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

by Mary L. Trump

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, arguably the most qualified presidential candidate in the history of the country,

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.

And I am the only Trump who is willing to tell it.

I can’t let him destroy my country.

He’d do whatever his father told him to do in the hope of gaining his acceptance. Whether he realized it consciously or not, it would never be granted.

At twenty-nine years old, my father was running out of things to lose.

“Donald got away with murder.”

I never understood what he meant by “the game”—it was my family, not a bureaucracy.

Everyone in my family experienced a strange combination of privilege and neglect.

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.

My grandfather had never been poor a day in his life, but poverty became his sole preoccupation; he was tortured by the prospect of it.

Finally, Fred had disowned us because he could.

love, about the limits of both. I’d thought I was part of the family. I’d gotten it all wrong.

If your only currency is money, that’s the only lens through which you determine worth;

It wasn’t enough for me to volunteer at an organization helping Syrian refugees;

I had to take Donald down.

“Donald always got his way,”

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 is not simply weak, his ego is a fragile thing that must be bolstered every moment because he knows deep down that he is nothing of what he claims to be. He knows he has never been loved. So he must draw you in if he can by getting you to assent to even the most seemingly insignificant thing: “Isn’t this plane great?” “Yes, Donald, this plane is great.”

It’s not the stress of the job, because he isn’t doing the job—unless watching TV and tweeting insults count.

His cruelty is also an exercise of his power, such as it is.

Donald learned a long time ago how to pick his targets.

The few journalists who do challenge him, and even those who simply ask Donald for words of comfort for a terrified nation, are derided and dismissed as “nasty.”

“Get even with people who have screwed you,” Donald has said, but often the person he’s getting revenge on is somebody he screwed over first—such as the contractors he’s refused to pay or the niece and nephew he refused to protect.

Donald can insult Cuomo and complain about him, but every day the governor’s real leadership further reveals Donald as a petty, pathetic little man—ignorant, incapable, out of his depth, and lost in his own delusional spin. What Donald can do in order to offset the powerlessness and rage he feels is punish the rest of us.

It would have been easy for Donald to be a hero. People who have hated and criticized him would have forgiven or overlooked his endless stream of appalling actions if he’d simply had somebody take the pandemic preparedness manual down from the shelf where it was put after the Obama administration gave it to him.

The pandemic didn’t immediately have to do with him, and managing the crisis in every moment doesn’t help him promote his preferred narrative that no one has ever done a better job than he has.

The simple fact is that Donald is fundamentally incapable of acknowledging the suffering of others. Telling the stories of those we’ve lost would bore him. Acknowledging the victims of COVID-19 would be to associate himself with their weakness, a trait his father taught him to despise.

Everything is transactional for this poor broken human being. Everything.”

Taking responsibility would open him up to blame. Being a hero—being good—is impossible for him.

I can only imagine that Donald wishes it had been his knee on Floyd’s neck.

But he can never escape the fact that he is and always will be a terrified little boy.