The world’s most dangerous man

How does a bankrupt, sociopath, son of a controlling enabler,

dropped in the middle of Queens,

a narcissist, egotist, delusional misogynist,

grow up to be a con-man living in the White House?

— with apologies to Lin-Manuel Miranda

Alexander Hamilton’s life story was the very opposite of Donald J. Trump’s. Hamilton came from nothing, and with a brilliant mind, hard work, and a revolutionary vision, he helped make America a More Perfect Union. Trump came from vast wealth, rarely put in an honest day’s labor, and, as we learn in Mary L. Trump’s impressive new book, “Too Much And Never Enough: How My Family Created The World’s Most Dangerous Man,” the wounds he has inflicted on America and the world are “the end result of Donald’s having continually been given a pass and rewarded not just for his failures but for his transgressions — against tradition, against decency, against the law, and against fellow human beings.”

Mary, Donald’s niece (using first names as she does throughout her book), holds a B.A. from Tufts University, an M.A. from Columbia University, and a Ph.D. from the Derner Institute of Advanced Psychological Studies at Adelphi University. She has taught graduate courses in trauma, psycho-pathology and developmental psychology. In addition to being a contributor to “Diagnosis Schizophrenia” (Columbia University Press, 2002), as an adjunct professor she provided therapy and psychological testing for several years to patients at a community clinic specializing in addictions.

With that background she poses a triple threat to Donald: For over 50 years she acquired firsthand knowledge of him up close and personal; she has the professional credentials to assess his mental deficiencies; and she has direct knowledge of his financial machinations. Mary has written a blunt, piercing, intelligent, brave and illuminating book that helps explain the 45th president of the United States and why he represents an ongoing danger to our nation and the world.

This is no frivolous “tell-all” book, although it contains its share of jaw-dropping anecdotes that reveal Donald’s and his father Fred’s pettiness and cruelties. Shortly after Donald announced his candidacy, at one of Mary’s regular lunches with her aunt Maryanne Trump, the oldest of the five Trump children, Maryanne called her brother a “clown” and said his becoming president “will never happen.” Mary asked her, “Does anyone even believe the bullshit that he’s a self-made man? What has he even accomplished on his own?” Maryanne, who served as a federal judge for 36 years, responded, “Well, he has had five bankruptcies.”

Three months after his inauguration, Donald showed off the White House to members of his family, including Mary. When they reached the Lincoln Bedroom, Donald boasted, “This place has never looked better since George Washington lived here.” The White House historian conducting the tour was too polite to point out that the White House was not even built until after Washington had died.

To understand her uncle, Mary centers on her grandfather, Fred Trump, who had an overwhelming need for recognition, “a need that propelled him to encourage Donald’s reckless hyperbole and unearned confidence that hid Donald’s pathological weaknesses and insecurities.” According to Mary, none of the Trump siblings emerged unscathed “from my grandfather’s psychopathy and my grandmother’s illnesses, both physical and psychological, but my uncle Donald and my father, Freddy, suffered more than the rest.”

Mary says she has no problem calling Donald a “narcissist,” since he meets all nine criteria outlined in the “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders” (DSM-5). In addition to his “malignant narcissism” and “narcissist personality disorder,” Mary points out that he also meets the criteria for “antisocial personality disorder,” which refers to “chronic criminality, arrogance, and disregard for the rights of others.” She also believes he meets some of the criteria for “dependent personality disorder,” which is marked by “an inability to make decisions or take responsibility, discomfort with being alone, and going to excessive lengths to obtain support from others.” And she sees “a long undiagnosed learning disability that for decades has interfered with his ability to process information.” On top of all that, Mary notes that consuming upwards of 12 Diet Cokes a day and sleeping very little, Donald likely suffers from “a substance — (in this case caffeine) — induced sleep disorder.”

Mary believes that the worst effects of Donald’s pathologies have been shielded during his presidency by a stable economy and a lack of serious crises. “But the out-of-control COVID-19 pandemic, the possibility of an economic depression, deepening social divides along political lines thanks to Donald’s penchant for division, and devastating uncertainty about our country’s future have created a perfect storm of catastrophes that no one is less equipped than my uncle to manage.”

