Mary Trump’s Book Shows How Donald Trump Gets Away With It

[homersapien 11,357]

The problem with a fraud as big as this president is that once you start collaborating with him, it’s impossible to get out.

Too Much and Never Enough, Mary Trump’s devastating indictment of how the Trump family created, as her subtitle characterizes him, “the world’s most dangerous man,” hits bookstores this week. Its publication coincides with—as she predicted—record-shattering COVID-19 cases, a fragile economy, and a half-formed government plan to open schools this fall at any cost. By now you have doubtless ingested the greatest hits of her family gossip: Donald Trump ogled his own niece in a bathing suit and sought to fill one of his books with hit lists of “ugly” women who had rebuffed him; Donald Trump paid someone to take his SATs; Maryanne Trump Barry, a retired federal appeals court judge, once described her brother as a “clown” with no principles; Donald Trump was a vicious bully even as a child; Freddy Trump—the author’s father—died alone in a hospital while Donald went to a movie. The details are new, and graphic, yes, but very little about it is surprising: The president is a lifelong liar and cheater, propped up by a father who was as relentless in his need for success as Donald Trump was to earn his approval. Check please.

But not quite. What is new and surprising is also that Mary Trump, who has a Ph.D. in clinical psychology, has given us a granular portrait of Trump’s profound impairment: She says that her uncle has all nine clinical criteria for narcissism, although she insists that this diagnosis is only the tip of the psychological iceberg—he may also suffer from antisocial personality disorder, sociopathy, and/or dependent personality disorder, along with an undiagnosed learning disability that likely interferes with his ability to process information. I leave it to the mental health experts to determine whether some or all of that is accurate. But what Mary Trump surely adds to the growing canon of the “Trump is unwell” book club is not limited to family gossip or mental health diagnostics: At bottom, Too Much and Never Enough may be the first book that stipulates, in its first pages, that the president is irreparably damaged, and then turns a clinician’s lens on the rest of us, the voters, the enablers, the flatterers, the hangers-on, and the worshippers. It is here that Mary Trump’s book makes perhaps the most enduring contribution to the teetering piles of books that have offered too little too late, even while telling us that which we already knew. Because Mary Trump begins from the assumption that other analysis tends to end with: Donald Trump is lethally dangerous, stunningly incoherent, and pathologically incapable of caring about anyone but himself. So, what Mary Trump wants to know is: What the hell is wrong with everyone around him? As she writes in her prologue, “there’s been very little effort to understand not only why he became what he is but how he’s consistently failed up despite his glaring lack of fitness.”

The book is thus actually styled as an indictment not of Donald Trump but of Trump’s enablers. The epigraph is from Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, and it’s emphatically not about Donald John Trump at all: “If the soul is left in darkness, sins will be committed. The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but the one who causes the darkness.” Mary Trump blames Fred Trump for Donald Trump’s pathology, although she doesn’t claim that her uncle is a tragic victim of abuse. She blames his family that propped him up (also her family, it should be noted), and then in concentric and expanding circles, the media that failed to scrutinize him, the banks that pretended he was the financial genius he was not, the Republican Party, and the “claque of loyalists” in the White House who continue to lie for him and to him in order to feed his insatiable ego and self-delusion. Even the phrase “too much and never enough” is perhaps deliberately borrowed from the language of addiction, and what Mary Trump describes here is not just her uncle’s addiction to adulation, fame, money, and success, but a nation’s—or some part of a nation’s—unfathomable addiction to him.

