GOOD EXCERPTS from Mary Trump’s book about her Uncle Donny. (Although, I do not recommend that anyone buy the book, I do encourage you to read the excerpts from the book that you can find all over the web. Read as many as you can. Read them repeatedly.)
I think I am a good judge of character. Or, in the case of Donald J. Trump the complete and total absence and lack of character on his part. Still, even though I had him pegged long ago for what he is, it’s nice to read the confirmation of it by his own niece Mary. Below is just a small sampling of what I have read so far. It’s very revealing.
What is new and surprising is also that Mary Trump, who has a Ph.D. in clinical psychology, has given us a granular portrait of Trump’s profound impairment: She says that her uncle has all nine clinical criteria for narcissism, although she insists that this diagnosis is only the tip of the psychological iceberg—he may also suffer from antisocial personality disorder, sociopathy, and/or dependent personality disorder, along with an undiagnosed learning disability that likely interferes with his ability to process information. I leave it to the mental health experts to determine whether some or all of that is accurate. But what Mary Trump surely adds to the growing canon of the “Trump is unwell” book club is not limited to family gossip or mental health diagnostics: At bottom, Too Much and Never Enough may be the first book that stipulates, in its first pages, that the president is irreparably damaged, and then turns a clinician’s lens on the rest of us, the voters, the enablers, the flatterers, the hangers-on, and the worshippers. It is here that Mary Trump’s book makes perhaps the most enduring contribution to the teetering piles of books that have offered too little too late, even while telling us that which we already knew. Because Mary Trump begins from the assumption that other analysis tends to end with: Donald Trump is lethally dangerous, stunningly incoherent, and pathologically incapable of caring about anyone but himself. So, what Mary Trump wants to know is: What the hell is wrong with everyone around him? As she writes in her prologue, “there’s been very little effort to understand not only why he became what he is but how he’s consistently failed up despite his glaring lack of fitness.”
The book is thus actually styled as an indictment not of Donald Trump but of Trump’s enablers. The epigraph is from Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, and it’s emphatically not about Donald John Trump at all: “If the soul is left in darkness, sins will be committed. The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but the one who causes the darkness.” Mary Trump blames Fred Trump for Donald Trump’s pathology, although she doesn’t claim that her uncle is a tragic victim of abuse. She blames his family that propped him up (also her family, it should be noted), and then in concentric and expanding circles, the media that failed to scrutinize him, the banks that pretended he was the financial genius he was not, the Republican Party, and the “claque of loyalists” in the White House who continue to lie for him and to him in order to feed his insatiable ego and self-delusion. Even the phrase “too much and never enough” is perhaps deliberately borrowed from the language of addiction, and what Mary Trump describes here is not just her uncle’s addiction to adulation, fame, money, and success, but a nation’s—or some part of a nation’s—unfathomable addiction to him.
Mary Trump is, among other things, a brisk and gifted writer, and she is a fact witness to, and also a victim of, a family that elevated a mediocre and vicious man, at the expense of justice, fairness, and truth. Her real beef is not with her uncle Donald, who has always been exactly as we have long known him to be; [it really is an] indictment of all the alleged adults who stick around Donald Trump, who came together to fail America, to leave vulnerable populations to fend for themselves, and who continue to lie and spin to pacify his ego. They do it because they can’t admit the payoff is never coming, and to save themselves from the embarrassment of having to admit they were catastrophically wrong.
Now we know why some people seem to adore and idolize Donald Trump. Basically, because they are self-obsessed fools. But, how did Trump get the way he is in the first place? Read on Macduff!
During the 1990s, she wrote, her uncle asked her to ghost write a book about to him to be called “The Art of the Comeback.” But he never paid her and eventually he sent someone else to fire her from the gig.
Later in 1998, when Mary was first introduced to Melania Trump, the future president told his future wife that Mary had dropped out of college (true) and had come back herself from a drug problem. (Mary said she has never taken drugs).
“By conflating my dropping out of college and his hiring me to write his book (while throwing in a fictional drug addiction), he concocted a better story that somehow had him playing the role of my savior,” Mary wrote.
She added: “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.”
Of the president, Mary Trump also writes: “In Donald’s mind, even acknowledging an inevitable threat would indicate weakness. Taking responsibility would open him up to blame, Being a hero – being good – is impossible for him.”
The president’s initial response to the coronavirus pandemic “underscores his need to minimize negativity at all costs,” Mary Trump writes.
“Fear – the equivalent of weakness in our family – is as unacceptable to him now as it was when he was three years old,” she said.
She points to New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s response to his state’s outbreak of COVID-19 cases as an example of “real leadership,” further revealing the president as a “petty, pathetic little man – ignorant, incapable, out of his depth, and lost to his own delusional spin.”
“He’ll withhold ventilators or steal supplies from states that have not groveled sufficiently,” she said. “What Donald thinks is justified retaliation is, in this context, mass murder.”
At the end, Mary Trump writes “Donald isn’t really the problem after all” – it is his enablers, from his father to the celebrity media to the congressional Republicans who acquitted him of impeachment.
“This is the end result of Donald’s having continually been given a pass and rewarded not just for his failures but for his transgressions – against tradition, against decency, against the law, and against fellow human beings,” she writes.
‘Fantasy worlds’ and Madonna’s gum chewing
Donald Trump tended to create his own fantasy worlds, Mary Trump writes.
In order to get into the prestigious University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, the future president paid someone to take his SAT, she writes.
