When we confront the monstrous, whether in an “unnatural” birth or in a social toxin in another person, young or old, or in a genocidal threat in a nation’s actions, we try to understand its origin. We want to know how that parent is unlike all of us, how that baby differed from the other babies, or how that nation turned from a citizen of the world to a threat to the world. How susceptible and safe are we from that? How entangled are we? How contagious is the evil or deviation?
The closer we are to the aberration, the more frenzied and irrational our attempts to explain or eject the “causes” of the “unnatural” thing. (In The Ovary of Eve, Clara Pinto Correia has a discussion of the mania for freakish births at the end of the 17th and beginning of the 18th centuries in Western Europe. (Do not read the blurb about the book. It is not “often hilarious.”))
Imagine having a national threat, a personal threat, an ongoing source of externalized power, value, and blame, and an internationally recognized repugnance so intimately bound to you that you could not even speak your own name, or hear it spoken, without having this locus of fascination and revulsion summoned. That is the place Mary L. Trump occupies. A gay woman with a homophobe literally owning her last name, a woman who cannot achieve a personal identity or value because her name is a brand whose value (and values) are controlled (in a monetary sense literally) by a man who tried to impoverish her.
The relatives of villains and monsters bear the same stigma as the relatives of heroes and martyrs: the burden of explaining the different one, to contain the exception and protect their selves. When the monster won’t go away, denies its shackles, and calls itself “perfect,” the weight of the need to explain him is heavier. No relative of the monster can explain it away, when it keeps shouting from the chains of opprobrium, “No, you’re the loser!”
In college, there is a bit of a cliche about Psychology majors — a cliche that follows people who get doctorates in Psychology — that people study Psychology to find out what’s wrong with them. Mary Trump majored in English Literature, and she got a Master’s in English from Columbia before getting the doctorate in Psychology, so she had encountered the psychology of the imagined and dramatic mind before she studied the clinical mind. She also writes well. . . when she tries.
Too Much and Never Enough pursues a thesis, and it’s a clear thesis that can be summarized easily by book publicists and late night hosts: Fred Trump was a sociopath incapable or caring about other humans who operationalized his family as a business. Women were instrumentalized — baby makers, decorators, aesthetic objects, and otherwise of no interest — and men were of value solely in a dichotomy of “killers” and “losers,” with good sons being those who would reiterate, extend, and infinitely live out Fred’s will. Fred Jr. developed compassion, interest in other people, and rebellion against the narrowness of Fred Sr., and thus he was literally erased from the father’s sight, company, and will, while Donald’s boasts and flash were things Fred used.
As a result, Donald Trump is not to blame for being Donald Trump. He was destroyed by Fred Trump as much as Freddy Trump was. Maryanne Trump, too, was almost ruined by Fred Trump, and David Trump was ruined by Fred and Donald Trump.
"It is beyond our power to explain either the prosperity of the wicked or the afflictions of the righteous." -- Talmud
This thesis is one of the dangers of the peculiar function of Mary L. Trump herself and of explaining evil. One of my favorite impenetrable essays of all time is by Odo Marquard. It’s “Burdened and Disemburdened Man in the Eighteenth Century and the Flight Into Unindictability.” If I understand it correctly, Marquard argues that the failure of theodicy and the question of the origin of evil (“theodicy” is bigger than “where does evil come from”) had led to Leibniz’s Theodicee, which argued, effectively, that God did not create evil, man did. Man created evil with disobedience in Eden.
Well, Marquard says, if God is innocent and can’t be brought into the tribunal, then man can be. If man is the source of evil, then man can be fixed! He suggests that anthropology, history, and, most importantly, psychology emerged in the 18th century to “solve” the problem of evil. Since there is no supernatural devil making evil, then we should be able to fix it. Let’s get cracking!
St. Patrick’s, Manhattan
Dr. Trump also pursues a subject, and that subject is her autobiography through a biography of her father. This is an attempt at justification and rehabilitation. Freddy Trump’s name has been obliterated like the face of a former Pharaoh in ancient Egypt, and in its place has been written only “jet pilot, alcoholic.”
