Trump has had a busy week of denial. He loudly proclaims that the polls are rising and everything is great, even as his standing in the polls continue to dwindle while he lays off his campaign manager and replaces him with the guy Chris Christie fingered over Bridgegate. Meanwhile, in the best style of a dictator in a banana republic, the Banana Republican dispatched unidentified soldiers to Portland, Oregon, to perform the vital task of arresting people who were walking home from a peaceful protest or just shooting them in the head. Let’s keep in mind that the party that is supposed to strongly advocate state rights is siding with Trump while the mayor of Portland and the governor of Oregon want these anonymous fatigue-clad kidnappers to stop running0 wild, grabbing people at random and throwing them into the backs of unmarked grey passenger vans. There are rumors that Portland is a test case for this parade of neo-Nazi thugs who, in supposedly showing up to defend American landmarks, are trampling all over the civil rights of Americans who committed the foul crime of complaining.
But let’s take a break from that to focus on the release of a brand new book, “Too Much and Never Enough,” written by Mary Trump who has come to despise her surname because of who it is associated with. This book broke S&S records, proving the ultimate example of the Streisand effect as the Donald’s attempts to shut down the book’s release kicked interest in it through the stratosphere. I reserved a copy at my local Barnes & Noble and received a confirming email that said they would hold it for three days. As we were driving there on the Tuesday of its release, they called to inform me that they had changed their minds and would only hold it for 24 hours, screw the email. At 950,000 copies sold, it set a new record for Simon & Schuster for day-of-release sales, topping the snooze-fest from John Bolton that only came out a few weeks earlier.
Although the news has been focused mostly on what Mary (I’m just going to refer to her by her first name to avoid confusion; it’s not like I know her) has said about her uncle, the book is largely not about that. It begins and ends with talking about “the world’s most dangerous man” (whom I could have sworn was James Bond, but okay) yet much of the book focuses on Donald’s older brother, Freddy Trump, and his absolutely horrendous relationship with Fred, the pater familias of the Trump family, whose demeanor and personality was the absolute prototype for Donald. A real estate developer with no record of army service and an aversion to paying taxes, Fred Trump expected his son Freddy to follow him into the family business. When Freddy developed an interest in flight and became a pilot for TWA, his father continued to relentlessly denigrate him, dismissing him as a bus driver in the sky. It drove him to drink, which eventually killed him.
Meanwhile Donald learned from his example. Seeing that his older brother’s actions got him into trouble with his father, Donald did everything he could to do the exact opposite. He was also a relentless bully, taking his younger brother’s toys and hiding them or threatening to destroy them, behaving like a total slob and routinely ignoring everything his mother instructed him to do. Indeed, Trump was so accustomed to being on top all the time, that during one dinner when he was being overwhelmingly obnoxious, his younger brother dumped a bowl of mashed potatoes on his head. The family roared with laughter; it was the first time in his life that Trump had ever been humiliated. It wounded him so deeply that years later, when the family reconvened at the White House to celebrate an aunt’s birthday, references was made to the mishap and President Trump sat there with his arms folded and scowled deeply like a wounded child. Six decades had passed and he still hadn’t gotten over it.
An entire book of psychological essays have been written about Trump, but Mary—a doctor of advanced psychological studies—has known him literally her whole life and has seen him behind the scenes and unguarded. So she may well be the most qualified individual to analyze the (dare I use the word) mind of the president. She notes that he does indeed display the nine classic symptoms of narcissism, but she believes his diagnosis goes far deeper than that. That indeed the only way to determine just how screwed up he is is to subject him to a battery of tests, which naturally he would never sit still for.
The book was written recently enough to include observations about the pandemic and Trump’s overall inabilities. Toward the end she writes:
“Though Donald’s fundamental nature hasn’t changed, since his inauguration the amount of stress he’s under HAS changed dramatically. It’s not the stress of the job, because he isn’t doing the job—unless watching TV and tweeting insults count. It’s the effort to keep the rest of us distracted from the fact he knows nothing—about politics, civics, or simple human decency—that requires an enormous amount of work. For decades, he has gotten publicity, good and bad, but he’s rarely been subject to close scrutiny, and he’s never faced significant opposition. His entire sense of himself and the world is being questioned.”
Even more enlightening was this observation which goes back to Trump’s very core:
“Donald continues to exist in the dark space between fear of indifference and fear of failure that led to his brother’s destruction. It took forty-two years for the destruction to be complete, but the foundations were laid early and played out before Donald’s eyes as he experienced his own trauma. The combination of those two things—what he witnessed and what he experienced—both isolated him and terrified him. The role that fear played in his childhood and the role it plays now cannot be overstated. And the fact that fear continues to be an overriding emotion for him speaks to the hëll that must have existed inside the house six decades ago.”
It is made clear in the book that the trauma of his relationship with his loveless father and witnessing the tragedy of his older brother destroyed whatever sense of caring or empathy Trump may have had. If that lack of empathy were not literally costing tens of thousands of Americans their lives, we could look upon Trump distantly as a sad, tragic tale of how bad parenting can completely annihilate someone’s hope of a happy life. The depressing truth is that Trump is someone who has spent his entire life never being loved because he has no idea how to love someone else. That’s because the first rule of love is simple: the other person’s welfare has to be more important than your own. For Trump, that feeling is an impossibility. He puts himself above everyone and everything else, and therefore cannot feel love the way most of us do.
If he weren’t running the country into the ground—if he were just somewhere on the outside living in misery—we could afford to feel sorry for him.
But we can’t.
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