I finished it. It was an easy read and Mary comes off, in my opinion, as an authentic and credible critic of her uncle. We’ll walk through the chapters I didn’t cover yesterday and then I’ll gift you with some parting thoughts.
Table of Contents
Prologue
Part One: Cruelty is the Point
Chapter 1: The House
Everything up until this point is covered in Evening Shade: Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary - Mary Trump's Book Reviewed - Part One
Chapter 2: The First Son
Mary Trump is the daughter of Fred tRump, Jr (Freddy), the oldest of Donald’s brothers. To help us understand the toxicity running loose within the tRump family, Mary relates the story of her father’s life. Fred tRump, Sr (Donald’s father) looms over the children as a distant and capricious autocrat. Young Donald lurks in the background, watching as Fred constantly humiliates his oldest son.
Fred dismantled his oldest son by devaluing and degrading every aspect of his personality and his natural abilities until all that was left was self-recrimination and a desperate need to please a man who had no use for him.
Chapter 3: The Great I-Am
Donald’s behavior gets so bad he gets sent to reform school (New York Military Academy). Freddy learns to fly, joins the National Guard, meets and marries his wife, Linda, as he tries to build a life away from under his father’s control. Freddy also goes to work for his father. That last bit wasn’t a good idea, so Freddy decides to leave and go to work as a commercial pilot.
Every one of Donald’s transgressions became an audition for his father’s favor, as if he were saying “See, Dad, I’m the tough one. I’m the killer.” He kept piling on because there wasn’t any resistance—until there was. But it didn’t come from his father.
…
Finally, by 1959, Donald’s misbehavior—fighting, bullying, arguing with teachers—had gone too far. Kew-Forest had reached its limits. Fred’s being on the school’s board of trustees cut two ways: on the one hand, Donald’s behavior had been overlooked longer than it otherwise might have; on the other, it caused Fred some inconvenience. Name-calling and teasing kids too young to fight back had escalated into physical altercations. Fred didn’t mind Donald’s acting out, but it had become intrusive and time consuming for him. When one of his fellow board members at Kew-Forest recommended sending Donald to New York Military Academy as a way to rein him in, Fred went along with it. Throwing him in with military instructors and upperclassmen who wouldn’t put up with his shit might toughen up Fred’s burgeoning protégé even more. Fred had more important things to do than deal with Donald.
Chapter 4: Expecting to Fly
Freddy gets a job flying the Boston to LA route for TWA. Freddy also develops a drinking problem, in part because his father calls him a “bus driver in the sky.” The alchohol gets to be too much and Freddy is forced to resign from TWA. He’s back under his father’s thumb. Donald graduates from NYMA.
Part Two: The Wrong Side of the Tracks
Chapter 5: Grounded
Aware of the Wharton School’s reputation, Donald set his sights on the University of Pennsylvania. Unfortunately, even though Maryanne had been doing his homework for him, she couldn’t take his tests, and Donald worried that his grade point average, which put him far from the top of his class, would scuttle his efforts to get accepted. 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. 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.
Freddy’s chance to do something to impress his father is wrapped up in the Steeplechase project. It fails, and Fred blames his son. Freddy continues to unravel.
Chapter 6: A Zero Sum Game
Freddy and Linda’s marriage collapses. So does Maryanne’s (the oldest of the siblings). Donald graduates from Penn and goes to work at tRump Management.
Chapter 7: Parallel Lines
In 1971 Donald is named president of Trump Management, but has no real responsibilities. Freddy’s downward spiral continues and he ends up temporarily living in his parent’s attic, before moving to a dingy one-bedroom apartment. In 1973 Fred and Donald get hit with one of the largest Federal housing discrimination suits ever filed. Donald’s buddy Roy Cohn defends the tRumps.
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 both 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.
Chapter 8: Escape Velocity
Holidays at the tRump House are not something I’d want to attend. One Christmas, Ivana offered to introduce 13 year-old Mary to Bob Guccione. Freddy’s tragedy finally ends when he dies of a heart attack in 1981. Fred and Donald are both still pigs.
Part Three: Smoke and Mirrors
Chapter 9: The Art of the Bailout
Roy Cohn fixes up a judgeship of Maryanne. Donald goes all in on casinos that compete with each other. Things get rough for Donald because he sucks at making deals. Fred throws a lot of money at the issue to prop Donald up. Donald is limited to pissing away $450,000 per month by the banks. The siblings are busy hiding money from the IRS. Fred is starting to show signs of dementia. Donald tries to take total control of Fred’s estate (locking out his siblings). He fails. Donald ask Mary to write The Art of the Comeback for him. Absurdity ensues.
Once Donald moved into Atlantic City, there was no longer any denying that he wasn’t just ill-suited to the day-to-day grind of running a few dozen middle-class rental properties in the outer boroughs, he was ill-suited to running any kind of business at all—even one that ostensibly played to his strengths of self-promotion and self-aggrandizement and his taste for glitz.
When Fred bragged about Donald’s brilliance and claimed that his son’s success had far outpaced his own, he must have known that not a word of it was true; he was too smart and too good at arithmetic to think otherwise: the numbers simply didn’t add up. But the fact that Fred continued to prop Donald up despite the wisdom of continuing to do so suggests that something else was going on.
Chapter 10: Nightfall Does Not Come at Once
Fred has full on Altzheimer’s and is in rapid decline. Melania enters the pictures. Donald lies about Mary’s life story.
Chapter 11: The Only Currency
Fred tRump dies. The vultures circle. There are lots of financial shenanigans. Mary and her brother are locked out of the inheritance and ask for an accounting. Rob (the youngest of Donald’s siblings) lies to Fred’s wife (Mary) and she essentially cuts our Mary and her brother Fritz out of her life.