“Donald has always needed to perpetuate the fiction my grandfather started,” Mary writes, “that he is strong, smart, and otherwise extraordinary because facing the truth — that he is none of these things — is too terrifying for him to contemplate.” She warns that “Donald, following the lead of my grandfather and with the complicity, silence, and inaction of his siblings, destroyed my father. I can’t let him destroy my country.”

Mary describes in detail, from her own personal experience and the stories told to her by her uncles and aunts, the central and domineering role her grandfather Fred played in Donald’s warped development. The book is filled with specific events and circumstances that validate her judgments, first in Fred’s life and then in Donald’s. Mary characterizes Fred as “a high functioning sociopath,” the symptoms of which include “a lack of empathy, a facility for lying, an indifference to right and wrong, abusive behavior, and a lack of interest in the rights of others.” Mary’s grandmother was no match for her husband. She failed to protect her children or provide any counterweight to Fred’s sociopathic personality and behavior. “Fred’s lack of real human feeling, his rigidity as a parent and a husband, and his sexist belief in a woman’s innate inferiority likely left her feeling unsupported.”

The title of Mary’s book comes from her view that child abuse is, in some sense, the experience of “too much” or “not enough.” Donald suffered deprivations that would scar him for life. “The personality traits that resulted — displays of narcissism, bullying, grandiosity — finally made my grandfather take notice but not in a way that ameliorated any of the horrors that had come before.” As he grew older, Donald witnessed Fred’s “too-muchness” when he saw what happened to Freddy (who was six years older than Donald), who was on the receiving end of “too much attention, too much expectation, and, too saliently, too much humiliation.” In order to cope, “Donald began to develop powerful but primitive defenses, marked by an increasing hostility to others and a seeming indifference to his mother’s absence and father’s neglect.”

“Unfortunately for Donald and everyone else on the planet,” Mary writes, “those behaviors became hardened into personality traits because once Fred started paying attention to his loud and difficult second son, he came to value them. Put another way, Fred Trump came to validate, encourage, and champion the things about Donald that rendered him essentially unlovable and that were in part the direct result of Fred’s abuse.”

As Mary sees it, “Fred destroyed Donald, too, but not by snuffing him out as he did Freddy; instead, he short-circuited Donald’s ability to develop and experience the entire spectrum of human emotion.” Mary adds that by “limited Donald’s access to his own feelings and rendering many of them unacceptable, Fred perverted his son’s perception of the world and damaged his ability to live in it.” The rules in the Fred Trump household, especially as applied to the boys, were to “be tough at all costs, lying is okay, admitting you’re wrong or apologizing is weakness.” From Mary’s perspective, “Donald’s growing arrogance, in part a defense against his feelings of abandonment and an antidote to his lack of self-esteem, served as a protective cover for his deepening insecurities.” Sadly, she discloses that she “never saw any man in my family cry or express affection for one another in any way other than the handshake that opened and closed any encounter.”

Mary enhances her extended analysis of Fred and Donald with vivid descriptions of dysfunctional family gatherings, her awkward and embarrassing personal encounters with each of them, and her frustrated efforts, at Donald’s own request, to try to write a book about him without him ever consenting to be interviewed.

At Trump Management, Fred never missed a chance to demean and humiliate Mary’s father Freddy, whose dream was to be an airline pilot rather than manage real estate. When Freddy ordered new windows for one of his father’s older buildings, Fred was furious and shouted, while the employees looked on: “You should have slapped a goddamn coat of paint on them instead of wasting my money! Donald is worth ten of you. He never would have done anything so stupid.” Mary points out that Donald was still in high school at the time. After Donald graduated from college, Mary goes on to describe how Donald’s fortunes at Fred’s company rose at Freddy’s expense. Plagued by depression and alcoholism, Freddy died in 1981at the age of 43.

Eventually, with Fred’s financial support, Donald formed the Trump Organization, and in the 1980s, Donald went on an ostentatious spending spree, opening three casinos in Atlantic City, purchasing Mar-a-Lago for $8 million, buying a yacht for $29 million, and acquiring Eastern Airlines Shuttle for $365 million. But lacking any real business acumen, Donald failed miserably. The Taj Mahal, his favorite casino, had to declare bankruptcy just a little over a year after it opened, and by 1990, his personal debts had ballooned to $975 million.

