Since 2015, there has been speculation on the mental faculties of the man who would become our nation’s 45th president. Donald Trump has been a fixture of the tabloid media for several decades, but never before has his eccentric nature influenced the fate of an entire country.
Clinical psychologist Mary L. Trump’s “Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man” is a must-read exposé on the Trump family, told from the point of view of Donald Trump’s niece.
The first part reads like a CliffsNotes version of Donald Trump’s family history. The most intensive feature in this section is the early childhood trauma that Donald endured when his mother was hospitalized. This is the first insight into Donald Trump’s early childhood and how his development was interrupted by his father’s inability to adequately care for him while his mother was ailing.
Donald Trump’s father was a textbook example of the domineering patriarch. He could not envision nor accept a career for his eldest son, Mary Trump’s father, that diverged from his vision of a business dynasty. He disparagingly called his eldest son – one of the first commercial pilots for TWA Airlines — a “glorified bus driver in the sky.”
Mary’s insights into the Trump family are scathing and inherently satisfying for anyone who, like her, was negatively impacted when Donald Trump was elected. It’s a validating piece for people who said “never my president.”
On the flip side of the exposé, though, lies paralyzing fear. Mary is convinced that Russia tampered with the 2016 election, and she does not paint a hopeful picture for the future based on that logic. If Russia intervened in 2016, what’s to stop them from doing it again in the future?
Mary’s insights on her paternal family is as fascinating as it is exasperating. Never before have I wanted access to a time machine more than I do after reading this exposé. It’s obvious that some kind of intervention was necessary to prevent the catastrophe that is Donald Trump.
Interestingly, Mary doesn’t elaborate much on Donald Trump’s fixation with young women. She does, however, tell a story about when Donald saw her in a bathing suit for the first time at his Mar-a-Lago resort and disgustingly remarked that she was “stacked.”
She closes the book with a firm push not to elect Donald for another presidential term, detailing the risks of prolonging his time in office. She reiterates how incompetent he is to lead the nation and suggests that his nomination as the Republican presidential candidate was a calculated move by GOP leaders to put someone in office who can be easily manipulated.
I read her tell-all with much skepticism, because the Trump name has become synonymous with ridiculous, self-serving arrogance and outright corruption. Her PhD in psychology lends credibility to an account that could otherwise be criticized as a conflict of interest.
To be fair, she makes no effort to disguise her obvious bias against him. She is honest even when it doesn’t benefit her — admitting before the world and her powerful family that she was the whistleblower in the 2018 “New York Times” investigation on Donald Trump’s corrupt business practices and criminal irresponsibility with his finances.
Despite my uncertainty, I found “Too Much and Never Enough” to be fascinating. Mary Trump’s recollections and her psychological insights certainly explain much about the way Donald seems to always “fail upwards,” all the way into the Oval Office.
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It seems that Donald Trump has always been a puppet for more powerful men and that his development was stunted at a critical age. In effect, he’s still the terrified child who was abandoned by his father when his mother was sick. He is not a man fit to lead the nation, and allowing him to do so for another four years would surely mean total devastation of the American democratic system.
Hevyn Heckes is a freelance reporter at the Daily Lobo. She can be contacted at culture@dailylobo.com or on Twitter @H_Squared90
