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

by Mary L. Trump

He had had a propensity for showmanship, and he often trafficked in hyperbole—everything was “great,...

He took a Dale Carnegie public speaking course, but he was so bad at it that even his usually obedient children teased him about it. Just as some people have a face for radio, Fred had a level of social confidence made for back rooms and print media. That fact would figure significantly in his later support of his second son at the expense of his first.

he smiled easily, even when he was telling somebody he or she was nasty, and was usually in a good mood. He had reason to be; he was in control of everything in his world.

Financial worth was the same as self-worth, monetary value was human value. The more Fred Trump had, the better he was. If he gave something to someone else, that person would be worth more and he less. He would pass that attitude on to Donald in spades.

Fred, for instance, wasn’t going to find out that Freddy and his buddy Homer from St. Paul’s School had stolen a hearse for a joyride. Before returning the vehicle to the funeral home, Freddy pulled into a gas station to fill up the tank. As he got out of the car and walked toward the pump, Homer, who was lying down in the back to see what it was like, sat up. A man at the pump across from them, thinking he’d just seen a corpse rising from the dead, screamed,

Weakness was perhaps the greatest sin of all, and Fred worried that Freddy was more like his own brother, John, the MIT professor: soft and, though not unambitious, interested in the wrong things, such as engineering and physics, which Fred found esoteric and unimportant. Such softness was unthinkable in his namesake, and by the time the family had moved into the House when Freddy was ten, Fred had already determined to toughen him up. Like most people who aren’t paying attention to where they’re going, however, he overcorrected.

The loss, in other words, had made him feel vulnerable, not because of his own feelings but because of his mother’s feelings, which he likely felt were being imposed on him, especially as he did not share them. That imposition must have been very painful. In that moment, he wasn’t the center of the universe, and that was unacceptable.

Fred was simultaneously telling his son that he had to be an unqualified success and that he never could be. So Freddy existed in a system that was all punishment, no reward.

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.

By limiting Donald’s access to his own feelings and rendering many of them unacceptable, Fred perverted his son’s perception of the world and damaged his ability to live in it.

Neither of his parents had interacted with him in a way that helped him make sense of his world, which contributed to his inability to get along with other people and remained a constant buffer between him and his siblings. It also made reading social cues extremely difficult, if not impossible, for him—a problem he has to this day.

Fred’s fundamental beliefs about how the world worked—in life, there can be only one winner and everybody else is a loser (an idea that essentially precluded the ability to share) and kindness is weakness—were clear.

Donald’s displays of confidence, his belief that society’s rules didn’t apply to him, and his exaggerated display of self-worth drew some people to him. A large minority of people still confuse his arrogance for strength, his false bravado for accomplishment, and his superficial interest in them for charisma.

Donald enjoyed flexing his power, even if only over his younger, smaller, and even thinner-skinned brother.

When his mother told Donald to stop, he didn’t; when Maryanne and Freddy told him to stop, he didn’t.

leaving Donald feeling invincible. He wasn’t yet being rewarded for selfishness, obstinacy, or cruelty, but he wasn’t being punished for those flaws, either.

they were laughing at Donald. It was the first time Donald had been humiliated by someone he even then believed to be beneath him. He hadn’t understood that humiliation was a weapon that could be wielded by only one person in a fight. That Freddy, of all people, could drag him into a world where humiliation could happen to him made it so much worse. From then on, he would never allow himself to feel that feeling again. From then on, he would wield the weapon, never be at the sharp end of it.

Donald had already had plenty of experience watching his older brother struggle with, and largely fail to meet, their father’s expectations. They were vague, of course. Fred had the authoritarian’s habit of assuming that his underlings knew what to do without being told. Generally, the only way to know if you were doing something right was if you didn’t get dressed down for it.

Although a strict parent in general, Fred accepted Donald’s arrogance and bullying—after he actually started to notice them—because he identified with the impulses.

Encouraged by his father, Donald eventually started to believe his own hype. By the time he was twelve, the right side of his mouth was curled up in an almost perpetual sneer of self-conscious superiority,

when Freddy flinched, Donald shrugged. He took what he wanted without asking for permission not because he was brave but because he was afraid not to.

