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

by Mary L. Trump

My grandfather believed that in the same way he believed it was appropriate to send your kids to college or join a country club: even if it was of no interest to him or wasn’t particularly important to him, it was simply “what you do.”

Asking for help meant you were weak or greedy or seeking advantage over someone who needed nothing from you in return, although an exception was made for Donald.

went straight to work at Trump Management. From his first day on the job, my twenty-two-year-old uncle was given more respect and perks and paid more money than my father ever had been.

Father and son could discuss the business and local politics and gossip endlessly even if the rest of us in the cheap seats had no idea what they were talking about.

Freddy had a wider view of the world than his brother or father did. Unlike Donald, he had belonged to organizations and groups in college that had exposed him to other people’s points of view. In the National Guard and as a pilot at TWA, he had seen the best and brightest, career professionals who believed there was a greater good, that there were things more important than money, such as expertise, dedication, loyalty.

As genuinely kind as Mr. Tosti may have been, he also knew on which side his bread was buttered.

(I learned many years later that my brother and I each owned 10 percent of the Highlander, so in retrospect, charging us rent at all seems excessive.)

The main purpose of the promotion was to punish and shame Freddy. It was the latest in a long line of such punishments, but it was almost certainly the worst, especially given the context in which it happened.

he needed to improve his communication skills—he had taken the Dale Carnegie course for a reason, and it wasn’t to boost his self-confidence. But the course had been a failure.

If Donald had thought of the surrounding buildings and complexes in terms of number of units, the value of the ground leases, and the sheer volume of income that poured into Trump Management every month, he would have recognized the huge opportunity. Instead, whenever he stood outside the office and surveyed the utilitarian sameness of Beach Haven, he must have felt suffocated by the sense that it was all beneath him.

Donald dedicated a significant portion of his time to crafting an image for himself among the Manhattan circles he was desperate to join. Having grown up a member of the first television generation, he had spent hours watching the medium, the episodic nature of which appealed to him. That helped shape the slick, superficial image he would come to both represent and embody. His comfort with portraying that image, along with his father’s favor and the material security his father’s wealth afforded him, gave him the unearned confidence to pull off what even at the beginning was a charade: selling himself not just as a rich playboy but as a brilliant, self-made businessman.

“Just give it a quarter of a turn on the mental carburetor,” my grandfather said to my father, as if that were all it would take for his son to stop drinking.

The closest thing Fred had to a philosophy was the prosperity gospel, which he used like a blunt instrument and an escape hatch, and it had never harmed any of his children more than it did right then.

appeared to have no vulnerabilities at all and therefore couldn’t recognize or sanction them in other people.

Across from the stairs, a huge mahogany bar, fully stocked with barstools, dusty glasses, and a working sink but no alcohol, had been built in the corner—an anomaly in a house built by a man who didn’t drink.

When I did manage to catch the ball he threw at me, the report of it against my leather glove reverberated off the brick retaining wall like a shot. Even with little kids, Donald had to be the winner.

He still had his FCT vanity plates, but now they were attached to a beat-up Ford LTD. Whatever wealth my father had was by then entirely theoretical.

I’m on my way to the city to look at some properties that are in foreclosure. It’s a fantastic time to take advantage of losers who bought at the height of the market.”

He acted as though he owned the place, which my grandfather seemed not only to encourage but to enjoy. My grandfather was transformed in Donald’s presence.

Cohn was more than a decade removed from his disastrous involvement in Joseph McCarthy’s failed anti-Communist crusade. He’d been forced to resign from his position as the senator’s chief counsel, but not until he’d wrecked the lives and careers of dozens of men because of their alleged homosexuality and/or ties to communism. Like many men of his vicious temperament and with his influential connections, Cohn was subject to no rules.

Cohn’s cruelty and hypocrisy were more public, but Fred had, in the intimate context of his family, also mastered those arts. Fred had also primed Donald to be drawn to men such as Cohn, as he would later be drawn to authoritarians such as Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un or anyone else, really, with a willingness to flatter and the power to enrich him.

Even so, both Cohn and Donald considered it a win because of all the press coverage.

Fred’s growing confidence in Donald created a bond between them and an unshakable self-confidence in Donald. After all, the most important person in the family, the only one whose opinion mattered, was finally showing him favor. And unlike Freddy, the attention Donald received from his father was positive.

when Donald was finally out in the world using his father’s connections to make more connections and using his father’s money to create his image as a burgeoning Master of the Universe, Fred knew that anything his son got credit for would redound to his own benefit. After all, if Donald was embraced as an up-and-coming dealmaker, that was entirely to the credit of Fred Trump—even if Fred was the only person who knew it.