Chapter 12: The Debacle
Mary and Fritz sue, using lawyer Jack Barnosky, to contest the will. After two yeasr and no progress they decide to settle and are bilked out of their father’s remaining holdings as a bonus. Their grandmother dies.
Maryanne, Donald, and Robert refused to settle unless we agreed to let them buy our shares of the assets we’d inherited from our father—his 20 percent of the mini-empire and the “priceless” ground leases.
My aunts and uncles submitted a property valuation to Jack Barnosky, and, using their figures, he and Lou Laurino arrived at a settlement figure that was likely based on suspect numbers. Jack told us that, short of a trial, it was the best we could expect. “We know they’re lying,” he said, “but it’s ‘He said, she said.’ Besides, your grandfather’s estate is only worth around thirty million dollars.” That was only a tenth of the estimate Robert had given the New York Times in 1999, which itself would turn out to be only 25 percent of the estate’s actual value.
Part Four: The Worst Investment Ever Made
Chapter 13: The Political is Personal
Mary gets welcomed back into the family in 2009. In 2017 she gets approached by some reporters from the New York Times asking questions about her uncle. She gives them 19 boxes of court documents from back when she was contesting Fred’s will.
On October 2, 2018, the New York Times published an almost 14,000-word article, the longest in its history, revealing the long litany of potentially fraudulent and criminal activities my grandfather, aunts, and uncles had engaged in.
Through the extraordinary reporting of the Times team, I learned more about my family’s finances than I’d ever known.
Donald’s lawyer, Charles J. Harder, predictably denied the allegations, saying: “The New York Times’s allegations of fraud and tax evasion are 100 percent false, and highly defamatory. There was no fraud or tax evasion by anyone.” But the investigative reporters laid out a devastating case. Over the course of Fred’s life, he and my grandmother had transferred hundreds of millions of dollars to their children. While my grandfather was alive, Donald alone had received the equivalent of $413 million, much of it through questionable means: loans that he had never repaid, investments in properties that had never matured; essentially gifts that had never been taxed. That did not include the $170 million he had received through the sale of my grandfather’s empire. The amounts of money the article mentioned were mind-boggling, and the four siblings had benefited for decades. Dad had clearly shared in the wealth early in his life, but he had had nothing left to show for it by the time he was thirty. I have no idea what happened to his money.
Chapter 14: A Civil Servant in Public Housing
Mary recaps how Fred propped up Donald through all Donald’s failures, reinforcing Donald’s image of Donald as infallible. No one ever made Donald own up to his mistakes and it’s turned him into something very dangerous.
The more money my grandfather threw at Donald, the more confidence Donald had, which led him to pursue bigger and riskier projects, which led to greater failures, forcing Fred to step in with more help. By continuing to enable Donald, my grandfather kept making him worse: more needy for media attention and free money, more self-aggrandizing and delusional about his “greatness.”
...
His real skills (self-aggrandizement, lying, and sleight of hand) were interpreted as strengths unique to his brand of success. By perpetuating his version of the story he wanted told about his wealth and his subsequent “successes,” our family and then many others started the process of normalizing Donald. His hiring (and treatment) of undocumented workers and his refusal to pay contractors for completed work were assumed to be the cost of doing business. Treating people with disrespect and nickel-and-diming them made him look tough.
...
After the election, Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong-un, and Mitch McConnell, all of whom bear more than a passing psychological resemblance to Fred, recognized in a way others should have but did not that Donald’s checkered personal history and his unique personality flaws make him extremely vulnerable to manipulation by smarter, more powerful men. 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.
Epilogue: The Tenth Circle
Mary looks at how Donald has screwed the pandemic response and the reaction to the killing of George Floyd. She is not gentle. He doesn’t deserve gentle.
While thousands of Americans die alone, Donald touts stock market gains. As my father lay dying alone, Donald went to the movies. If he can in any way profit from your death, he’ll facilitate it, and then he’ll ignore the fact that you died.
Afterthoughts [NNNE]:
I like Mary. I suspect she’d be an interesting dinner guest. Sure, she’s angry at her grandparents and aunts and uncles for how shabbily they treated her father (and mother and brother and herself). She’s also angry at her father for not being stronger. Those emotions leak through the text. Still, she is able to offer us insight into the psyche of the hot mess we all deplore. I suspect that she has given us the keys to refine our attempts to push Donnie’s buttons.
Just because I didn’t quote something from every chapter doesn’t mean there wasn’t something worth quoting — there was. (← I just did a triple negative. I am so sorry.) The whole book is a study in the dysfunction of the tRump family at large and Donald’s in particular as the most venomous of the clan.
Unlike the Bolton book, this one is, in my opinion, worth the effort. Outside of Al Franken’s books, I’m not generally enthusiastic about political books and do not say that lightly. I’m certainly not a fan of the subject matter. I am grateful for her perspective. It helps to fill in the reasons for some of the otherwise incomprehensible behavior we have all suffered through.
If nothing else, Mary has given me a lot of factoids to trot out in future Shade diaries.
Up the Resistance!
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Cut and Paste Department. This is the regularly scheduled plea for readers. I’ve still only had to make two memes. You have it within your power to make me work. If you spread the word about Evening Shade and your spreadee announces themselves in the comments, you will become eligible to receive your very, very special noprize of a meme of your very own. All you have to do is jump up and get out there and start carnival barking, cajoling, proselytizing (or pimping, if you are of an irreligious bent). You could even pester and push. Procrastination is not an option — it’s a way of life.
arhpdx continues to produce excellent GNR’s. I’m jealous: Good News Roundup for July 15, 2020 — Keep your energy up as we near the finish line!