Whether Donald understood the underlying message or not, Fred did: in family, as in life, there could be only one winner; everybody else had to lose.

Donald began to realize that there was nothing he could do wrong, so he stopped trying to do anything “right.” He became bolder and more aggressive because he was rarely challenged or held to account by the only person in the world who mattered—his father. F...

“Wait until your father comes home” had been an effective threat with Freddy, but to Donald it was a joke that his father seemed to be in on.

Throwing him in with military instructors and upperclassmen who wouldn’t put up with his shit might toughen up Fred’s burgeoning protégé even more.

she didn’t speak much, having learned the lesson that neither of her parents was really listening. Still she remained devoted to them until well into middle age, returning to the House every weekend, still hoping for “Poppy’s” attention.

Freddy craved discipline that made sense. He thrived in ROTC’s transparent system of achievement and reward.

But it wasn’t just the pleasure of finding something he excelled at, it was the joy of total freedom, which he’d never before experienced.

By necessity he had to improve his impulse control, not only to avoid punishment but to help him get away with transgressions that required a little more finesse.

when Mary MacLeod had reached the top of the ladder, she had pulled it up after her.

The building stood at the top of a hill on Highland Avenue, essentially the dividing line that ran through Jamaica: the north side had a more suburban feel and was predominantly white; the south side was urban and predominantly black. The front and back doors of the building gave onto two different worlds.

What Freddy achieved in the cockpit made him unique in the Trump family. None of Fred’s other children would accomplish so much entirely on their own.

Freddy had put himself through flight school in college, defied his father (which he would spend the rest of his life paying for),

Freddy was finally reaping the rewards of all of those hours he’d logged at the airfield while his fraternity brothers were partying.

The reactions pilots got from passengers as they walked through the terminal, the admiring stares, the requests for autographs, were all new to Freddy and a welcome change from Trump Management, where he had struggled and failed to gain respect. The gleaming airports stood in stark contrast to the dark, unwelcoming office and dirty construction sites he’d left behind in New York.

Freddy told them, with a note of disbelief in his voice, that the old man was embarrassed to have a “bus driver in the sky” for a son.

His brother’s decision had come at the end of the first semester of Donald’s senior year, and since his name wasn’t Fred, he had no idea what his future role in the company might be, although he did plan to work there in some capacity.

Freddy understood that his brothers had been sent to deliver their father’s message in person—or at least Donald had. But hearing Fred’s belittling words come out of his little brother’s mouth broke his spirit.

He had spent his childhood navigating the minefield of his father’s conditional acceptance, and he knew all too well that there was only one way to receive it—by being someone he wasn’t—and he would never be able to pull that off.

From Fred’s perspective, Freddy’s leaving Trump Management must have felt like an act of blatant disrespect. Ironically, it was the kind of boldness Fred had wanted to instill in his son, but it had been squandered on the wrong ambition.

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

his oldest son asked for a job that he didn’t want and Fred didn’t think he could do. Fred reluctantly agreed, making it clear that he was doing his son a favor.

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.

Having learned his lesson to be the best—even if in ways his father hadn’t intended—Donald

Freddy was happy to help, but he had an ulterior motive: though he never saw Donald as competition or thought he was out to replace him, he also didn’t like to be around his increasingly insufferable younger sibling. It would be a relief to have Donald out of the way.

Fred decided to host an event at the Pavilion of Fun, built in 1907. The purpose was to celebrate the park’s demolition—in other words, he would destroy what the community was trying to save before landmark status could be secured.

he wasn’t any more comfortable at Penn than he had been at Fordham. The work didn’t interest him, and it’s possible that he suddenly found himself a small fish in a big pond.

He had all the confidence of a bully who knows he’s always going to get what he wants and never has to fight for it.

During the most crucial juncture of the Steeplechase deal, its unraveling, and its aftermath, Donald did a fair amount of armchair quarterbacking.

When they were younger, Donald had been both a bystander and collateral damage. Now that he was older, he felt increasingly confident that Freddy’s continuing loss of their father’s esteem would be to his benefit, so he often watched silently or joined in.