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

by Mary L. Trump

My room was also tasteful. But my name was plastered everywhere, on everything: TRUMP shampoo, TRUMP conditioner, TRUMP slippers, TRUMP shower cap, TRUMP shoe polish, TRUMP sewing kit, and TRUMP bathrobe. I opened the refrigerator, grabbed a split of TRUMP white wine, and poured it down my Trump throat so it could course through my Trump bloodstream and hit the pleasure center of my Trump brain.

As the historian told us stories about what had happened in the room through the years, Donald pointed vaguely once in a while and declared, “This place has never looked better since George Washington lived here.” The historian was too polite to point out that the house hadn’t been opened until after Washington had died.

Despite the millions of dollars pouring in from Trump Management every year, Fred still couldn’t resist picking up unused nails or reverse engineering a cheaper pesticide. Despite the ease with which Mary took to her new status and the perks that went along with it, including a live-in housekeeper, she spent most of her time in the House, sewing, cooking, and doing laundry. It was as if neither of them could quite figure out how to reconcile what they could possibly have and what they would actually allow themselves.

my grandfather appointed Donald vice president of several companies that fell under the Trump Management umbrella, named him “manager” of a building he didn’t actually have to manage, gave him “consulting” fees, and “hired” him as a banker.

Maryanne, with her background as a prosecutor, had limited knowledge of trusts and estates. She asked her husband, John Barry, a well-known and respected attorney in New Jersey, to recommend someone who could help, and he asked one of his colleagues to look into the situation. It didn’t take long for Donald’s scheme to be uncovered. As a result, my grandfather’s entire will was rewritten, replacing one he had written in 1984, and Maryanne, Donald, and Robert were all named as executors. In addition, a new standard was put into place: whatever Fred gave Donald, he would have to give an equal amount to each of the other three children. Maryanne would say years later, “We would have been penniless. Elizabeth would have been begging on a street corner. We would have had to beg Donald if we wanted a cup of coffee.” It was “sheer luck” that they had stopped the scheme. Yet the siblings still got together every holiday as though nothing had happened.

Donald had been given more of everything; he had been invested in; elevated to the detriment of Maryanne, Elizabeth, and Robert (and even his mother) and at the expense of Freddy. In Donald’s mind, the success and reputation of the entire family rested on his shoulders. Given that, it makes sense in the end that he would feel he deserved not just more than his fair share but everything.

More than twenty-five years later, my grandmother chose Ivana and Blaine, without factoring in how the decision might affect me and my brother. Now Donald said, “I think we made a big mistake continuing to support your mother. It might have been better if we’d cut her off after a couple of years and she had to stand on her own two feet.”

As soon as we reached cruising altitude and we could unbuckle our seat belts, one of his bodyguards handed him a huge stack of mail after setting a glass of Diet Coke next to him. I watched as he opened one envelope after another, then, after examining the contents for a few seconds, threw them and the envelope onto the floor. When a large pile accumulated, the same guy would reappear, pick up the wastepaper, and throw it into the garbage. That happened over and over again. I moved to another seat so I didn’t have to watch.

Rob, who’d left his position as president of Trump’s Castle (of the infamous $3.15 million chip bailout) under a cloud, had sat in for my grandfather at Trump Management during his 1991 hospitalization and never left. It was a good gig for Robert. In addition to the millions of dollars a year he got simply by virtue of the fact that he was one of Fred’s living children, he was also paid half a million dollars a year to do a job that required little skill or effort. It was the position for which Freddy and then Donald had been groomed—and had rejected, each in his own way.

Fred still went to the office every day and sat behind his desk until it was time to go home, but Rob was actually, if not nominally, in charge of the well-oiled, self-sustaining machine he often referred to as a “cash cow.”

“Do you know what your father was worth when he died?” she said. “A whole lot of nothing.” There was a pause and then a click. She’d hung up on me.

In an article for The Atlantic, Adam Serwer wrote that, for Donald, the cruelty is the point. For Fred, that was entirely true. One of the few pleasures my grandfather had, aside from making money, was humiliating others. Convinced of his rightness in all situations, buoyed by his stunning success and a belief in his superiority, he had to punish any challenge to his authority swiftly and decisively and put the challenger in his place.

Every time you hear Donald talking about how something is the greatest, the best, the biggest, the most tremendous (the implication being that he made them so), you have to remember that the man speaking is still, in essential ways, the same little boy who is desperately worried that he, like his older brother, is inadequate and that he, too, will be destroyed for his inadequacy. At a very deep level, his bragging and false bravado are not directed at the audience in front of him but at his audience of one: his long-dead father.

Donald’s initial response to COVID-19 underscores his need to minimize negativity at all costs. Fear—the equivalent of weakness in our family—is as unacceptable to him now as it was when he was three years old. When Donald is in the most trouble, superlatives are no longer enough: both the situation and his reactions to it must be unique, even if absurd or nonsensical. On his watch, no hurricane has ever been as wet as Hurricane Maria. “Nobody could have predicted” a pandemic that his own Department of Health and Human Services was running simulations for just a few months before COVID-19 struck in Washington state. Why does he do this? Fear.

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. Telling the stories of those we’ve lost would bore him. Acknowledging the victims of COVID-19 would be to associate himself with their weakness, a trait his father taught him to despise.

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.

Donald’s monstrosity is the manifestation of the very weakness within him that he’s been running from his entire life. For him, there has never been any option but to be positive, to project strength, no matter how illusory, because doing anything else carries a death sentence; my father’s short life is evidence of that. The country is now suffering from the same toxic positivity that my grandfather deployed specifically to drown out his ailing wife, torment his dying son, and damage past healing the psyche of his favorite child, Donald J. Trump. “Everything’s great. Right, Toots?”