Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man

by Mary L. Trump

do everything it could to swing the election in his favor, the appeal of winning grew. “He’s a clown,” my aunt Maryanne said during one of our regular lunches at the time. “This will never happen.” I agreed. We talked about how his reputation as a faded reality star and failed businessman would doom his run. “Does anybody even believe the bullshit that he’s a self-made man? What has he even accomplished on his own?” I asked. “Well,” Maryanne said, as dry as the Sahara, “he has had five bankruptcies.” When Donald started addressing the opioid crisis and using my father’s history with alcoholism to burnish his anti-addiction bona fides to seem more sympathetic, both of us were angry. “He’s using your father’s memory for political purposes,” Maryanne said, “and that’s a sin, especially since Freddy should have been the star of the family.” We thought the blatant racism on display during Donald’s announcement speech would be a deal breaker, but we were disabused of that idea when Jerry Falwell, Jr., and other white evangelicals started endorsing him. Maryanne, a devout Catholic since her conversion five decades earlier, was incensed. “What the fuck is wrong with them?” she said. “The only time Donald went to church was when the cameras were there. It’s mind boggling. He has no principles. None!” Nothing Donald said during the campaign—from his disparagement of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, arguably the most qualified presidential candidate in the history of the country, ...