 

 

The bulk of the book focuses on the tale of Mary and her brother Fritz’s abandonment by the rest of the Trump clan. Her father, Freddy, the scion and namesake, failed to be the storybook heir to her grandfather’s real estate empire, instead collapsing into a tragic black hole of alcoholism, illness, and despair. Donald Trump, Freddy’s younger brother, not only helped push Freddy down but also stepped on his sinking shoulders on his way into the empty, Freddy-shaped space to become his father’s successor. And as Freddy’s parents and three other siblings altered their lives and priorities in order to orbit around Donald, Mary and her brother were eventually written out of the wills, the empire, and the family story, as payback for their father’s perceived weakness and failures. This is all tragic in its own right, but it also makes Mary, who has been let down by the so-called adults in the room almost since her infancy, perfectly positioned to explain and translate what happens to otherwise high-functioning adults—her aunt Maryanne, a competent federal judge; the lawyers and accountants tasked with fulfilling Donald’s whims and hiding his failings; the sycophants and Republicans and evangelical Christians who support his campaign unquestioningly; and the officials who now populate the Senate, the Cabinet, and the Oval Office. All of them appear to be reasonably mentally sound. Yet they all cover for Donald, at the expense of real suffering and genuine human loss, just as the Trump clan ignored Freddy’s disintegration and death. Mary Trump’s childhood trauma has become America’s trauma, and she really wants to know how that came to be. Again.

The section of the book that has garnered the most attention is likely Mary’s claim that Trump cannot be evaluated for pathologies because he is “in the West Wing, essentially institutionalized” and that he has in fact “been institutionalized for most of his adult life. So there is no way to know how he would thrive, or even survive, on his own in the real world.” We are not used to seeing entities like the White House described in this way—a “very expensive and well-guarded padded cell”—as a means of protection for the broken man inside rather than as a platform from which a leader can change the world. And her ultimate point is that even a shattered psyche, buffered from the real world, can still do irreparable damage to it. But the most interesting assessments she offers are reserved for those inside the “institutions,” the people who might have saved us and certainly have not, from the nuclear family, to the Trump businesses, to New York’s bankers and powerful elites, to Bill Barr, Mike Pompeo, and Jared Kushner. They all knew and know that the emperor has no clothes, even as they devote their last shreds of dignity to effusive praise of his ermine trim and jaunty crown.

Mary Trump seems to answer the question of why they do this in a section late in the book about Donald Trump’s father, Fred Trump. In describing Fred’s growing realizing that his fair-haired boy, Donald, was a fraud, Mary explains that, yes, Fred himself was a master at fattening his wallet with taxpayer funds, committing tax fraud to benefit his children. (Mary admits she was the one who leaked the family tax information to the New York Times in 2018 for its blockbuster story.) But as it became clear that Donald had no real business acumen—as his Atlantic City casinos cratered and his father unlawfully poured secret funds into saving them—Mary realized that Fred also depended on the glittery tabloid success at which Donald excelled. Fred continued to prop up his son’s smoke-and-mirrors empire because, as Mary writes, “Fred had become so invested in the fantasy of Donald’s success that he and Donald were inextricably linked. Facing reality would have required acknowledging his own responsibility, which he would never do. He had gone all in, and although any rational person would have folded, Fred was determined to double down.”

Mary Trump’s words there could just as easily be true for John Kelly, Kellyanne Conway, John Bolton, Mitch McConnell, Susan Collins, or Melania Trump. And as Mary Trump is quick to observe, the sheer stuck-ness of his enablers means that Trump never, ever learns his lesson. Being cosseted, lied to, defended, and puffed up means that Donald Trump knows that, “no matter what happens, no matter how much damage he leaves in his wake, he will be OK.” He fails up, in other words, because everyone around him, psychologically normal beings all, ends up so enmeshed with his delusions that they must do anything necessary to protect them. Trump’s superpower isn’t great vision or great leadership but rather that he is so tiny. Taking him on for transactional purposes may seem like not that big a deal at first, but the moment you put him in your pocket, you become his slave. It is impossible to escape his orbit without having to admit a spectacular failure in moral and strategic judgment, which almost no one can stomach. Donald Trump’s emptiness is simply a mirror of the emptiness of everyone who propped him up. It’s that reflection that becomes unendurable. This pattern, as Mary writes, “guaranteed a cascade of increasingly consequential failures that would ultimately render all of us collateral damage.” Nobody, not even Mary, who signed on briefly to ghostwrite one of his books, ends up just a little bit beholden to Donald Trump and that includes his rapturous supporters who still queue up, maskless, to look upon his greatness. As she concludes, his sociopathy “reminds me that Donald isn’t really the problem at all.” That makes hers something other than the 15^th book about the fathoms-deep pathologies of Donald Trump: It is the first real reckoning with all those who “caused the darkness.”

