About this book
Mary Trump spent much of her childhood in her grandparents’ large, imposing house in the heart of Queens, 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 first-hand witness to countless holiday meals and family 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 re-gifting 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.
Numerous pundits, armchair psychologists, and journalists have sought to parse Donald J. Trump’s lethal flaws. Mary L. Trump has the education, insight, and intimate familiarity needed to reveal what makes Donald, and the rest of her clan, tick. She alone can recount this fascinating, unnerving saga, not just because of her insider’s perspective but also because she is the only Trump willing to tell the truth about one of the world’s most powerful and dysfunctional families.
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Reviews
When Freddy Trump, the oldest brother of the Trump siblings, was critically ill, Donald Trump dialled Linda to inform her that her husband won’t make it. Linda rushed to the Trump House and found Freddy’s parents sitting in the library; they were not in hospital with their son. Nor had they called the hospital, with which they had an enduring relationship, to ensure quick and effective treatment for Freddy. After calling Linda, Donald, along with his sister, went to the movies.
Warped sensibility
If this anecdote shows Donald Trump as insensitive, it is equally a comment on his father, Fred Trump. In her blistering book Too Much and Never Enough, the President’s niece writes that the Trump siblings are who they are largely because of their father — “a high-functioning sociopath”. He had no time or patience for his wife, Mary, who had chronic health issues, or his children. He was singularly obsessed with expanding his business by building political connections and obtaining government largesse; yet the children spent their lives craving for his respect and love. His ruthless, controlling nature left them with a warped sense of right and wrong and arrested their growth in various ways. Maryanne was obedient. She learnt never to challenge her father and even “convinced herself that not asking for or receiving help was a badge of honour”.
Rob and Elizabeth were always eager to please. Donald learnt that being brash, boastful and disrespectful was the only way to gain his father’s acceptance. Freddy, a quiet rebel, chased his dream of becoming a pilot only to be degraded and humiliated. Eventually, depression and alcoholism cost him his life. Mary’s no-holds-barred attack on the family stems from the deep hurt of losing her father to emotional abuse and from being completely cut out of Fred’s will. Her story is also designed to hurt, which it seems to have done given President Trump's reaction to the book as “stupid, disgraceful, vicious and a lie”.
If Freddy tried to be different, Donald mirrored his parents. Fred engaged in hyperbole: “everything was ‘great’, ‘fantastic’, and ‘perfect’”; lying and cheating were acceptable business practices. When the first Italian-American family moved into a white neighborhood in the 1950s, “Fred was scandalized”. Donald’s mother, Mary, was horrified that Elton John, a “little faggot”, sang at Princess Diana’s service. If an old Fred once pulled out a photo of a topless young woman from his wallet in front of his granddaughter, Donald gawked at his young niece in a bathing suit and said: “Holy ***t, Mary. You’re stacked.”
Under the scanner
What Mary is at pains to emphasise is that Donald Trump is not a self-made man. Constantly supported by his father, he rose to the top only through self-aggrandisement and charisma, she says. Armed with a Ph.D. in clinical psychology, she puts the President under the scanner. He is a “narcissist” with an “antisocial personality disorder” and “an undiagnosed learning disability”. In short, he is not fit to lead a country. When he won the 2016 presidential election, Mary walked around her house in the morning, dazed. “It felt as though 62,979,636 voters had chosen to turn this country into a macro version of my malignantly dysfunctional family,” she writes.
Too Much and Never Enough is a strategically timed book: revenge, it seems for Mary, is best served cold. What sets it apart from other books about the President is an insider family perspective. Mary is a gifted storyteller. She is scathing, yet empathetic; a Trump, yet not one; immersed in the narrative, yet on the margins. This is both a memoir and a cautionary tale — if Donald Trump is given a second term, Mary is unequivocal about its result: “it would be the end of American democracy”.
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This is written well enough but there is no new information here. Most of the book focuses on Fred Trump Sr (trash) and Fred Jr, the author’s dad whose story is quite sad. The whole family is very terrible! Donald is a blathering moron. The best parts are when she eviscerates him and tells us what we already know—that he is the literal worst person and the least competent man. She seems to have empathy for him. Fuck that. Lots of people have asshole fathers and they manage not to destroy the world as a coping mechanism.
Anyway. Worst family ever
How do you nurture a sociopath?
If you were not aware, this book is written by Donald Trump's niece Mary. It is a VERY short book, but it is very good.
So let's break down a little about what this book is exactly. You aren't going to find any state secrets here. For anyone asking "Why Didn't Mary speak out earlier", this is addressed, but this is isn't a political expose. At its heart, Too Much and Never Enough is a story about an extremely twisted family, that is much about the other Trumps as it is Donald.
