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

by Mary L. Trump

Worse, Donald, who understands nothing about history, constitutional principles, geopolitics, diplomacy (or anything else, really) and was never pressed to demonstrate such knowledge, has evaluated all of this country’s alliances, and all of our social programs, solely through the prism of money, just as his father taught him to do.

Though Fred’s business was built on the back of government financing, he loathed paying taxes and would do anything to avoid doing so.

Sounds familiar

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

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).

Although Donald put no money toward the development costs of the building, he received consulting fees, and he was paid to manage the property, a job for which there were already full-time employees on site. That one project alone netted Donald tens of thousands of dollars a year despite his having done essentially nothing and having risked nothing to develop, advance, or manage it.

But he's "self-made"?

Within five years they were living in the $10 million penthouse triplex in Trump Tower, all while Donald was still effectively on my grandfather’s payroll.

Donald was successful because he was a success. That was a premise that ignored one fundamental reality: he had not achieved and could not achieve what he was being credited with. Despite that, his ego, now unleashed, had to be fed continually, not just by his family but by all who encountered it.

Donald’s talent for deflecting responsibility while projecting blame onto others came straight from his father’s playbook.

The book’s ghostwriter, Tony Schwartz, had done a good job—which he has long since regretted—of making his subject sound coherent, as if Donald had actually espoused a fully realized business philosophy that he understood and lived by.

Donald was still receiving his $450,000 allowance from the banks every month.

While my grandfather was alive, Donald alone had received the equivalent of $413 million, much of it through questionable means: loans that he had never repaid, investments in properties that had never matured; essentially gifts that had never been taxed.

Fred didn’t groom Donald to succeed him; when he was in his right mind, he wouldn’t trust Trump Management to anybody. Instead, he used Donald, despite his failures and poor judgment, as the public face of his own thwarted ambition. Fred kept propping up Donald’s false sense of accomplishment until the only asset Donald had was the ease with which he could be duped by more powerful men.

Donald today is much as he was at three years old: incapable of growing, learning, or evolving, unable to regulate his emotions, moderate his responses, or take in and synthesize information.

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.

When Donald became a serious contender for the Republican Party nomination and then the nominee, the national media treated his pathologies (his mendacity, his delusional grandiosity), as well as his racism and misogyny, as if they were entertaining idiosyncrasies beneath which lurked maturity and seriousness of purpose.

Over time, the vast bulk of the Republican Party—from the extreme Right to the so-called moderates—either embraced him or, in order to use his weakness and malleability to their own advantage, looked the other way.

After the election, Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong-un, and Mitch McConnell, all of whom bear more than a passing psychological resemblance to Fred, recognized in a way others should have but did not that Donald’s checkered personal history and his unique personality flaws make...

His cruelty serves, in part, as a means to distract both us and himself from the true extent of his failures. The more egregious his failures become, the more egregious his cruelty becomes.

January 6

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.

Even as hundreds of thousands of Americans are sick and dying, he spins it as a victory, as proof of his stunning leadership.

The through line from Donald’s early, destructive behavior that Fred actively encouraged to the media’s unwillingness to challenge him and the Republican Party’s willingness to turn a blind eye to the daily corruption he has committed since January 20, 2017, have led to the impending collapse of this once great nation’s economy, democracy, and health.

It was unvarnished racism meant to stir up racial animosity in a city already seething with it. All five boys, Kevin Richardson, Antron McCray, Raymond Santana, Korey Wise, and Yusef Salaam, were subsequently cleared, proven innocent via incontrovertible DNA evidence. To this day, however, Donald insists that they were guilty—yet another example of his inability to drop a preferred narrative even when it’s contradicted by established fact.

The lies may become true in his mind as soon as he utters them, but they’re still lies. It’s just another way for him to see what he can get away with. And so far, he’s gotten away with everything.

Donald will acknowledge none of this, moving the goalposts to hide the evidence and convincing himself in the process that he’s done a better job than anybody else could have if only a few hundred thousand die instead of 2 million.

What Donald can do in order to offset the powerlessness and rage he feels is punish the rest of us. He’ll withhold ventilators or steal supplies from states that have not groveled sufficiently. If New York continues not to have enough equipment, Cuomo will look bad, the rest of us be damned.

While thousands of Americans die alone, Donald touts stock market gains. As my father lay dying alone, Donald went to the movies. If he can in any way profit from your death, he’ll facilitate it, and then he’ll ignore the fact that you died.

The simple fact is that Donald is fundamentally incapable of acknowledging the suffering of others.

In Donald’s mind, even acknowledging an inevitable threat would indicate weakness. Taking responsibility would open him up to blame.

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.