Mary Trump is, among other things, a brisk and gifted writer, and she is a fact witness to, and also a victim of, a family that elevated a mediocre and vicious man, at the expense of justice, fairness, and truth. Her real beef is not with her uncle Donald, who has always been exactly as we have long known him to be; that’s why a smattering of new details about his business failures and meanness were never really the point of this book. We’ve read that book before. The perspective of this book is made possible exactly because Mary Trump was one of the first children to be written out of the will, cast out of the family, and denied the support and love that should have been hers, as a result of her father’s perceived failures. It is this—because she was ousted rather than being forced to remove herself—that allows her to see clearly why everyone else stuck around. And what she reveals is a devastating indictment of all the alleged adults who stick around Donald Trump, who came together to fail America, to leave vulnerable populations to fend for themselves, and who continue to lie and spin to pacify his ego. They do it because they can’t admit the payoff is never coming, and to save themselves from the embarrassment of having to admit they were catastrophically wrong.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/07/mary-trump-book-psychoanalysis-enablers.html?via=taps_top

 

Get used to history MAGAs, there's a lot more coming. (As if you cared.)

 

[DKW 86 7,419]

7 hours ago, homersapien said:

But not quite. What is new and surprising is also that Mary Trump, who has a Ph.D. in clinical psychology, has given us a granular portrait of Trump’s profound impairment: She says that her uncle has all nine clinical criteria for narcissism, although she insists that this diagnosis is only the tip of the psychological iceberg—he may also suffer from antisocial personality disorder, sociopathy, and/or dependent personality disorder, along with an undiagnosed learning disability that likely interferes with his ability to process information.

FINALLY. Homer, you have posted up some very very questionable pieces in this forum. But this is something I can believe and have no reason to question. She has spent REAL LIVE TIME with Trump.  She has had him "on the couch" so to speak. I have no question to believe that this true and in fact, AS I HAVE SAID TOO MANY TIMES before, I had a guttural reaction to eh man back in 1987 or so when he released his first "book." 

narcissism 
antisocial personality disorder
sociopathy
dependent personality disorder
undiagnosed learning disability that likely interferes with his ability to process information

I must have been able to feel some of that even back then. My issue with all this is that how did so many Americans, especially American Celebrities and Politicians not see this for almost 3o years? DJT was the toast of the Entertainment Industry for three decades. How did they not see it? Why was he allowed to become a celebrity while at the same time he was a collossally bad business man? 

Homey, this may be your best post ever...I mean that. This woman has real insight, not the drive by BS the For-Profit-Pop-Psych-People pedal...

[aubiefifty 16,747]

someone hand me a tissue i am overcome............lol

[I_M4_AU 7,789]

5 hours ago, DKW 86 said:

This woman has real insight, not the drive by BS the For-Profit-Pop-Psych-People pedal

Not saying what she has written is false, but the timing says otherwise.

[homersapien 11,357]

Trump proves the veracity of his niece's exposition on a daily basis:

 

Trump’s coronavirus blame game is part of a pattern from the White House

Over the past five days, the United States has suffered a worsening resurgence of coronavirus cases indicating that — after six months — the most powerful country in the world has made little progress in controlling the virus and that Americans may indefinitely remain its prisoners.

President Trump, meanwhile, has been largely MIA on a question most citizens expect their president to address: What does he plan to do now to better protect the public health and return the country to normalcy?

The American people heard little from their president over the weekend on the worrisome infections spreading throughout the South and West.

From Thursday to today, Trump apparently preferred to spend his time on other things. 

