Kruse Review | Too Much and Never Enough by Mary L. Trump

— Kruse Review by Jens Kruse —

Mary Trump opens her bestselling book Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man with the
moment in early April of 2017 when she arrives in Union Station, in Washington, D. C., to join members of her extended family at a dinner with her uncle, Donald Trump, at the White House.

As she leaves the station she encounters a vendor who sells buttons with inscriptions like
“Deport Trump,” “Dump Trump,” and “Trump is a Witch.” In her room at the Trump International Hotel she finds herself surrounded by “TRUMP shampoo, TRUMP conditioner, TRUMP slippers, TRUMP shower cap, TRUMP shoe polish, TRUMP sewing kit, and TRUMP bathrobe (2).” She opens the refrigerator and grabs “a split of TRUMP white wine, and poured it down my Trump throat, so it could course through my Trump bloodstream and hit the pleasure center of my Trump brain (2).”

Once in the Oval Office, family members sit behind the Resolute Desk
and have their photos taken. Later on, when she looks at hers she
notices the framed photo of her grandfather “hovering behind me like a
ghost (5).”

This is the first inkling the reader has that this book will be at least as
much about Donald Trump’s father, Fred, as it will be about her uncle.
Mary Trump brings to her book the perspective of a concerned citizen,
the expertise of a Ph. D. in clinical psychology, and – uniquely – the
knowledge and observations of a member of the extended Trump
family.

But before she gets to Fred Trump, Mary Trump makes clear that the
mother of the Trump children, the Mary Trump after whom she was
named, was a less than sufficient parent. This was the case in part
because Mary Trump, beginning nine months after the birth of her fifth
and last child, Robert, experienced late diagnosed and life threatening
post partum complications that led to a series of operations, severe
osteoporosis, and other health impairments. During this prolonged
struggle she was a largely absent mother. But her niece makes clear that
the reasons for this went beyond her grandmother’s medical struggles.
She writes:

Mary and Fred were problematic parents from the very beginning.
My grandmother rarely spoke to me about her own parents or
childhood, so I can only speculate, but she was the youngest of ten
children — twenty-one years younger than her oldest sibling and
four years younger than the second youngest –and she grew up in
an often inhospitable environment in the early 1910s. Whether her own needs weren’t sufficiently met when she was young or for some
other reason, she was the kind of mother who used her children to
comfort herself rather than comforting them. She attended to them
when it was convenient for her, not when they needed her to. Often
unstable and needy, prone to self-pity and martyrdom, she often put
herself first. Especially when it came to her sons, she acted as if
there was nothing she could do for them. (23)

Donald Trump was two and a half years old when his mother almost
died on the operating table and became even more absent as a mother
than she was already anyway. Mary Trump clearly feels that this
circumstance had devastating consequences for Donald’s early
development.

But Mary Trump sees the role of Donald’s father Fred as even more
damaging. She writes:

Whereas Mary was needy, Fred seemed to have no emotional needs
at all. Although uncommon, sociopathy is not rare, afflicting as
much as 3 percent of the population. Seventy-five percent of those
diagnosed are men. Symptoms of sociopathy include a lack of
empathy, a facility for lying, an indifference to right and wrong,
abusive behavior, and a lack of interest in the rights of others.
Having a sociopath as a parent, especially if there is no one else
around to mitigate the effects, all but guarantees severe disruption
in how children understand themselves, regulate their emotions,
and engage with the world. (24)

Fred Trump ruled his family as an authoritarian, making clear,
especially to his sons that they were there to serve him and Trump
Management, the empire of apartments that Fred had built in Queens
and Brooklyn. When the first son, Fred Trump, Jr., was less than
successful in his assigned role as heir apparent to that empire, when he
had the temerity to instead become a commercial airline pilot in the
early jet age, Fred Trump began the process of what Mary Trump,
Freddy’s daughter, describes as the dismantling and destroying of her
father, who begins to drink heavily and eventually dies at the age of 42
of alcoholism related heart disease.

Meanwhile, Donald, Fred’s second son, had become the heir apparent at
Trump Management. Mary Trump describes his modus operandi as
follows:

Donald dedicated a significant portion of his time to crafting an
image for himself among the Manhattan circles he was desperate to
join. Having grown up a member of the first television generation,
he had spent hours watching the medium, the episodic nature of
which appealed to him. That helped shape the slick, superficial
image he would come to represent and embody. His comfort with
portraying that image, along with his father’s favor and the
material security his father’s wealth afforded him, gave him the
unearned confidence to pull off what even at the beginning was a
charade: selling himself not just as a rich playboy, but as a brilliant,
self-made businessman. (90)

Mary Trump leads us through the by now familiar history of Trump
from then to now: the early glitzy projects like Trump Tower, the casino
bankruptcies in Atlantic City, the increasingly desperate branding
gambits, the Art of the Deal and other ghostwritten delusional fantasies,
The Apprentice, and – eventually – the presidency.

Mary Trump ends her book on a note of sadness and despair. Sadness
because “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 (197).”
Despair because:

Donald takes any rebuke as a challenge and doubles down on the
behavior that drew fire in the first place, as if the criticism is
permission to do worse. Fred came to appreciate Donald’s obstinacy
because it signaled the kind of toughness he sought in his sons. Fifty
years later, people are literally dying because of his catastrophic
decisions and disastrous inaction. (204)

Mary Trump’s Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2020) can be checked out, by way of curbside pickup, from the Orcas Library or obtained through Darvill’s Bookstore.