Too Much and Never Enough....

Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man by Mary L. Trump

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Mary Trump, Donald Trump’s niece (daughter of Donald’s brother Freddy) has written a slim but at times scathing tell-all about growing up as a member of the Trump family, watching Donald as he fumbled and stumbled his way up to the highest office in the land. And while it is at times shocking and some of the family’s bad behavior ranges from just plain tacky (regifting) to the obscene (cutting people out of the will for no good reason=Fred Trump, the family patriarch—for purposes of clarity, I will refer to the father as “Fred”, the eldest son as “Freddy”), this is largely a rough sketch of the man who would become the future one term president of the United States.

These are awful people. While Mary Trump presents Fred Trump as a successful businessman, he is also a terrible father, a terrible man who controlled everyone in his orbit. He ruined eldest son Freddy, cut his grandchildren out of his will (he cut off Mary because her father had divorced her mother), and then the final indignity to Fred: refusing his final wishes to have his cremated ashes scattered into the sea at Montauk, instead insisting that his ashes be buried in a family plot.

But presenting a view of Fred only helps to understand the world from which Donald came. As the second son, he served a role that older brother Freddy never could. Fred put a lot of pressure on Freddy to take the reins on the Trump Empire but when he did not meet expectations and tried to branch out on his own (he was an airline pilot for ten months until he was pressured into coming back to re-join the family business) Fred was done with him. Meanwhile, Donald watched and learned how to survive in this family. He learned all the worst traits of bullying, deflecting blame from his failures to others, and promoting an image over reality to become Fred’s unquestioned favorite.

It may all sound like gossip and family gripes and airing dirty laundry. Maybe it is. She hits a turning point in their relationship when he becomes president where she decides he must be stopped, and this book is most likely part of that. To that end, Chapter 14: A civil Servant in Public Housing lays out a devastating case against him.

Re: his manipulation of the media:

“We must dispense with the idea of Donald’s ‘strategic brilliance’ in understanding the intersection of media and politics. He doesn’t have a strategy; he never has. Despite the fluke that was his electoral advantage and a ‘victory’ that was at best suspect and at worst illegitimate, he never had his finger on the pulse of the zeitgeist; his bluster and shamelessness just happened to resonate with certain segments of the population.” (203-204)
There’s more, but I’ll leave it at that.

Like any other books about Trump, to half of us it is shocking (though really, who is shocked anymore) and to the other half its fake news.




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