He wiped away the prison sentence of his convicted political adviser Roger Stone and golfed two days in a row at his Trump National Golf Club on the banks of the Potomac River. The president sent out dozens of tweets, including some that threatened 10-year prison sentences for protesters who defile federal monuments and statues, defended his border wall, and congratulated his Fox News booster Sean Hannity for a “big night” of viewer ratings on Thursday night, when Trump was his guest.

Trump has increasingly sidestepped responsibility for leading a coordinated federal response. 

That behavior fits a pattern in Trump's presidency in which the president seemingly has no interest in or patience for what he considers the boring work of governing, several of his former senior advisers say, speaking on the condition of anonymity. He was not fully engaged for the hard work of defusing the pandemic, including listening to panels of experts, sifting through scientific models and making hard choices to craft a whole-of-government response, an option not seriously considered.

 

Trump's attempts to contain the virus have always been tentative.

In early spring, as his advisers pushed the reluctant president to deem the virus a public health emergency, Trump tried marketing, taking to the White House lectern almost daily to talk about the “great” job his administration was doing to tackle the disease, despite a botched testing launch that put the country way behind the curve in containment.  Trump still routinely pans testing as a “double-edged sword,” arguing it only increases the number of confirmed cases and makes his administration “look bad,” while  simultaneously vowing an imminent vaccine. He then tried saddling governors with the responsibility of tamping down the crisis, while calling to “LIBERATE!” states that wouldn't move to reopen quickly enough. Now, he is saying schools should move to fully reopen this fall despite major pushback from local officials and teachers unions.

That’s come into sharp relief again in the past five days, as the rate of coronavirus infections is setting records, suggesting  America is back to square one in this health crisis. 

Coronavirus deaths are on the rise in every region of the country. As happened in early spring, the volume of new cases is rising so fast, particularly in the Sun Belt, that testing can’t keep up. Receiving rapid test results, quarantining the sick and controlling the virus's spread is proving nearly impossible. Several major school systems and colleges in California are retrenching on their plans to reopen this fall, and announced they will instead have online classes only for the time being. CEOs are preparing for employees to continue working remotely indefinitely after Labor Day, as well. 

The worsening pandemic cries out for concrete steps from the federal government. But Trump has stubbornly sought to shift the blame for the situation and sees himself as the victim of an unfortunate convergence of circumstances. 

Trump’s most recent fall guy is Anthony S. Fauci.

Though never entirely on the same page as his top infectious-disease specialist, the president appeared with Fauci at coronavirus task force briefings, and the two seemed to be communicating earlier in the crisis. But things have clearly changed between the two men, with Trump apparently viewing Fauci’s grim message about burgeoning cases and the dangers of reopening as a threat. In the midst of the most perilous public health threat in a century, the president hasn’t met with Fauci in over a month. The doctor slipped into the White House yesterday, however, to meet with Chief of Staff Mark Meadows as criticism of the administration's bashing of him intensified.

In the past five days, as the news has grown more dire and Fauci has refused to sugarcoat it, Trump and his allies have sought to cast Fauci as error-prone.

In his Thursday interview with Hannity, Trump criticized Fauci as a nice guy who has nevertheless “made a lot of mistakes.” By Monday, Trump’s souring on the doctor had become part of a larger concerted campaign within the White House. A senior White House official anonymously gave reporters opposition-research-style bullet points of comments Fauci made about the virus that were described as misleading or inaccurate. They included Fauci’s early advice that people who didn’t feel sick need not wear masks and should preserve the supply for medical workers, and Fauci typically cautioned the situation was evolving.

The White House list doesn’t mention Trump's repeated inaccurate and misleading comments about the virus and the government's response, including his claim the U.S. could reopen safely by Easter or his recommendation that people with covid-19 could get better by taking hydroxychloroquine or possibly by being treated with bleach or ultraviolet light. The list didn’t mention when Trump in January insisted the coronavirus was “totally under control” and would create only a few U.S. cases, or when he said the number of cases would “go down to zero.”

