I've not been particularly enticed to read any of the books coming out about Donald Trump and his administration. I guess I get enough of him reading the daily news, but Mary Trump's memoir showed up in the Little Free Library outside my condominium complex. It looked like a quick and easy read and my brain was in a down-cycle, so I took it home.
Mary Trump is, of course, Donald Trump's niece. She was part of a the close knit family born of Donald's father, Fred Trump. She also received a Ph.D. in clinical psychology from Adelphi University. The combination puts her in a unique position to comment on Donald Trump's thinking and behavior. There was a time when psychologists and other media pundits were "diagnosing" Donald as exhibiting a narcissistic personality. Caution required us to recognize that a proper diagnosis would require more than observing Donald's public behavior. It would require a more in depth examination by a qualified professional including personal interviews. Mary gives us the closest thing we'll ever get to that. Not only has she known Uncle Donald from countless private, family gatherings, she grew up knowing his father, mother, his siblings, children, nieces, nephews, personal friends, and employees. For the book, she conducted numerous, sometimes taped interviews with these people. Her professional conclusion is not surprising: Donald is not just narcissistic, he's a sociopath.
But the main thrust of the book is not Donald. It's the Trump family. The two figures that loom largest in her narrative are Fred Trump and his eldest son "Freddy." Freddy was Mary's father. He was what some might call "the black sheep" of the family, much maligned by his father and often ostracized by his siblings. He struggled with alcoholism and eventually died of a heart attack at the age of 42. Much of Mary's book reads as an effort to restore her father's reputation.
As the eldest male among the Trump siblings, Freddy was expected to carry on the family business, but he had little interest in this. He preferred a more relaxed and social lifestyle: boating and fishing with friends. He eventually earned a pilot's license. For a short time, he was a commercial pilot for Trans World Airlines. Still, his reputation in the family was so low that even his mother disparaged him, saying to Mary, "Do you know what your father was worth when he died? A whole lot of nothing."
The comment "a whole lot of nothing" gives a pretty good clue to the family values extant in the Trump family: a person's worth can be measured by their wealth and what they are willing to do to acquire it. According to Mary, these values stemmed from her grandfather's single-minded pursuit of money. Mary describes Fred too, as a sociopath, distant and uncaring, concerned mostly that he have a male heir to whom he could bequeath a fortune and who would then expand it. The family's patriarchal values are exemplified in the family's tradition of naming the eldest son "Frederick" (or "Friedrich," if you trace the sires back far enough). In Donald, Jr.'s case, "Donald" lives on. The Trump family seems to think of itself as a royal dynasty.
When Freddy failed to live up to his father's expectations, Donald became the new heir apparent to the family business. Donald was an unruly child that had to be sent to the New York Military Academy to try to learn a little discipline. Unfortunately for the world, the discipline he learned was how to manage his amorality in a way that would allow him operate effectively in the world. Most of all, Donald cultivated the "killer" personality that his father so highly valued. On Mary's assessment, Donald is a chip off the old block if there ever was one. He has been, however, not nearly as adept in business as his father was. Instead, Mary claims that Donald merely cultivated an image of success which was his only real talent. His actual fortune was a product of his inheritance and the assistance that his father gave him along the way. Fred even participated in the creation and maintenance of Donald's image.
As Fred aged, Donald became something of a tyrant among his siblings. In his father's declining years, he even attempted to have his father's will changed to give him basically the whole fortune. Luckily for the siblings, the attempt was made during one of Fred's more lucid times, so it failed. The siblings were especially lucky as they were concerned mostly about remaining in the good graces of their father to avoid being disinherited. Mary herself was disinherited for simply being the child of a deceased son. Fred had no concern for his grandchildren. Had Donald succeeded in gaining control of the estate, the siblings' bondage to the will of a sociopath would have continued for the rest of their lives.
Mary's book only lightly touches on the unscrupulous (even illegal) business activities of Fred, but as a grandchild, Mary was more or less unaware of them until she was contacted by reporters for the New York Times. They were working on a massive investigation of the Trump business and hoped Mary would provide them with some documents and insight. It is somewhat surprising that Mary does not make more use of what their investigation discovered. The article they finally wrote (NYT, Oct. 2, 2018) provides clear and unassailable evidence of the chief motives and methods of Fred and Donald. They conform to Mary's assessments.
Very little in Too Much and Never Enough is surprising in what it says about Donald's personality. All that Mary writes is entirely consistent with his public behavior. Even his supporters are likely to recognize the character traits she describes, but instead view them as virtues or as lamentable quirks. Still, it's worthwhile to see an account from someone with a deep, personal connection to Donald and with professional credentials confirm what the lay public at large can see.
One final note, the documentary evidence and public behavior of Donald's three eldest children seems to indicate that the kind of relations within Fred's family have been reproduced in Donald's family. Both are rich family units with children subject to an authoritarian, sociopathic father. What seems to hold them together is mainly the family's wealth. It makes me want to re-watch the 2003 documentary film Born Rich which interviews several children of phenomenally wealthy parents. Ivanka Trump is one of those children.
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