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

by Mary L. Trump

Each of the waiters carried a bottle of red wine and a bottle of white. Real wine, not TRUMP wine. That was unexpected.

When Donald announced his run for the presidency on June 16, 2015, I didn’t take it seriously. I didn’t think Donald took it seriously. He simply wanted the free publicity for his brand.

“He’s a clown,” my aunt Maryanne said during one of our regular lunches at the time. “This will never happen.”

“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.”

we need to start with my grandfather and his own need for recognition, a need that propelled him to encourage Donald’s reckless hyperbole and unearned confidence that hid Donald’s pathological weaknesses and insecurities.

I received my PhD in clinical psychology from the Derner Institute of Advanced Psychological Studies,

his two oldest children grew up feeling “white poor.”

Abuse can be quiet and insidious just as often as, or even more often than, it is loud and violent. As far as I know, my grandfather wasn’t a physically violent man or even a particularly angry one. He didn’t have to be; he expected to get what he wanted and almost always did. It wasn’t his inability to fix his oldest son that infuriated him, it was the fact that Freddy simply wasn’t what he wanted him to be. Fred 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.

That’s what sociopaths do: they co-opt others and use them toward their own ends—ruthlessly and efficiently, with no tolerance for dissent or resistance.

A large minority of people still confuse his arrogance for strength, his false bravado for accomplishment, and his superficial interest in them for charisma.

When Freddy, at fourteen, dumped a bowl of mashed potatoes on his then-seven-year-old brother’s head, it wounded Donald’s pride so deeply that he’d still be bothered by it when Maryanne brought it up in her toast at the White House birthday dinner in 2017.

Parents always have different effects on their children, no matter the dynamics of the family, but for the Trump children, the effects of Fred and Mary’s particular pathologies on their offspring were extreme.

he shouted while the employees looked on. “Donald is worth ten of you. He never would have done anything so stupid.” Donald was still in high school at the time.

Her eventual appointment to the federal appeals court, however, was possible because Donald used his connections to do her a favor.

the old man was embarrassed to have a “bus driver in the sky” for a son.

Donald may not have understood the origin of their father’s contempt for Freddy and his decision to become a professional pilot, but he had the bully’s unerring instinct for finding the most effective way to undermine an adversary.

The only self-made man in the family, Freddy was being slowly, inexorably dismantled.

His idea of flirting was to insult her and act superior. It struck her as juvenile, as if he were a second grader who expressed his affection for a girl by pulling her hair.

Maryanne had been doing his homework for him, she couldn’t take his tests,

To hedge his bets he enlisted Joe Shapiro, a smart kid with a reputation for being a good test taker, to take his SATs for him. That was much easier to pull off in the days before photo IDs and computerized records. Donald, who never lacked for funds, paid his buddy well.

Sentiment, nostalgia, and community were concepts my grandfather didn’t understand,

Maryanne, Freddy, and Elizabeth, in different ways, all suffered from totally avoidable deprivation.

From his first day on the job, my twenty-two-year-old uncle was given more respect and perks and paid more money than my father ever had been.

eventually the city purchased the land back from my grandfather. He walked away with $1.3 million in profit for having done nothing but ruin a beloved city landmark.

Besides being driven around Manhattan by a chauffeur whose salary his father’s company paid, in a Cadillac his father’s company leased to “scope out properties,” Donald’s job description seems to have included lying about his “accomplishments” and allegedly refusing to rent apartments to black people (which would become the subject of a Justice Department lawsuit accusing my grandfather and Donald of discrimination).

The closest thing Fred had to a philosophy was the prosperity gospel, which he used like a blunt instrument and an escape hatch, and it had never harmed any of his children more than it did right then.

My grandfather had never been sick a day in his life; he had never missed a day of work; he had never been sidelined by depression or anxiety or heartbreak, not even when his wife was near death. He appeared to have no vulnerabilities at all and therefore couldn’t recognize or sanction them in other people.

When Dad returned from wherever he had been—the hospital or rehab—he moved into my grandparents’ attic. It was a temporary arrangement, and no effort was made to turn it into a proper living space.

When the whole family was together, we spent most of our time in the library, a room without books until Donald’s ghostwritten The Art of the Deal was published in 1987. The bookshelves were used instead to display wedding photos and portraits.

When Donald hitched his fortunes to the likes of Roy Cohn, the only things he had going for him were Fred’s largesse and a carefully cultivated but delusional belief in his own brilliance and superiority.

In interviews in the early 1980s, Fred claimed that Donald’s success had far exceeded his own. “I gave Donald free rein,” he said. “He has great visions, and everything he touches seems to turn to gold. Donald is the smartest person I know.” None of that was true, and Fred must have known that a decade before he said it.

It was a great joke between me and my friends that I, the granddaughter and niece of real estate tycoons, was terrible at real estate. It turned out that Donald and I had something in common after all.