 “It’s going to disappear,” Trump said Feb. 28. “One day it’s like a miracle, it will disappear.”

The campaign of presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden on Monday attacked Trump’s effort to blame Fauci.

“Over 135,000 Americans have lost their lives and tens of millions have lost their jobs because Donald Trump spent the last six months disastrously mismanaging the worst public health crisis in a century, the whole time failing to heed the warnings and guidance of medical experts — particularly Dr. Fauci,” Biden campaign spokesman Andrew Bates said. 

So much of Trump’s response is part of the playbook he deployed during the first three years of his presidency. 

Trump finds governing tedious, several of his senior former advisers have said. He likes to make decisions on impulse, and later, if those decisions blow up in his face, he tends to blame others for making them.

Though Trump repeatedly praised his defense secretary Jim Mattis as one of his best Cabinet picks ever, he later concluded the four-star general was “overrated” after he resigned in protest of Trump’s decision to pull U.S. soldiers out of Syria. Trump made the decision on the fly during a phone call when Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan asked him to leave Syria. Mattis felt it was militarily unwise to exit the battlefield, which would just allow Islamic State factions to regain their strongholds. He also considered it unethical to leave America's Kurdish allies in danger, and inexplicable for Trump to grant this gift to Erdogan without any benefit to the United States.

When Trump was in Paris in November 2018 and didn’t want to go to a sacred memorial to fallen American soldiers in World War II, he asked his chief of staff John Kelly and another aide for options. They said he could blame his absence on weather; it would be difficult to clear the streets for his motorcade at the last minute and potentially worrisome to fly by helicopter. But when Trump got terrible press for skipping the event, with some critics asking if he didn’t want to get his hair wet, Trump blamed Kelly, saying he should have talked him into attending.

“He never apologizes,” said one former senior adviser who left the Trump administration. “It’s always somebody else’s fault. He can’t take responsibility for any decision.” 

This March, Trump blamed the rules and regulations from the Obama administration for his administration’s inability to test enough Americans for the virus to control its spread at a critical early stage. He didn’t mention that he and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, had feared that such rapid, emergency testing might be bad for the markets and the economy.

“I don't take responsibility at all,” Trump said.

Governing is boring, hard, uncertain. Blaming is infinitely easier.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/daily-202/2020/07/14/daily-202-trump-s-coronavirus-blame-game-is-part-of-a-pattern-from-the-white-house/5f0cda1588e0fa7b44f735b0/?itid=hp_hp-banner-main_daily202-whitehouse-10am%3Ahomepage%2Fstory-ans

 

[SaltyTiger 7,781]

14 hours ago, homersapien said:

Get used to history MAGAs, there's a lot more coming. (As if you cared.)

" anti Trump campaign book"

[ToraGirl 5,498]

2 hours ago, SaltyTiger said:

" anti Trump campaign book"

😉

She is free to write what she wants for the public to dissect. Timing, no mystery there. Motive? For her to know and anyone else to surmise. Her life makes me glad mine is relatively anonymous, and I'm sorry for any pain...real or perceived... she has experienced.

But with everything, worldview and what you support matters. (What, for me, is very different from who. Individuals tend to gain my ear where political movements tend to gain my rear...back, that is.)

I'm not sure anyone with an inherently diametrical worldview will ever change another's mind. But folks can post all day and try. Worldview is the lens that makes all the difference with our heads, even as our hearts yearn to find common ground wherever possible. 

Again...at least we get a choice in America. November 3 will be super interesting...but the sun will rise the next day no matter the outcome.

"According to tweets attributed to her, Mary Trump appears to have been feeling low on the day of her uncle's 2016 election.

An account bearing her name has a post that says: "This is one of the worst nights of my life."

Another tweet called the president's defeated rival, Hillary Clinton, "an extraordinary human being and public servant". 

The Twitter account's bio contains the Black Lives Matter hashtag, a gay pride flag and the pronouns she/her/hers."

BBC...

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bbc.com/news/amp/world-us-canada-53058811