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

by Mary L. Trump

he had never been on a leash before, let alone a short one, and it chafed. He was legally obligated to pay the banks back, and if he didn’t, there would be consequences. At least there should have been. Despite the restrictions, Donald continued spending cash he didn’t have,

The banks admonished him for betraying their agreement, but they never took any action against him, which just reinforced his belief that he could do whatever he wanted, as he almost always had.

Donald was, in essence, still Fred’s construct. Now he belonged to the banks and the media. He was both enabled by and dependent upon them, just as he had been upon Fred. He had a streak of superficial charm, even charisma, that sucked certain people in. When his ability to charm hit a wall, he deployed another “business strategy”: throwing tantrums during which he threatened to bankrupt or otherwise ruin anybody who failed to let him have what he wanted. Either way, he won.

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.

my grandfather’s modest purchase of $3.15 million worth of casino chips,

Everyone in my family experienced a strange combination of privilege and neglect. Although I had all of the material things I needed—and luxuries such as private schools and summer camp—there was a purposely built-in idea of uncertainty that any of it would last. By the same token, there was the sometimes dispiriting and sometimes devastating sense that nothing any of us did really mattered or, worse, that we didn’t matter—only Donald did.

Reduced to a monthly allowance—that a family of four could have lived on comfortably for ten years

Donald knew that taking responsibility for your failures, which obviously meant acknowledging failure, was not something Fred admired; he’d seen where it had gotten Freddy. It’s very possible that back in the late 1960s and early ’70s, Fred didn’t know just how deep Donald’s ineptitude ran.

Fred had become so invested in the fantasy of Donald’s success that he and Donald were inextricably linked. Facing reality would have required acknowledging his own responsibility, which he would never do. He had gone all in, and although any rational person would have folded, Fred was determined to double down.

As usual, the lesson Donald learned was the one that supported his preexisting assumption: no matter what happens, no matter how much damage he leaves in his wake, he will be okay. Knowing ahead of time that you’re going to be bailed out if you fail renders the narrative leading up to that moment meaningless.

holiday as though nothing had happened. Donald’s attempt to wrest control of Fred’s estate away from him was the logical outcome of Fred’s leading his son to believe that he was the only person who mattered.

In Donald’s mind, the success and reputation of the entire family rested on his shoulders. Given that, it makes sense in the end that he would feel he deserved not just more than his fair share but everything.

when I reread the letter, that I understood why Donald thought it would be a good idea to hire me—not because it was “fantastic” but because it demonstrated that I was really good at making other people look really good.

The Art of the Deal, as far as I understood it, had been meant to present Donald as a serious real estate developer. 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.

Whenever anything outrageously sycophantic, salacious, or stupid was said, Donald smirked and pointed to the speakerphone as if to say, “What an idiot.”

It was an aggrieved compendium of women he had expected to date but who, having refused him, were suddenly the worst, ugliest, and fattest slobs he’d ever met.

The idea that anyone else was entitled to money or support he or she wasn’t obviously earning was impossible for Donald and my grandfather to fathom.

Donald probably thought he was being kind. There used to be a spark of that in him.

But his kindness had become so warped over time—through lack of use and Fred’s discouragement—that what he considered kindness would have been practically unrecognizable to the rest of us.

golf—a hobby that Donald spent an inordinate amount of time on but that Fred, who had no use for pastimes, never complained about.

It was the first time I’d ever seen my grandfather wearing something other than a suit. I’d never seen him look so uncomfortable and self-conscious before.

You could measure your worth in my grandfather’s eyes by how long he remembered you.

He never forgot Donald.

It was the position for which Freddy and then Donald had been groomed—and had rejected, each in his own way.

My grandfather often left the cheap drugstore dye on too long, turning his eyebrows and mustache a jarring shade of magenta.

Every once in a while, he’d stick his foot out and kick whichever boy was being pinned to the floor. When they had been younger, Donald had wrestled with them—a fight that had basically consisted of his picking them up, throwing them on the ground, and kneeling on them until they cried uncle. As soon as they had gotten big enough to fight back in earnest, he had opted out.

Eventually the visits became just another form of torture. Like so much else in the family that didn’t make sense, they continued doing it anyway.

because of the legendarily bad service, that meant at the end of the evening the table was littered with the wreckage of a couple of cow carcasses, dozens of Coke bottles, and plates full of food nobody in my family ever ate. The meal wasn’t over until my grandfather had sucked the marrow out of the bones, which, given his mustache, was a sight to behold.

