TOO MUCH AND NEVER ENOUGH, a fair and balanced view of a deeply dysfunctional family

TOO MUCH AND NEVER ENOUGH: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man
MARY L. TRUMP PhD
Simon & Schuster
$28.00 hardcover, $14.99 ebook editions, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: 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, 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 first-hand witness to countless holiday meals and family 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 re-gifting 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.

I CHECKED THIS EBOOK OUT OF MY LOCAL LIBRARY. USE YOUR PUBLIC LIBRARIES, FOLKS!

My Review: First and foremost, this book is *NOT* a takedown of 45. It is *NOT* a cash-grab by an angry, estranged niece whose greed was stoked by envy. Sorry haters, Dr. Mary Trump outflanked you and wrote her own family's story.

It is the story of Fred Trump's family from the viewpoint of someone who, despite not being welcomed within it because her father needed to be himself, still was there inside the bunker until her father's death. A childhood spent among people like the Trumps is not a healthy childhood, and Dr. Trump clearly felt the miasma of wrongness that permeated The House (as her grandparents' monumentally ugly Queens home was referred to in the family).

Trumpshack in all its straight-from-the-factory glory.
These are formative memories, even though the occupants can't see the wrongness from within they leave their scars. Freddy Trump, Mary's father, wasn't someone who did a lot of sharing with his youngest child. But that did not prevent her from making memories, with or without him in them, that included all the extended family, aunts and uncles all.

It is the memory of a person whose entire life was formed by bad parents, her own as well as each of theirs. It is the analytical conclusions of a trained psychologist whose degree is from a highly regarded school. It is also chilling, infuriating, and deeply, deeply saddening to read.

Freddy Trump never got a break; he died before his life developed meaning and long after he stopped caring about it. Fred, father of the Devil's Brood, was a tyrannical, withholding man without a shred of empathy or a trace of capacity to experience, still less express, emotion. Mary Anne Trump, illegal Scottish immigrant, was useless and indifferent as a mother or grandmother.

And there is no doubt that 45 was formed in this nuclear reactor to be exactly who he is. Mary Trump, future psychologist, had a balcony seat to the process and tells us exactly what happened on the occasions she was present. This is not sensationalized or presented as a bid for pity. Dr. Trump made a concerted effort to tell us what happened *then* contextualize it on a psychological level.

I didn't want to read another hatchet job on 45. Of course I despise him. I don't need more fuel for that binfire (started as a typo...became what I really meant!). I do, however, need to have some context, some sense of *why* this catastrophe is unfolding. Dr. Mary Trump told me what I wanted to know.

The seeds of the present are always in the past.