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Nothing in this book would sway a staunch believer. Nothing here is going to rock the world of an undecided voter- because this is a book about who the Trumps are as people. We have already seen Trump mock women, non-white folks, disabled people. We have seen him do so many evil things. If you don't know who Trump is by now, I don't really know what to say about you. Too Much and Never Enough is this woman's catharsis- its a way for her to release her trauma. Her book chronicles essentially, how she was became disenchanted with her family before 45 ever decided to run for office, how she was disinherited, and where Fred Trump comes into play as a lynchpin at the center of it all.
Mary's father, Fred Trump junior, was an outlier. Not necessary a good man, but a complicated one who had made a number of visible mistakes before she was even born. She describes his dark relationship with his brother, and her father's slow physical and mental decline as he falls out of favor with Fred Senior. Much of this book is really told through her father's eyes, and through the stories he told her before his passing.
Mary's grandfather Fred is also hi lighted as an abuser that gaslit and traumatized his children, saw the evil in his own younger son, and then raised him as an ideal son to take on the family name. Fred Senior's cruelty towards everyone around him, and shady business practices help shaped the monster we now know today as 45.
As for Donald Trump- Mary uses a number of personal and family stories to paint a picture of Trump's youth. Trump's behavior doesn't come out of thin air, and Mary is really able to paint a picture of 45 at his darkest, which started at a much earlier age than some may expect. These personal stories are chilling and callous- often reflecting his relationships with the American people during his four years as president.
You get some interesting little tidbits about "modern" behavior from the family as well, from small squabbles to election night anecdotes. Imagine the literary families of Long days Journey Into the Night or Haunting of Hill House. The Trump family in Mary's book is almost laughably literary "broken wealthy".
I highly recommend Too Much and Never Enough, even if you don't find yourself often drawn towards non fiction- if only because this is a simple and easy to follow biography that helps us understand how we got where we are now. How Donald Trump, against all odds, rose in the ranks of his own family from a younger "second son", and ended up making all of us pay for his neurosis.
I think most folks would go into this worried that Mary is providing excuses or sympathy for her family, and I can assure you that is not the case. Mary is an exceptional author and intelligent woman who makes no excuses for her family, and manages to tell a hard and painful story with striking objectivity and honesty.
'We need to talk about the elephant in the room.'
I was reading this book while watching the Netflix docu series Trump: An American Dream. In the fourth and final episode entitled ‘Politics’, it is suggested that Obama’s roasting of Trump at the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Dinner was the final trigger to make the Donald run for office, as this was the sort of humiliation and embarrassment that he could neither forget nor forgive.
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Up to that point, Trump had been rather coy about his presidential ambitions. It is also notable that Trump first used the slogan ‘Make America Great Again’ on 7 Nov 2012, the day after Obama won against Romney. So was Obama inadvertently responsible for priming America’s greatest nemesis, akin to a superhero origin story where the good guy inadvertently gives rise to evil?
The great value of Mary Trump’s book is, indeed, the light it shines on Trump’s own origin story – not in the sense of his personal mythopoiesis, but in the broader sense of his family relations and personal life.
All the facts here are overly familiar to anyone with a passing interest in Trump, and these do read like filler sections of the book. The writing only really sparks or presents a real sense of urgency when his niece presents her psychological insights into her uncle’s behaviour – and what a withering gaze it is.
You can sense the anger simmering beneath the surface of the page, but it is a coolly controlled rage only allowed expression in a current of black humour and acerbic wit that runs throughout like a pulsing vein.
I honestly wish Mary Trump had been allowed more time to flesh out the book, and also to give us more insight into her own character and role in the family. Surely she is as much an ‘enabler’ as everyone else she slags off, especially as she is only ‘coming out’ now, as it were, in order to ‘save democracy’.
That is quite a burden to place on such a slim book, of which 30% of the Kindle version is an index that only the publisher’s lawyers could have derived any benefit from. I do think it is an important book in that it cogently summarises everything the world has suspected about Trump to date – his cognitive problems, his lack of empathy, his narcissism, etc. – as well as issuing a dire warning about the upcoming election.
It is highly unlikely that Trump will go gently into that good night, and there are already ominous signs that he intends to destabilise the US to the point where (a) an election cannot be held as per normal or (b) where the outcome is in danger of being contested.
This was certainly not a happy reading experience, and I found it hard to judge if Mary Trump indulges in too much ‘doom and gloom’ blues. The picture she paints of the Trump household is one so dysfunctional that it seems almost Dickensian.
While Mary Trump manages to control her feelings with steely determination throughout, which is perhaps why it is such a grim and pervasively dark read, her composure slips at a crucial point. Here she allows emotion to trump her own clinical distance:
I can only imagine the envy with which Donald watched Derek Chauvin’s casual cruelty and monstrous indifference as he murdered George Floyd; hands in his pockets, his insouciant gaze aimed at the camera. I can only imagine that Donald wishes it had been his knee on Floyd’s neck.
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