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Too Much and
Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most
Dangerous Man
by Mary L. Trump, Ph.D.
c.2020, Simon and Schuster
$28.00 / $37.00 Canada
227 pages
By Terri Schlichenmeyer
The Truth Contributor
You hadn't seen that
container in ages.
You really can't remember
when you put it on the shelf. Sometime this year, six years
ago, when you moved last? What's in it must be worth
something, though, or you wouldn't've saved it. Now, as in
the new book Too Much and Never Enough by Mary L.
Trump, PhD, digging may yield answers. |
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No one has to explain to
you who Donald Trump is but, for anyone who's been
completely out of the loop, Mary Trump is Donald's niece
(she uses his first name, always, and to avoid confusion, so
will we). Trump has a PhD in psychology, worked at Manhattan
Psychiatric Center while in school, was once a therapist,
and taught graduate psychology. The point is, she got chops
and it shows, especially when this book – a look at her
family and, specifically, her Uncle Donald – reads like
something from the True Medicine genre. Indeed,
medically-based passages are nearly emotionless in their
clinicality.
To fully understand this
story and where it leads, Trump begins with brief accounts
of her great-grandfather, who came to America from Germany
in order to avoid military service. After the elder man
died, Trump's grandfather "Fred" (as she refers to him)
became business partners with his mother and expanded the
family fortune.
Trump asserts that
grandfather Fred was "a high-functioning sociopath" who put
his own self-interests above everything else. He was cruel
for cruelty's sake and ultimately used that against his
eldest son and namesake, "Freddy," whom Fred hoped would
assume the family business but who didn't have the heart for
it.
When Freddy proved to be a
disappointment, Fred turned to Donald, his second son, and
gave him free reign, an open bank account and the paternal
approval Trump suggests that Donald craved.
Once you get this far into
Too Much and Never Enough, it shouldn't surprise you;
none of it will, going forward, because you know how
this book ends. Long before that, though, Trump shares
details of growing up, noting nuances within the Trump
sibling group and the family at large, learning to read
silences, and hearing regular racist or homophobic comments
that made her, years later, keep mum on her marriage to (and
subsequent divorce from) a woman. The cruelty, as she
describes it, can sometimes read like a TV documentary on
wolves at a kill. Disappointment was thick on both sides.
Readers may occasionally
note something like sour grapes, too, but even that offers
more of an understanding of Trump's observations. While this
memoir somewhat culminates with the fight over Trump's
grandfather's will, a skewed inheritance, subsequent
lawsuit, and the truth she says she found with the urging of
the New York Times, the story – as she indicates –
won't begin to be finished until January, or a January four
years hence.
Until then, this is a
must-read for left and right alike but beware that it might
leave you feeling mournful – not for any one person, but
overall, in general: Too Much and Never Enough just
contains a lot of sadness. |
