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

by Mary L. Trump

If the soul is left in darkness, sins will be committed. The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but the one who causes the darkness. —Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

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.

The tableau reminded me of one of my grandfather’s tactics: he always made his supplicants come to him, either at his Brooklyn office or his house in Queens, and he remained seated while they stood.

My brother took a picture of me, and when I looked at it later, I noticed my grandfather hovering behind me like a ghost.

That was the kind of thing he often said to charm people, and he had a knack for tailoring his comment to the occasion, which was all the more impressive because I knew it wasn’t true.

The second thing I noticed after sitting down was the seating arrangement. In my family, you could always gauge your worth by where you were seated,

As usual with Donald, the story mattered more than the truth, which was easily sacrificed, especially if a lie made the story sound better.

It wasn’t long after his first national security advisor had been fired in disgrace, and the cracks in his presidency were already beginning to show. Donald jutted out his chin and clenched his teeth, looking for a moment like the ghost of my grandmother. “They’re not going to get me,” he said.

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.

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.”

“The only time Donald went to church was when the cameras were there. It’s mind boggling. He has no principles. None!”

Remember all that bother to have a photo-op with a Bible--and he was holding it upside-down? 🤬

That kind of casual dehumanization of people was commonplace at the Trump dinner table. What did surprise me was that he kept getting away with it.

I began to feel as though I were watching my family history, and Donald’s central role in it, playing out on a grand scale. Donald’s competition in the race was being held to higher standards, just as my father had always been, while he continued to get away with—and even be rewarded for—increasingly crass, irresponsible, and despicable behavior. This can’t possibly be happening again, I thought. But it was.

As Donald grew up, he was forced to become his own cheerleader, first, because he needed his father to believe he was a better and more confident son than Freddy was; then because Fred required it of him; and finally because he began to believe his own hype,

The fact is, Donald’s pathologies are so complex and his behaviors so often inexplicable that coming up with an accurate and comprehensive diagnosis would require a full battery of psychological and neuropsychological tests that he’ll never sit for. At this point, we can’t evaluate his day-to-day functioning because he is, in the West Wing, essentially institutionalized. Donald has been institutionalized for most of his adult life, so there is no way to know how he would thrive, or even survive, on his own in the real world.

As the pressures upon him have continued to mount over the course of the last three years, the disparity between the level of competence required for running a country and his incompetence has widened, revealing his delusions more starkly than ever before.

deepening social divides along political lines thanks to Donald’s penchant for division,

His ability to control unfavorable situations by lying, spinning, and obfuscating has diminished to the point of impotence in the midst of the tragedies we are currently facing. His egregious and arguably intentional mishandling of the current catastrophe has led to a level of pushback and scrutiny that he’s never experienced before, increasing his belligerence and need for petty revenge as he withholds vital funding, personal protective equipment, and ventilators that your tax dollars have paid for from states whose governors don’t kiss his ass sufficiently.

it felt as though 62,979,636 voters had chosen to turn this country into a macro version of my malignantly dysfunctional family.

The smallest thing—seeing Donald’s face or hearing my own name, both of which happened dozens of times a day—took me back to the time when my father had withered and died beneath the cruelty and contempt of my grandfather.

The horror of Donald’s cruelty was being magnified by the fact that his acts were now official US policy, affecting millions of people.

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.

In the midst of obscene plenty, one person, using all of the levers of power and taking every advantage at his disposal, would benefit himself and, conditionally, his immediate family, his cronies, and his sycophants; for the rest, there would never be enough to go around, which was exactly how my grandfather ran our family.

Honest work was never demanded of him, and no matter how badly he failed, he was rewarded in ways that are almost unfathomable.

👿

the stakes are far higher than they’ve ever been before; they are literally life and death. Unlike any previous time in his life, Donald’s failings cannot be hidden or ignored because they threaten us all.

The events of the last three years, however, have forced my hand, and I can no longer remain silent. By the time this book is published, hundreds of thousands of American lives will have been sacrificed on the altar of Donald’s hubris and willful ignorance. If he is afforded a second term, it would be the end of American democracy.

Donald, following the lead of my grandfather and with the complicity, silence, and inaction of his siblings, destroyed my father. I can’t let him destroy my country.

Whether her own needs weren’t sufficiently met when she was young or for some other reason, she was the kind of mother who used her children to comfort herself rather than comforting them.

When Maryanne wasn’t in school, much of the responsibility of taking care of the younger kids fell to her. (As a boy, Freddy wouldn’t have been expected to help.)

Symptoms of sociopathy include a lack of empathy, a facility for lying, an indifference to right and wrong, abusive behavior, and a lack of interest in the rights of others. Having a sociopath as a parent, especially if there is no one else around to mitigate the effects, all but guarantees severe disruption in how children understand themselves, regulate their emotions, and engage with the world.

