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

by Mary L. Trump

It’s weakening our ability to be kind or believe in forgiveness, concepts that have never had any meaning for him.

Unlike any previous time in his life, Donald’s failings cannot be hidden or ignored because they threaten us all.

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

Anything that helped you maintain power was by definition right, even if it wasn’t always fair.

Donald’s need for affirmation is so great that he doesn’t seem to notice that the largest group of his supporters are people he wouldn’t condescend to be seen with outside of a rally. His deep-seated insecurities have created in him a black hole of need that constantly requires the light of compliments that disappears as soon as he’s soaked it in. Nothing is ever enough. This is far beyond garden-variety narcissism; Donald is not simply weak, his ego is a fragile thing that must be bolstered every moment because he knows deep down that he is nothing of what he claims to be.

The idea that his tactics were legitimate calculations instead of unethical cons was yet another aspect of the myth that he and my grandfather had been constructing for decades.

His cruelty is also an exercise of his power, such as it is.

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.

“Everything is transactional for this poor broken human being. Everything.”