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

by Mary L. Trump

Overview

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.

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781982141462
Publisher:	Simon & Schuster
Publication date:	07/14/2020
Pages:	240
Sales rank:	101,987
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Mary L. Trump holds a PhD from the Derner Institute of Advanced Psychological Studies and taught graduate courses in trauma, psychopathology, and developmental psychology. She lives with her daughter in New York.

Editorial Reviews

[Mary L. Trump] remembers [Robert Trump, baby brother of Donald Trump] as a teenager, not much older than she was, leaning against the refrigerator as he peeled back the foil on a block of Philadelphia cream cheese and ate it "as if it were a candy bar." It's the kind of detail—memorably specific, fundamentally human and decidedly weird—that gives this book an undeniable power…Mary, who was also a graduate student of comparative literature, knows how to tell a story and choose an anecdote.

The New York Times - Jennifer Szalai

07/13/2020

Trump, a trained clinical psychologist and the niece of President Donald Trump, delivers a concise and damning account of her family's dysfunctions and their role in shaping her uncle's toxic blend of cruelty, incompetence, and vainglory. The fault, according to Trump, lies mainly with her grandfather, Fred Trump, a "high-functioning sociopath" whose harsh treatment of his eldest son and namesake, Freddy Trump (the author's father, who died at age 42 after years of alcohol abuse), taught Donald to bury his insecurities behind "a perpetual sneer of self-conscious superiority" and to cheat and bully his way to success on wheels greased by his father's money and political connections. Though Trump begins and ends the book with scathing assessments of Donald's presidency and offers plenty of unflattering anecdotes, he remains a somewhat distant figure throughout. The most harrowing sections deal with Freddy Trump's yearslong decline after his attempt to leave his father's real estate business failed, and the family's callous treatment of his ex-wife, children, and grandchildren after his death. 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. (July)

Publishers Weekly

"[T]he most devastating, most valuable and all-around best Trump book since he started running for president. In the vast Trump literature, this one is something new...[W]hat this book does do is help us understand him, offering the most incisive rendering yet of why he is the way he is."—Politico

"Mesmerizing beach reading and a memorable opposition research dump...It is salacious, venomous and well-sourced...Yet the narrative remains compelling." —The Guardian

"A delicious tell-all that does in fact tell all in a way one longs for a tell-all to do.” —Vogue

"Dripping with snideness, vibrating with rage, and gleaming with clarity—a deeply satisfying read." —Kirkus (starred review)

"Mary Trump’s compelling saga of one very unhappy family does more than just provide probing insights into her uncle’s disturbing inner world. It’s also a first-rate primer on the chaotic inner workings of an administration that has shocked the world by failing to take the basic steps required to keep Americans safe during the coronavirus pandemic. —Boston Globe

"After many, many Trump books, this is an essential one." —Vanity Fair

"[A] deftly written account of cross-generational trauma...Mary Trump brings to this account the insider perspective of a family member, the observational and analytical abilities of a clinical psychologist and the writing talent of a former graduate student in comparative literature." —Washington Post

Mary’s clarity, training, discipline and sharp eye help make her a reliable narrator, and she’s a fluid, witty writer to boot...She’s a true insider in an era when “insider” accounts of the president are a dime-a-dozen — and that what she’s written is likely to be indelible.—Bloomberg

"Mary L. Trump comes closer than anyone to describing the making of a seemingly heartless person who won his way to the White House...[A]n insightful, well-crafted memoir"—CNN

"You can see why President Trump doesn’t want anyone to read this thing. It gives the lie to many of his most cherished myths about himself."—Los Angeles Times

From the Publisher

★ 2020-07-08
The long-awaited tell-all from the president’s niece, a clinical psychologist.

Donald Trump, writes the author early on in this scathing critique, “understands nothing about history, constitutional principles, geopolitics, diplomacy (or anything else, really).” Her account of a night spent at the Trump International Hotel begins with her discomfort at finding her name plastered on every object in the room: “TRUMP shampoo…TRUMP shoe polish, TRUMP sewing kit, and TRUMP bathrobe….I opened the refrigerator, grabbed a split of TRUMP white wine, and poured it down my Trump throat so it could course through my Trump bloodstream and hit the pleasure center of my Trump brain.” As readers will quickly realize, there is a fate worse than having Donald J. Trump as president: being related to him. The author describes wandering around her house in shock the morning after the 2016 election. “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.” Few fairy tales were ever colder and greedier than the story of Donald’s father, Fred Trump; the author, who specializes in psychopathology, prefers the technical term, “high-functioning sociopath.” Donald and his siblings were “essentially motherless” from a very early age, and they were subjected to an ongoing form of abuse summarized by the book’s title. But once Donald was tapped as his father’s favorite, he was ushered into the proverbial counting house while his siblings were left to fight for the scraps. The author’s father was repeatedly humiliated and all but disowned, and he was left to die alone. The author’s aunt "wouldn't have been able to feed herself or her son" without Crisco cans of dimes and quarters collected from the laundry machines in the Trump apartments, sneaked to her by her mother. 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 we all.

Dripping with snideness, vibrating with rage, and gleaming with clarity—a deeply satisfying read.

Kirkus Reviews