Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man

by Mary L. Trump Ph.D.

Hardcover, 2020

Status

Available

Collection

Publication

Simon & Schuster (2020), Edition: 1, 240 pages

Description

"In this revelatory, authoritative portrait of Donald J. Trump and the toxic family that made him, Mary L. Trump, a trained clinical psychologist and Donald�s only niece, shines a bright light on the dark history of their family in order to explain how her uncle became the man who now threatens the world�s health, economic security, and social fabric. Mary Trump spent much of her childhood in her grandparents� large, imposing house in the heart of Queens, New York, where Donald and his four siblings grew up. She describes a nightmare of traumas, destructive relationships, and a tragic combination of neglect and abuse. She explains how specific events and general family patterns created the damaged man who currently occupies the Oval Office, including the strange and harmful relationship between Fred Trump and his two oldest sons, Fred Jr. and Donald. A firsthand witness to countless holiday meals and interactions, Mary brings an incisive wit and unexpected humor to sometimes grim, often confounding family events. She recounts in unsparing detail everything from her uncle Donald�s place in the family spotlight and Ivana�s penchant for regifting to her grandmother�s frequent injuries and illnesses and the appalling way Donald, Fred Trump�s favorite son, dismissed and derided him when he began to succumb to Alzheimer�s." --book jacket.… (more)

Media reviews

The sins of the father loom large too in Too Much and Never Enough by Mary Trump (Simon & Schuster), a fascinating memoir from the US president's niece that sheds a very prescient light on his refusal to quit the White House. The author's own father, Donald’s brother Freddy, was the eldest son of
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the family; in her telling, Donald and Freddy's father, Fred Trump Sr, was a sociopath who pitted his children cruelly against each other. Eventually Freddy Jr is deemed the loser, not fit to inherit the family business, and brutally rejected. Donald steps up, but never forgets the lesson that failure equals ostracism. From then on everything he touches must always be terrific, amazing, the best it could be.
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But the most interesting assessments she offers are reserved for those inside the “institutions,” the people who might have saved us and certainly have not, from the nuclear family, to the Trump businesses, to New York’s bankers and powerful elites, to Bill Barr, Mike Pompeo, and Jared
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Kushner. They all knew and know that the emperor has no clothes, even as they devote their last shreds of dignity to effusive praise of his ermine trim and jaunty crown.... As she concludes, his sociopathy “reminds me that Donald isn’t really the problem at all.” That makes hers something other than the 15th book about the fathoms-deep pathologies of Donald Trump: It is the first real reckoning with all those who “caused the darkness.”
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“Too Much and Never Enough” is a deftly written account of cross-generational trauma, but it is also suffused by an almost desperate sadness — sadness in the stories it tells and sadness in the telling, too. Mary Trump brings to this account the insider perspective of a family member, the
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observational and analytical abilities of a clinical psychologist and the writing talent of a former graduate student in comparative literature. But she also brings the grudges of estrangement.
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Writing with the sharp eye of a perpetual outsider in her own family, Trump presents a melancholic portrait of their complicity in her uncle's worst behaviors. Readers who despair for President Trump's ability to lead the country out of its current crises will have their worst suspicions confirmed.
“It felt,” she writes, “as though 62,979,636 voters had chosen to turn this country into a macro version of my malignantly dysfunctional family.” ... And it goes on, coming to a head in the unbelievable story of Fred Trump’s will. Does Mary Trump, Ph.D., have an ax to grind? Sure. So do
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we all. Dripping with snideness, vibrating with rage, and gleaming with clarity—a deeply satisfying read.
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Original publication date

2020-07-14
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