5/20/2023 0 Comments Donald trumps vbookIt was Mary’s own father, Fred Trump Jr., the president’s older brother, who bore the brunt of the family patriarch’s disappointment. Even Mary admits that, on the advice of one of the family advisers, she changed her signature when her grandfather expressed his unhappiness over its legibility. It is his approval that undergirds so many family members’ decisions, even well into their adult lives. The book revolves around family patriarch Fred Trump Sr., described as sociopathic in his lack of empathy and emotional cruelty, and the spell he held over his children and many of the others in the family clan. That said, despite her academic credentials, her analysis isn’t nearly as powerful as her anecdotes, largely because we’ve yet to see a version of the Trump story from the point of view of a family member, and it is, despite the gilt, one of indifference and alienation. It’s a bit of a personality paradox that she ascribes to the president: the insecurity of feeling less than and greater than at the same time. The title - Too Much and Never Enough - is perhaps apt for this moment, as the president dominates each news cycle yet is seemingly unable to sit one out. The book draws on her experience as a clinical psychologist, as she gives a full rundown of the dynamics at work in the family that made Donald Trump who he is. The horse already has left the barn, though, and her version of family history isn’t pretty. Hers is from the family-insider’s perspective, threatening enough to spill all their secrets that another uncle, Robert, has gone to court to try to get her to stop it. With its shades of Augusten Burroughs’ Running with Scissors, Mary Trump’s vivid details of incidents, of the family dysfunction and ultimately the tragedy of her father’s death and, in her eyes, the election of her uncle to the presidency, makes the memoir unique. Last month it was John Bolton’s book before he was returned to custody, the president’s former lawyer Michael Cohen was promising one at the end of September. Trump tell-alls seemingly are coming out fast and furious as Election Day nears. So there’s that: it’s just a distraction.” As Mary Trump writes, “If he can keep forty-seven thousand spinning plates in the air, nobody can focus on any one of them. ![]() ![]() Yet even these new claims about Trump might not have a long shelf life amid the daily chaos of the administration. They are noticing now, obviously, as headlines were blasted out this week of some of her claims, including one that the future president cheated on the SATs and another that he tried to hoodwink his father into altering his will in a way that would give him control of his estate. “The media failed to notice that not one member of Donald’s family, apart from his children, his son in law and his current wife, said a word in support of him during the entire campaign,” she writes. In Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man, set to be published by Simon & Schuster on Tuesday, the niece of President Donald Trump still seems a bit surprised that, through his entire career, her uncle, whether by design or impulse, has used distraction to his advantage. As reporters rushed to post many of the juicy anecdotes and scorching analysis from Mary Trump’s new book this past week, they might have missed that the memoir also is a media critique.
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