In June 1990, Donald missed a $43 million payment for his casino, Trump’s Castle. Mary reveals that six months later, her grandfather sent his chauffeur with more than $3 million in cash to purchase chips at the Castle. “In other words, he bought the chips with no intention of gambling with them; his driver simply put them in a briefcase and left the casino.” The next day, Fred had to wire another $150,000 to the Castle. Although these maneuvers helped temporarily, according to Mary, “they resulted in my grandfather’s having to pay a $30,000 fine for violating a gaming commission rule prohibiting unauthorized financial sources from lending money to casinos.”

In a pattern of manipulation that Donald would repeat throughout his life, he convinced the banks that were carrying his debts to delay collection and thereby sustain his extravagant lifestyle. He did this by convincing them that the only real collateral they had was the Trump brand. Mary reports that in addition to fronting Donald the money to cover his businesses’ operating expenses, astonishingly “the banks reached an agreement with him in May 1990 to put him on a $450,000-a-month allowance — that is, almost $5.5 million a year — for having failed miserably.” The banks, just as Fred had done in the past, subsidized Donald thereby enabling him to perpetuate the myth that he was self-made genius at business.

In April 2017, Mary was contacted by Susanne Craig, a reporter at the New York Times. Craig told her the Times was doing an in-depth investigation into Donald’s finances. At first Mary put off the reporter. But Craig persisted, writing Mary a letter explaining that the documents Mary possessed could help “rewrite the history of the President of the United States.” As Mary watched in real time how “Donald shredded norms, endangered alliances, and trod upon the vulnerable,” she realized she was watching “our democracy disintegrating and people’s lives unraveling because of my uncle’s policies.” She called Craig and offered to help. Eventually Mary secured 19 bankers boxes, full of Trump financial records, from her lawyer’s office and delivered them to the Times. “I had to take Donald down.”

With Mary’s help, in October, 2018, after 18 months of research, the Times published an almost 14,000-word series of articles, the longest in its history, by Susanne Craig, David Barstow and Russ Buettner, “revealing the long litany of potentially fraudulent and criminal activities my grandfather, aunts, and uncles had engaged in.” While Fred was alive, “Donald alone received the equivalent of $413 million, much of it through questionable means: loans he had never repaid, investments in properties that had never matured; essentially gifts that had never been taxed.” In 2019, the reporters received a Pultizer Prize for the Trump series.

“Donald today is much as he was at three years old,” Mary writes, “incapable of growing, learning, or evolving, unable to regulate his emotions, moderate his responses, or take in and synthesize information.” When he was elected, she writes that she was in despair, certain that “Donald’s cruelty and incompetence would get people killed,” possibly through “an avoidable war he either provoked or stumbled into.” What she did not anticipate was how many people would willingly “enable his worst instincts,” as Fred, the banks, and others had done throughout his life. As she learned, Donald’s worst instincts “have resulted in government-sanctioned kidnapping of children, detaining of refugees at the border, and betrayal of our allies, among other atrocities,” she writes. “And I couldn’t have foreseen that a global pandemic would present itself, allowing him to display his grotesque indifference to the lives of other people.”

Mary concludes her compelling and devastating portrait with the “simple fact” that Donald “is fundamentally incapable of acknowledging the suffering of others.” He “can no more advocate for the sick and dying than he could put himself between his father and Freddy.” For Donald, “there is no value in empathy, no tangible upside to caring about other people.”

Exhibiting the red-hot anger of a daughter who is convinced her uncle contributed to her father’s early death, Mary unleashes a gut-wrenching accusation invoking perhaps today’s most indelible image of the arrogance and impunity of power: “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.”

This remarkable book may well be the most serious, candid and revealing examination of Donald Trump ever written by anyone in his inner circle. It deserves to be read by anyone who has been desperately trying to figure out how Donald Trump could ever have been elected president of the United States. More importantly, it demands that we look long and hard at how we and those around us enable people like Donald Trump, people incapable of kindness and sympathy, to secure and exercise domination and control over our families, ourselves, our nation, and our world. 

Stephen Rohde, a retired civil liberties lawyer and contributor to the Los Angeles Review of Books, is author of “American Words for Freedom” and “Freedom of Assembly.”