None of that was true, and Fred must have known that a decade before he said it.

Fred made it possible for Donald to play a role that fulfilled his own desire for recognition while allowing his son to garner the reputation as a Manhattan developer that Fred had always aspired to.

Fred was willing to stake millions of dollars on his son because he believed he could leverage the skills Donald did have—as a savant of self-promotion, shameless liar, marketer, and builder of brands—to achieve the one thing that had always eluded him: a level of fame that matched his ego and satisfied his ambition in a way money alone never could. When things turned south in the late 1980s, Fred could no longer separate himself from his son’s brutal ineptitude; the father had no choice but to stay invested. His monster had been set free. All he could do was mitigate the damage, keep the cash flowing, and find somebody else to blame.

My parents’ divorce agreement had also been based on my grandfather’s wealth, but Ivana’s $150,000 bonus was worth almost twenty-one years of the $600-per-month checks my mother received for child support and alimony.

It was simpler for Rob and Maryanne to toe the party line in the hope that they wouldn’t get treated any worse, which seems to be the same calculation Republicans in Congress make every day now.

I told him about Ivana’s generous offer. “Wait a second; who does she want to introduce you to?” I would never forget the name. I’d looked at the magazine’s masthead right after speaking to Ivana, and there he was: Bob Guccione, Publisher.

I, the granddaughter and niece of real estate tycoons, was terrible at real estate. It turned out that Donald and I had something in common after all.

there’s no evidence to suggest that my father lacked the skills to run Trump Management, just as there is none to suggest that Donald had them.

sitting with him in his tiny childhood bedroom, which we called “the Cell.”

Donald was becoming a constant presence even when he wasn’t in the House. Every time my father wanted to go to the kitchen or back to his room, he had to pass through the gauntlet of magazine covers and newspaper articles that littered the breakfast room table. Ever since the 1973 lawsuit, Donald had been a staple of the New York tabloids, and my grandfather had collected every single article that mentioned his name.

New York City mayor Abe Beame. Fred also contributed generously to both the mayor’s and Governor Hugh Carey’s campaigns. Louise Sunshine, Carey’s fund-raiser,

“Donald’s busy, he doesn’t need this bullshit.” The subtext was clear: Donald is important, and he’s doing important things; you’re not.

picked him up and brought him back to the House, arguably the worst place he could be. When she checked on him the next day, Dad had already started drinking again. Freddy had lost his home and family, his profession, much of his willpower, and most of his friends. Eventually his parents were the only people left to take care of him. And they resented it. In the end, Freddy’s very existence infuriated his father.

The students were there to watch The Other Side of the Mountain, an uplifting story about an Olympic skier who becomes paralyzed in a skiing accident. Instead, The Other Side of Midnight—a decidedly different kind of movie with an early rape scene—had been ordered.

At one point he referred to Dad as the black sheep of the family, and there were audible gasps from the guests. I felt a thrill of recognition and a sense of vindication—at long last. My brother, who had always been so much better at negotiating the family than I was, had dared tell the truth.

where a minister of no specified denomination demonstrated both his utter lack of knowledge of my father and the fact that nobody in the family had bothered to educate him about the man he was soon to consign to the flames.

Despite the fact that he’d brought it all on himself, he seemed put upon rather than humbled or humiliated.

“Donald got away with murder.”

I don’t know if the timing of his hip surgery was a coincidence or if it had been scheduled after Gam was admitted so she wouldn’t have to deal with him while she recovered.

Donald had promised those historically significant artifacts to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Realizing that removing them in one piece would cost money and slow down construction, he instead ordered that they be destroyed. When confronted with that breach of trust and taste, he shrugged it off, declaring the sculptures to be “without artistic merit,” as if he knew better than the considered assessment of experts.

For Donald, too much of a good thing was a better thing;

It seemed as if the sheer volume of purchases, the price tags of the acquisitions, and the audacity of the transactions kept everybody, including the banks, from paying attention to his fast-accumulating debt and questionable business acumen.

Having his own casino provided Donald an outsize canvas; he could tailor that entire world to his specifications. And if one casino was good, two would be better and three even better than that. Of course, his casinos were competing with one another and eventually would be cannibalizing one another’s profits.

If one casino was a cash cow, three would be a herd of them.

the late 1980s, nobody said no to Donald, thereby legitimizing another misguided project that had the ancillary benefit of bolstering the ego of a man who had no way of making it succeed.

In order to sell his image, Donald needed to be able to continue living the lifestyle that bolstered it.