Although Donald and Marla were still married, she was already a distant memory, replaced by his new girlfriend, Melania, a twenty-eight-year-old Slovenian model whom I’d never met.

I’m not sure how he managed it, but Donald’s apartment felt even colder and less like a home than the House did.

He thought it was something we had in common: we’d both hit rock bottom and then somehow clawed our way back to the top (in his case) or just back (in mine).

Of course, between my dropping out of school and his hiring me, I’d dropped back into school, graduated, and gotten a master’s degree—all without taking any drugs at all. There was no point in setting the record straight, however; there never was with him. The story was for his benefit as much as anybody else’s, and by the time the doorbell rang, he probably already believed his version of events.

My grandfather’s propensity for picking up unused nails at his construction sites to hand back to his carpenters the next day was noted before the details of his birth. The Times also repeated the family line that Donald had built his own business with minimal help from my grandfather—“a small amount of money”—a statement that the paper itself would refute twenty years later.

Mostly they told stories about my grandfather, although my brother was the only one who came close to humanizing him.

Donald was the only one to deviate from the script. In a cringe-inducing turn, his eulogy devolved into a paean to his own greatness. It was so embarrassing that Maryanne later told her son not to allow any of her siblings to speak at her funeral.

When he was deposed, Donald didn’t know or couldn’t remember anything, a kind of strategic forgetfulness he has employed many times to evade blame or scrutiny.

Fred no doubt believed that my dad had been given the same tools, the same advantages, and the same opportunities as Donald had. If Freddy had thrown them all away, that wasn’t his father’s fault.

The eulogies were remarkable only for what was not said. There was a lot of speculation about my grandparents’ reunion in Heaven, but my father, their oldest son, who had been dead for almost twenty-seven years, was not mentioned at all. He didn’t even appear in my grandmother’s obituary.

My father and his entire line had now been effectively erased.

the clubhouse at Donald’s golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, which looked eerily like the House,

Jared’s father, Charles, who’d been released from prison three years earlier, rose to tell us that when Jared had first introduced him to Ivanka, he had thought she would never be good enough to join his family. It was only after she had committed to converting to Judaism and worked hard to make it happen that he had begun to think she might be worthy of them after all. Considering that Charles had been convicted of hiring a prostitute to seduce his brother-in-law, taping their illicit encounter, and then sending the recording to his sister at his nephew’s engagement party, I found his condescension a bit out of line.

person in the lengthening line of people, some of them waiting to congratulate the father of the bride. But The Apprentice had just concluded its eighth season, so it’s just as likely that many of them were simply there for the photo op.

“Get her ten million dollars.” I thought, Holy shit, that’s a lot of money! at the same moment that Rob said, “What a cheap bastard.”

I watched in real time as Donald shredded norms, endangered alliances, and trod upon the vulnerable. The only thing about it that surprised me was the increasing number of people willing to enable him. As I watched our democracy disintegrating and people’s lives unraveling because of my uncle’s policies,

It had been a head-spinning few weeks. I hadn’t fully grasped how much of a risk I was taking. If anybody in my family found out what I was doing, there would be repercussions—I knew how vindictive they were—but there was no way to gauge how serious the consequences might be. Anything would pale in comparison to what they’d already done. I finally felt as though I might be able to make a difference after all.

For a long time, I blamed my grandfather for my feeling this way. But none of us realized that the expectation of being “the best” in my grandfather’s view had applied only to my father (who had failed) and Donald (who had wildly exceeded Fred’s expectations).

I still felt that only a grand gesture would set it right. It wasn’t enough for me to volunteer at an organization helping Syrian refugees; I had to take Donald down.

“That’s nasty,” he said. She could see the sneer on his face.

On October 2, 2018, the New York Times published an almost 14,000-word article, the longest in its history, revealing the long litany of potentially fraudulent and criminal activities my grandfather, aunts, and uncles had engaged in. Through the extraordinary reporting of the Times team, I learned more about my family’s finances than I’d ever known.

My aunts and uncles detested paying taxes almost as much as their father did, and it seemed the main purpose of All County was to siphon money from Trump Management through large gifts disguised as “legitimate business transactions,” according to the article.