Several weeks ago when former National Security Adviser John Bolton’s memoir titled “The Room Where It Happened” hit the bookstores and subsequently sold a mind-boggling 780,000 copies the first week, my mind was definitely boggled. I figured that must be some kind of a record.
But now just two weeks later “Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man” by Mary Trump was released and quickly established a publishing record by selling an inconceivable 950,000 copies. ON! THE! FIRST! DAY!
People must really be eager to read what salacious dirt Mary has to spread about her uncle. Depending upon what you’re hoping for, you may be disappointed. Or you may not. Early on Mary tells us why she wrote the book.
“Donald, following the lead of my grandfather and with the complicity, silence, and inaction of his siblings, destroyed my father. I can’t let him destroy my country.”
Now before we move on, allow me to remind you that book reviews are completely subjective; therefore what may appeal to me may not be of interest to someone else and vice versa. That being understood, I’ll say straight away that I did not particularly care for this book as a whole. Don’t misunderstand me. There definitely are some juicy nuggets nestled in Mary’s erudite prose, but there was a lot of information that I found completely uninteresting.
One of the first things you will notice about the book his how well it is written. The author obviously is quite intelligent, and her assessment of Donald’s personality clearly displays her knowledge as a clinical psychologist. She also pulls no punches about how Donald gets his way with things.
“When Donald became a serious contender for the Republican Party nomination and then the nominee, the national media treated his pathologies (his mendacity, his delusional grandiosity), as well as his racism and misogyny, as if they were entertaining idiosyncrasies beneath which lurked maturity and seriousness of purpose. Over time, the vast bulk of the Republican Party—from the extreme Right to the so-called moderates—either embraced him or, in order to use his weakness and malleability to their own advantage, looked the other way.”
Mary says early on that in order to understand Donald, some family history is necessary, and then she proceeds to devote a great deal of space to this. There’s no question that her family was at once unhappy and dysfunctional. These people threw around millions of dollars as if it was Monopoly money, and they were always trying to outdo each other. Because of this it took a while to get to the parts about Donald, but when we do, things become interesting.
When Donald first declared himself as a candidate for president, none of his family members took him seriously. In fact at a family luncheon when the subject came up, his sister Maryanne observed, “He’s a clown. This will never happen.”
But it did happen, and Mary remembers waking up at 5 a.m. and thinking: “It felt as though 62,979,636 voters had chosen to turn this country into a macro version of my malignantly dysfunctional family.”
At this point I guess we could say, “And the rest is history.” However, the history is continuing, and after Donald becomes president, Mary recounts some of her contact (or lack thereof) with him, and in particular she tells of being invited to the White House for dinner. As she was walking down a hallway, she came upon a portrait of Hillary Clinton, whom she describes as, “…arguably the most qualified presidential candidate in the history of the country…,” and she just stands there wondering how Hillary could have lost to Donald.
While she is pointing out Donald’s many weaknesses and his poor handling of the pandemic, she also explains how people can get him to do their bidding.
“His pathologies have rendered him so simple-minded that it takes nothing more than repeating to him the things he says to and about himself dozens of times a day—he’s the smartest, the greatest, the best—to get him to do whatever they want, whether it’s imprisoning children in concentration camps, betraying allies, implementing economy-crushing tax cuts, or degrading every institution that’s contributed to the United States’ rise and the flourishing of liberal democracy.”
She also explained his apparent lack of empathy toward those affected by the COVID-19 pandemic.
“As the pandemic moved into its third, then fourth month, and the death toll continued its rise into the tens of thousands, the press started to comment on Donald’s Lack of empathy for those who have died and the families they leave behind. The simple fact is that Donald is fundamentally incapable of acknowledging the suffering of others.”
When things become uncomfortable for him or when someone confronts him about something unpleasant, Donald has his own defense mechanism.
“Instead, Donald 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.”
If I had to choose one word to describe my reaction to this book, it would be “disappointed.” Perhaps I was expecting too much, but the book does not reveal a lot more about the president than I already knew. I also found much of the material about the other members of Donald’s family to be tedious with the exception of the parts about Mary’s father, who became an accomplished aircraft pilot and worked for a while for TWA. Unfortunately his abuse of alcohol ruined both his career and his life.
The Trump family tried unsuccessfully to block the publication of the book, and as I read through it, I couldn’t help but whether those who were expecting a “bombshell” didn’t get what they were hoping for. And then I came to the part about his handling of the racial crisis. Hang on!
“The same could be said of his handling of the worst civil unrest since the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. This is another crisis in which it would have been so easy for Donald to triumph, but his ignorance overwhelms his ability to turn to his advantage the third national catastrophe to occur on his watch. An effective response would have entailed a call for unity, but Donald requires division. It is the only way he knows how to survive—my grandfather ensured that decades ago when he turned his children against each other. I can only imagine the envy with which Donald watched Derek Chauvin’s casual cruelty and monstrous indifference as he murdered George Floyd; hands in his pockets, his insouciant gaze aimed at the camera. I can only imagine that Donald wishes it had been his knee on Floyd’s neck.”
KABOOM!!!
