A great review of Too Much and Never Enough – how my family created the world’s most dangerous man – by Mary L. Trump (2020)

 A great review of Too Much and Never Enough – how my family created the world’s most dangerous man – by Mary L. Trump (2020)

 

Given my assumption that the USA repeat history (as a farce) as chronicled by Edward Gibbon in his The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the phenomenon of Donald Trump must rank along the likes of Nero and Caligula – as I claimed in my previous blog called Trump, Trumper, Trumpest. With the end of the Trump era now in sight, allow me to join the thousands of authors who have something to say on this matter yet again, this time as a review of a book that hangs out the dirty underwear from the inside out. As a trained psychologist, Mary Trump goes for her uncle’s warped psyche as a fairly clear act of revenge (best served cold) for having been swindled out of a fortune (she has since started a new lawsuit to get her fair share). Naturally, given that hyperbole is in the DNA of the Trump clan, she gives her best shot in the title of the book. Poor old uncle Donald is painted as the ‘world’s most dangerous man’ when in fact he has done nothing much to earn the epithet. So far, he has not started any major wars as some of his more pathetic predecessors did, although he may yet start a minor civil war. His disastrous handling of the corona virus pandemic is not that much different from his fellow (elected) travellers in the UK, Brazil and India. Mary Trump’s account of Donald’s upbringing is as boring as any tycoon’s story, tracking along the tenets of vulture capitalism, whereby selling your grandmother for a real estate deal is the least of the problem. Donald’s father Fred made Donald for what he is, or so says Mary Trump. To make it a bit more ‘nasty’ (a word Donald likes) Mary notes that Fred was a real tycoon while Donald is a failed one. There is a lot of psycho-babble, as to be expected from a psychologist, but strangely missing is the term ‘megalomaniac’ which is surely a character trait of Donald, not in the sense of being a ‘dangerous militarist’ but in the sense of a bizarre businessman who lives off the megalomaniac celebrity culture so prevalent in the USA and Western World in general. Obviously, Donald is doing a great job as a media star, surrounding himself with beautiful people whose main claim to fame is being somewhat photogenic. If Mary Trump’s (psycho)analysis were correct of Donald being a totally dysfunctional bastard (liar, cheat, torturer) he would never have been able to win his way into the sagging hearts, if not breasts – to invoke a Freudian slip – of his many admirers. Donald is not utterly stupid, as Mary suggests,as he is practiced in the ‘art of deception’ (to quote a line from a Rolling Stones’ song that Donald liked to play at his rallies until the Rolling Stones complained), a trait greatly admired in the world of the one percent. Not that Donald is a major player in this league, having only gotten some 170 million dollars from the sale of his father’s real estate empire – and Mary having gotten nothing. Donald’s other siblings benefitted equally, except for Mary’s father who had died earlier in the story, aged only aged 42.  Mary accuses the rest of the clan, Donald and her grandfather in particular, for having driven her father to an untimely death, having disinherited her separated mother and Mary and her brother in due process. Mary accuses the media and the banks for having aided and bankrolled Donald, all the while blatantly bankrupting himself due to his incompetence. Again, this is an unlikely scenario, for in particular, banks like the Deutsche Bank, provided Donald with huge loans and mortgages in the knowledge that his real estate deals - like his golf courses – were in fact worthy collaterals in a world where desirable (location, location) ‘real estate’ appreciates faster than you can say a billion dollars. Donald did after all learn from his father that real estate in the form of housing estates is a gold mine (now also via the Kushner empire), while of course, more risky items like casinos and flash hotel towers (as later favoured by Donald) can bring you down – but not the bank that will call in the collateral. Banks love the brash businessman who puts profits before people, and that’s something that Donald certainly also learnt from his father, as in this case well described by Mary. The mainstream media too, as an extension of the capitalist banking and corporate system, loves the fairy tale of the self-made billionaire (with a little help from his father and his father’s friends), to give hope to the 99 percent who live their miserable lives in the knowledge that it is due their own shortcomings that they are dirt poor. You too can overcome your shortcomings by subscribing to Fred Trump’s bible called The Power of Positive Thinking by Pastor Norman Vincent Peale (who was also a friend of Richard Nixon and whose church Donald attended as a youngster, and later was married to Ivana in that church). In the good old USA, to this day, the Calvinist dogma holds fast, namely that the Christian God rewards good people with being rich. Donald brandishes the Bible like all the presidents before him, only that in his case all the angels open the wings for him, literally, and if not willingly, he will grab their pussies. This endears him to all the chauvinists who still rule the roost (not to speak of the hens who happily submit to such divine demands). Maybe the Rolling Stones should let him play at least the Little Red Rooster! The US mainstream media really has reached a pinnacle with Donald Trump, manufacturing consent (to paraphrase Noam Chomsky) along with social media like Twitter (you have to be a twit to use Twitter). Mary fails to analyse these major contributing factors, with her sole focus on the presumed psychological dysfunction of Donald due to his upbringing. To her credit though she does offer a glimpse towards the end of her book, saying that ‘… Donald isn’t really the problem after all’. She then cites the ‘sham’ acquittal of the Senate impeachment trial as an example of how he is aided and abetted by the powers to be. Then again, she fails to mention that Bill Clinton’s acquittal was a ‘sham’ as well. Nixon, the true madman of recent US politics, did however see the writing on the wall. Indeed, US politics, in recent history at least, is a sad story of the corporate elite running the ship to the ground, what with Donald Trump just being a bit player in the grand scheme of things. Mary Trump still lives in a dreamworld of the USA being (before Donald) a ‘great nation’, a great democracy, with a great economy … words that echo none other than Donald’s delusions of grandeur. Finally, regarding Mary’s by-line of Too Much and Never Enough, if she succeeds to get some of the millions owed to her by the remaining Trump siblings, is she going to donate said millions to charity or is she going to do what her aunt Maryanne allegedly did? Namely, take the 170 million from the sale of the Trump Empire and resign from her position as a judge (formerly appointed with Donald’s aid), collect her $200,000 pension and live happily in her Florida Palm Beach mansion worth some 20 million. Money makes the world go round, world go round – as the song goes – and the Trump money, as dirty as their combined sibling’s underwear, is a stain on even the one percent, and Mary should have the common sense of not wanting any of it. Her income from her day job and now from book sales should suffice, and she, as many of the other erstwhile sycophants fired by Donald, should thank Donald for the great opportunity to have something to write about. If and when Biden gets in, all the talk show hosts cum comedians will have to retire and authors like Mary Trump will have to revert to writing cheap crime novels, if anything at all.