Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man by Mary L. Trump
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Mary L. Trump's book is a narrative of a family we all seem to know very well, but don't be fooled into thinking it's all about Donald. It's all about the full family, of Fred Trump and how he ruthlessly encouraged Donald to take self-aggrandizement, deflection, and narcissism to new heights, shamelessly using his vast fortune to prop up and bail out his son Donald throughout his career.

It's about Fred's high-functioning sociopathy. It's about how he disregarded all his children and turned them all into slaves of his non-existent affection and his money. It's about Mary's own father and how he was ruthlessly disenfranchised and belittled.

It's about Mary, herself, who had to make her own way without assistance from either her grandfather or her uncle (who had, by now, become a product of a vast PR machine), or when she was asked to help Donald write a book for him, she was given neither any assistance BY Donald for the book ABOUT him nor did she even get paid. And this doesn't even touch the vast pettiness of stopping health insurance for Fred's grandchildren who are in serious need or the mind-boggling entitlement of these rich a**holes.

Let's put the record straight here. Donald IS what we're all most interested in. Mary is a clinical psychologist in her own right. And a few things are very clear about Donald.

He was rewarded for striking first, bullying, and never accepting defeat in anything. He grew up learning to deflect responsibility and browbeat everyone else into doing the work and then taking full credit. He was taught to lie, lie, lie at all costs. His father's truncated ambitions fell on his son to make it really big and neither father nor son makes any compunctions about behaving like slumlord billionaires. That's how Fred did it. And he pushed and propped up his son the entire way.

This is a PR machine. Just think about all those banks that fell for the PR and promise of Trump, only to see him fail, spectacularly, and out of fear of being called out for gross incompetency, made sure to give Trump even MORE money to make it look like he wasn't losing... oh, no... he is always winning.

It's about narrative. It's always about narrative. And we ignore FIVE, I repeat FIVE bankruptcies. We ignore the total scam of the Trump University, which was a scaled-down version of short-selling on other's misfortunes as a way of life. We ignore the basic underlying principle... which is to bluster your way through every situation regardless of facts, capitalize on other's misfortunes, and above all, put on a fake face.

How did he do it?

He's a confidence man in a very real sense. He sells confidence in him. He asks for HUGE amounts and then -- when he inevitably fails -- his investors have to double down or lose everything.

Sound familiar?

Half the nation is seeing the same cycle all over again and has decided, like the banks, to double down on him.



How interesting.

View all my reviews