She has a daughter’s need to revive her father, an heiress’s need to rehabilitate her father’s career and duty to the family, and a writer’s need to follow autobiography on the heels of her father’s story. It is all entirely justified. However, we who are outside of the family are left wondering why it matters to her to make Freddy look loyal to Fred, why she needs to establish that Freddy served Fred, when Fred is, in her estimation and diagnosis, a sociopath. What does it matter? Why is she trying to please a man who cannot be pleased and whose dead hand is still clutching from the grave the heels of his children? Her father was entitled to his inheritance by being himself alone, and he was entitled to humane treatment by the law of humanity.
Many people have said, in their reviews, that Mary L. Trump is a good writer, and she is. However. . . the quality lapses in the way that books often do these days. From the middle of the book onward, people are introduced with first names only, having never been properly named. People are introduced by relationship, when their names had never been provided. Some women are named as if we all know them, when we haven’t a clue. These mistakes are all the sorts of flaws that occur with a memoir and editors who are too much in the same social circle. They know who “Elizabeth” is, but the reader doesn’t.
Back when I was making music, the rule we learned was to make sure that the song with the biggest “hook” in the intro was the cut 1/1, the song with the heaviest drive was the last cut on side 1, the biggest “pop” hit was cut 2/1, and the last song of the record was the long “Freebird” song. The reason was that the music directors would never, ever, ever listen to a whole song. They would drop the needle on the first track, then the last track of the side, then the first track of the next side. Candy needed to be right there.
In short stories and novels, sales are made on the virtue of the first paragraph, or the first line. (This is why Game of Thrones starts repeating speech tags after about page 200 and everyone “said” or “spoke.”)
To be clear, Too Much and Never Enough is never bad. It’s never even mediocre. However, the introduction and first chapter are polished, witty, and well structured. They’re literary. Chapter fourteen, when the author finally expands beyond the need to justify herself and quarantine her psyche (and free her father) from Trump, “A Civil Servant in Public Housing,” is very strong again.
"Ignorance is the mother of admiration." -- George Chapman (1612)
I do not fault Dr. Trump for her desire to explain her uncle. She has every reason (and need) to do so. We all do. When confronted by the lussus naturae, we need to stand back and then ensure that we are not culpable. We know, of course, that we are, and Dr. Trump knows that she, too, is implicated in her uncle’s career, even if she claims to have been ironic.
When I was in my twenties, I explained my miseries by my birth and parents. It’s a popular thing to do. I was born with a busted up heart, cross-eyed, and club footed, and my parents were entirely unprepared for having the runt of the litter (the puppy that’s sweet, doesn’t make a lot of noise, and then dies). My father thought treating me as ‘normal’ was best — throw a football and run and catch (and I couldn’t) and then berate the failures. My mother thought that keeping me safe from attempting anything was best.
A colleague in grad school told me something she attributed to Leo Buscaglia. I was not into him (still am not): When you’re 20, and you think everything wrong with you is your parents’ doing, you’re right. When you’re 30, it’s what you’ve done with what they did.
Ok. Whatever your family did is over, once you’re on your own, mentally. Then it’s how you reshape all that stuff. . . . Made sense, but it also seem(s/ed) like a vast oversimplification. Some of the things parents do are mild. Some are severe. Some don’t stop after the parents die.
After she pursues her thesis and her subject, she gets a chance to pick up her second subject: the career of Donald. It is in chapter fourteen that she builds out to talk about what Donald Trump’s character was, is, and has done. Without the scaffolding of cause and grounding in the cruelty of his father, Donald is Donald: a fool in full blossom.
[You’ll notice that I have not used up my fair use quota. I’ve been saving it for this extended quote.]
. . . when he was in his right mind, he wouldn’t trust Trump Management to anybody. Instead [Fred] used Donald, despite his failures and poor judgement. . . [and] kept propping up Donald’s false sense of accomplishment until the only asset Donald had was the ease with which he could be duped by more powerful men.