“To hedge his bets he enlisted Joe Shapiro, a smart kid with a reputation for being a good test taker, to take his SATs for him,” Mary Trump wrote. “That was much easier to pull off in the days before photo IDs and computerized records.”
During the 1990s, she wrote, her uncle asked her to ghostwrite a book about him to be called “The Art of the Comeback.” Mary Trump writes that she was given little guidance on what the book would contain, so she tried to focus on the adversity that he had overcome to reach his success. But there was little evidence to support that narrative considering he was about to enter his fourth bankruptcy with the Plaza Hotel, she writes.
One night, she said, he called her, sounding excited, to let her know that Rhona Graff, his longtime executive assistant at the Trump Organization, would hand her some pages he had been working on for the book. Mary Trump said she received a manila envelope the next day, containing about 10 typewritten pages, that she had hoped would help her glean insight on how he ran his business or the role he played in development deals.
“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,” she wrote.
Among those women was Madonna, who “chewed gum in a way Donald found unattractive,” and Katarina Witt, a German Olympic figure skater and two-time gold medalist who Trump thought “had big calves.”
Mary Trump writes that Donald Trump never paid her for the book project and eventually he sent someone else to fire her from the gig.
. . .
‘He’s a clown’
Trump’s own sister dismissed the idea of him running for president, Mary Trump writes.
Maryanne Trump Barry, a retired federal appeals court judge, mocked the idea of his running after his announcement in mid-2015, Mary Trump writes.
“He’s a clown – this will never happen,” Judge Barry said, according to her niece.
Trump Barry – who said Trump has “no principles! None!” – later criticized him for invoking their brother’s alcohol problems during a campaign discussion about addiction.
She told the author: “He’s using your father’s memory for political purposes and that’s a sin, especially since Freddy should have been the star of the family.”
. . .
Putin, Kim Jong Un and Mitch McConnell
Mary Trump has especially harsh words for the people who surround Trump and enable him to stay in power.
“The people with access to him are weaker than Donald is, more craven, but just as desperate. Their futures are directly dependent on his success and favor,” she said. “Although more powerful people put Donald into the institutions that have shielded him since the very beginning, it’s people weaker than he is who are keeping him there.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and Republican Senator Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, “all whom bear more than a passing psychological resemblance to Fred,” recognized after the election that Donald Trump’s personal history and personality flaws made him vulnerable to manipulation, Mary Trump writes.
“His pathologies have rendered him so simple-minded that it takes nothing more than repeating to him the things he says to and about himself dozens of times a day – he’s the smartest, the greatest, the best – to get him to do whatever they want, whether it’s imprisoning children in concentration camps, betraying allies, implementing economy-crushing tax cuts, or degrading every institution that’s contributed to the United States’ rise and the flourishing of liberal democracy.”
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Donald Trump had no issue cheating his way to success. He would have his eldest sister, Maryanne, do his homework for him, and he hired a ringer to take his SAT for him, the book says. “To hedge his bets [Donald] enlisted Joe Shapiro, a smart kid with a reputation for being a good test taker, to take his SATs for him. That was much easier to pull off in the days before photo IDs and computerized records. Donald, who never lacked for funds, paid his buddy well,” Mary Trump wrote.
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The president’s father viewed apologies as a sign of weakness, according to the book. “Fred hated it when his oldest son screwed up or failed to intuit what was required of him, but he hated it even more when, after being taken to task, Freddie apologized. ‘Sorry, Dad,’ Fred would mock him. Fred wanted his oldest son to be a ‘killer’ in his parlance (for what reason it’s impossible to say — collecting rent in Coney Island wasn’t exactly a high-risk endeavor in the 1950s), and he was temperamentally the opposite of that,” the author wrote.
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“For some of the Trump kids, lying was a way of life, and for Fred’s oldest son, lying was defensive — not simply a way to circumvent his father’s disapproval or to avoid punishment, as it was for the others, but a way to survive,” Mary Trump wrote. “For Donald, lying was primarily a mode of self-aggrandizement meant to convince other people he was better than he actually was.”
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After her father had the heart attack that would kill him, Mary Trump said, Donald Trump didn’t go with him to the hospital and didn’t go to visit; instead, he had “gone to the movies.”
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Mary Trump acknowledged helping The New York Times with its prize-winning investigation into the president’s tax history. “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,” she wrote. “I had to take Donald down.”
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Maryanne Trump Berry, the president’s sister, wasn’t exactly supportive of his 2016 campaign. “He’s a clown,” Berry, a retired federal judge, told Mary Trump, according to the book. “This will never happen.” Mary Trump said she told her aunt that she couldn’t believe people were buying his claim that he was a self-made man, and she questioned what he’d ever accomplished on his own. “Well,” her aunt replied, “he has had five bankruptcies.”
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Berry, a Roman Catholic, was irate that evangelicals were supporting her brother and questioned what was “wrong with them.” “The only time Donald went to church was when the cameras were there. It’s mind-boggling. He has no principles. None!” the book quotes Trump’s sister as saying.
The bottom line is this: basically Donald J. Trump is a total fraud. Those who support him have been tricked. They are fools.
Like W.C. Fields said, “You can fool some of the people some of the time — and that’s enough to make a decent living.” They are fools who have been fooled, and there is very little we can do to cure their foolishness.
They, the fools, really have to discover the truth for themselves. GOOD LUCK (to them)!
God help the rest of us. (God Damn Donald ‘The Dumbass’ Trump!) God save America!
WATER 