Fred’s lack of real human feeling, his rigidity as a parent and a husband, and his sexist belief in a woman’s innate inferiority likely left her feeling unsupported.

The greater their distress, however, the more Fred rebuffed them. He did not like to have demands made of him, and the annoyance provoked by his children’s neediness set up a dangerous tension in the Trump household: by engaging in behaviors that were biologically designed to trigger soothing, comforting responses from their parents, the little boys instead provoked their father’s anger or indifference when they were most vulnerable. For Donald and Robert, “needing” became equated with humiliation, despair, and hopelessness. Because Fred didn’t want to be disturbed when he was home, it worked in his favor if his children learned one way or another not to need anything.

That Fred would, by default, become the primary source of Donald’s solace when he was much more likely to be a source of fear or rejection put Donald into an intolerable position: being totally dependent on his father, who was also likely to be a source of his terror.

Having been abandoned by his mother for at least a year, and having his father fail not only to meet his needs but to make him feel safe or loved, valued or mirrored, Donald suffered deprivations that would scar him for life. The personality traits that resulted—displays of narcissism, bullying, grandiosity—finally made my grandfather take notice but not in a way that ameliorated any of the horror that had come before.

From the beginning, Fred’s self-interest skewed his priorities. His care of his children, such as it was, reflected his own needs, not theirs. Love meant nothing to him, and he could not empathize with their plight, one of the defining characteristics of a sociopath;

Fred wasn’t interested in children at all. His oldest son and namesake received Fred’s attention simply because he was being raised to carry on Fred’s legacy.

In place of those needs grew a kind of grievance and behaviors—including bullying, disrespect, and aggressiveness—that served their purpose in the moment but became more problematic over time. With appropriate care and attention, they might have been overcome. Unfortunately for Donald and everybody else on this planet, those behaviors became hardened into personality traits because once Fred started paying attention to his loud and difficult second son, he came to value them. Put another way, Fred Trump came to validate, encourage, and champion the things about Donald that rendered him essentially unlovable and that were in part the direct result of Fred’s abuse.

As far as he was concerned, he had been, for a brief time, faced with the limits of his wealth and power in fixing his wife’s near-death health crisis. But ultimately Mary’s medical challenges were a small blip in the grand scheme of things.

“Keep your elbows off the table, this is not a horse’s stable” was a frequent refrain, and Fred, knife in hand, would tap its handle against the forearm of any transgressor. (Rob and Donald took over that task when Fritz, David, and I were growing up, with a bit too much enthusiasm.)

Becoming a builder had been his dream for as long as he could remember. He took every opportunity to learn the business, all aspects of which intrigued him, and during his sophomore year, with his mother’s backing, he began building and selling garages in his neighborhood. He realized he was good at it, and from then on he had no other interests—none.

Despite her status as a domestic servant, as a white Anglo-Saxon, Mary would have been allowed into the country even under her son’s draconian new immigration rules introduced nearly ninety years later.

Hmmm.....😖

With free time to volunteer and money with which to shop, she never looked back, which perhaps explains why she was quick to judge others who came from similar circumstances.

She ran the house, but he ruled it—and, at least in the beginning, so did his mother. Elizabeth was an intimidating mother-in-law who, during the first few years of her son’s marriage, made sure that Mary understood who was really in charge: she wore white gloves when she visited, putting Mary on notice regarding the expectations she had for her daughter-in-law’s housekeeping, which must have felt like a not-so-subtle mockery of her recent employment.

Fred had had time to sharpen his skills and gain the reputation that got him the work because while other eligible men had enlisted, he had chosen not to serve, following in his father’s footsteps. Through his growing experience with building many houses simultaneously and his inherent skill at using local media to his own ends, Fred was introduced to well-connected politicians and learned through them how to call in favors at the right time, and, most important, chase government money.

Mary suffered a miscarriage, a serious medical event from which it took her months to recover fully. Doctors warned her against further pregnancies, but Mary found herself expecting again a year later.

So…he almost...wasn't?

The draw this time was the $9 million in FHA funds that would be paid to Fred directly, just as Donald would later capitalize on tax breaks lavished on him by both the city and the state.

Though an iron-fisted autocrat at home and in his office, Fred had become expert at gaining access to and kowtowing to more powerful and better-connected men. I don’t know how he acquired the skill, but he would later pass it on to Donald.

When he got the green light for another development—Beach Haven, a forty-acre, twenty-three-building complex in Coney Island that would net him $16 million in FHA funding—it was clear that his strategy of building on the taxpayer’s dime was a winner. Though Fred’s business was built on the back of government financing, he loathed paying taxes and would do anything to avoid doing so. At the height of his empire’s expansions, he never spent a dime he didn’t have to, and he never acquired debt, an imperative that did not extend to his sons.

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.

Although frugal, Fred was neither modest nor humble.