There was a long line of people willing to take advantage of him. In the 1980s, New York journalists and gossip columnist discovered that Donald couldn’t distinguish between mockery and flattery and used his shamelessness to sell papers. That image, and the weakness of the man it represented, were precisely what appealed to Mark Burnett. By 2004, when The Apprentice first aired, Donald’s finances were a mess (even with his $170 million cut of my grandfather’s estate when he and his siblings sold the properties), and his own ‘empire’ consisted of increasingly desperate branding opportunities such as Trump Steaks, Trump Vodka, and Trump University. That made him an easy target for Burnett. pp. 195-6
It is at that time, too, that Trump gave his infamous deposition where he said that his net worth depended upon how he was feeling that day. His product was his name only, he said, and how he presented himself was the thing sold, so his feeling about himself was the product of value. The bigger the lie, the bigger the front, and the bigger the front, the bigger the con, and the bigger the con, the bigger the haul.
"The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted the spoons." -- correspondence Ralph Waldo Emerson
Dr. Mary L. Trump’s book is extremely good. No one needs me to say this. It is also an illustration of the psychologist of, in, and by the family. All families generate psychological contradictions and damage, and the families of monsters engrave their miseries on the family in deeper letters than the rest of us. She had to think this book, even if she never wrote it.
Aside from its value to all of us as a social medicine, as a way for each of us to explain Donald J. Trump away — to contain the exception, to prevent contamination with general society and assure ourselves that there is minimal risk that our children will be Donald Trump, that our uncles will be Donald Trump, the book also gives us insights that were non-medical, insights that help us historically.
"... there are so many fools placed in heights of which they are unworthy, that he who cannot restrain his contempt or indignation at the sight will be too often quarrelling with the disposal of things to relish that share which is allotted to himself." -- -- Henry Mackenzie, The Man of Feeling.
Mary Trump tells us, over and over again, about Fred Trump’s insistence on ignoring his wife’s physical infirmities. Confronted with severe osteoporosis and bone fractures, he would say, “Everything’s great. Right toots?” When Freddy was dying, Fred would attribute it to lack of will power. Because of her thesis, this is the source of the river of denial in Donald Trump — his “perfect” phone call with Zelensky, his “beautiful” letter with Kim, his “perfect” handling of the novel coronavirus. Because her thesis is that Fred’s sociopathy fed Donald’s narcissism and stunted him at an infantile phase, Donald simply mimics his father and is emotionally incapable of seeing himself.
None of us are in a position to disagree, except that she also tells us that Fred read Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking and was absolutely in love with it. The family moved its membership to Marble Collegiate Church (Peale’s church), and that’s where Fred’s funeral would be, along with Mary’s. The theology in Peale’s book is pretty close to the sham of The Secret (2006) and the heresy of Prosperity Gospel. (Peale was not heretical, but he got darned close, and his followers certainly tipped over the edge. (By the way, I am not shy about calling prosperity theology heretical.))
What Fred got from Peale, she says, is that you visualize the thing you want, concentrate on it in prayer, and then it . . . comes. (In the gospel, Jesus says that, if you but have faith the size of a mustard seed, you can tell a mountain to go over here, and it will. This, however, is usually understood as faith in God and not faith in yourself.) Fred, like many after him, cut out the divinity bit.
If Fred talked to his second son at all, it could well explain Donald’s counterfactual statements. Lies are not lies: they are claims on the future that are going to be made true with a will to power. He has no reason to doubt that the things he speaks will come to him, either, since powerful men have given him those things over and over again. “One day the coronavirus will just disappear” sounds very much like someone practicing “the power of positive thinking” would say. Firing scientists who say that the virus is running rampant for ruining the positive thinking and vision also sound in keeping with a presidency by Babbitry and Pealism.
This insight alone helps explain a great deal, and it is hardly the only one.
The family operated, within its own ranks, on money alone. A person’s net worth was a person’s human worth. This eliminates the confusing problem of virtue, empathy, social bonds, social debts, and intellectual merit. It makes marriages as simple as a renaissance noble’s contract, and as sterile (no matter how fecund). It explains mistresses (and the toleration of them).
It is hard to read the book without having sympathy for the author and, if possible, greater horror at weak, sad, withering, demented Donald J. Trump.
