he’s embarrassed by you,” Donald says. “Donald,” his father says to
Freddy, “is worth 10 of you.”
We see Freddy’s drinking get worse. We see Fred tell him
to simply stop. “Just give it a quarter of a turn on the mental carburetor.”
We see family members gather at the House but not at the
hospital the day of his death. We see Donald leave to go to a movie.
We’re in the House, “colder still,” for Thanksgiving a
couple months later, and we see Robert put a hand on Mary Trump’s shoulder and
point to her new, month-old cousin, Ivanka, asleep in a crib. “See,” he says,
“that’s how it works.”
“I understood the point he was trying to make, but it
felt as though it was on the tip of his tongue to say, ‘Out with the old, in
with the new,’” she writes. “At least he had tried. Fred and Donald didn’t act
as if anything was different. Their son and brother was dead, but they
discussed New York politics and deals and ugly women, just as they always had.”
And we listen in as they try to mostly erase her from
the estate after Fred’s death in 1999.
“As far as your grandfather was concerned, dead is
dead,” Robert says. “He only cared about his living children.”
“Do you know what your father was worth when he died?”
her grandmother tells her. “A whole lot of nothing.”
Now, in the middle of this grim and pitiless summer, in
the last year of the first term of the presidency of Donald Trump, here is this
book by his niece.
She presents her uncle as fundamentally and profoundly incapable
of an empathetic or merely effective response to the challenges of this or any
other era. “Donald,” she concludes, “withdraws to his comfort zones—Twitter,
Fox News—casting blame from afar, protected by a figurative or literal bunker.
He rants about the weakness of others even as he demonstrates his own. But he
can never escape the fact that he is and always will be a terrified little
boy.”