Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man by Mary L. Trump

Perhaps the most qualified person to assess Trump, not only a close relative but a clinical psychologist.  One wonders how could someone like Trump be allowed to lead the most powerful nation in the world, to have his finger on the nuclear button.  One could argue that the position of President isn’t really that powerful, that there are far more powerful people in the world, and they really run the show.  The position of President is much like the title of king or queen in England.  Others might argue that his reality TV show stardom gave him unprecedented popular support which (excuse the pun) trumped the establishment powers of Washington, that an uncouth, loudmouthed, hot-headed, unpredictable jerk could get enough popular support to irk the powers.  I think there’s truth to both.  Those who really do run the show would never have chosen Trump by themselves, not because he’s rude and crass, but rather because he’s his own boss.  He answers to nobody but himself.  Recent past Presidents have all been sycophants who are good at pleasing their bosses.  They’re spineless servants to the real power. 

The democratic process is largely a theater to give the masses the impression that they actually run the show, but those in power have so much sway with the news media that they get an outsized voice in who gets the most positive media attention.  It was supposed to be Jeb Bush, but none of the run-of-the-mill sycophants could stand up to the sheer charisma and independent-minded charisma of Trump.  Therein lies the problem.  People hate spineless sycophants, and if they don’t have a better choice, they’ll vote for them, but if someone like Trump comes along, the spineless sycophants don’t have a chance.  Trump also lucked out in that the 2016 pool of Republican candidates was perhaps the most shallow and mosquito-ridden in recent memory with the limp, impotent likes of Ted Cruz, Ben Carson, Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, and the remarkably diluted and uncharismatic version of Ron Paul, his son.  If any of these louts had walked into a casting office for the role of US President, they would have been laughed out of the room.

But someone like Trump can become President, because he is pretty much like everyone of those who truly rule the country and the world.  He acts like a petty, narcissistic, megalomaniac, sociopath who is obsessed with power, wealth, and status.  Unfortunately, the modern world has an unusual natural selection process for the richest, most powerful people on the planet.  Those who cannot bring themselves to cut the wages of their employees, to cut the costs of their operations by substituting quality for barely passable garbage, to spend all their time in the office, simply self-select themselves out of the race to the top of the wealth and power pyramid.  In other words, good people with good morals and values have little interest in accumulating huge wealth and power.  You can say, it’s not in their DNA.  So what is left? 

The ones who are left are people who have no problem cutting wages, substituting cheap garbage into their products and services, moving American jobs overseas, cheating on their taxes, hiding their wealth in trusts, and hiring lobbyists to rig the system in their favor.  Unfortunately, in our modern world, they rise to the top, and it is preposterous to think that there is anyone else at the very top of this corrupt and sick pyramid scheme.  However, while they identify with Trump, and he is cut from the same cloth, just like mob bosses, they know that the best subordinates are cowering, spineless sycophants and not people like themselves: ruthless, cunning, narcissistic, and cruel.  Trump got away with it, because of his surprising and not-so-surprising popular support.  While those in power breathed a sigh of relief when Trump took office and didn’t actually drain the swamp but refilled it with the same slime, they also breathed a sigh of relief when he was voted out of office and a true spineless, career sycophant will take his place. 

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The book is more a story about Freddy, Donald’s older brother, than about Donald.  It’s an incredibly tragic story about a cold, narcissistic father who cruelly favors Donald over Freddy, because he views Freddy as weak, sensitive, and not completely interested in carrying on his business.  At one point, Freddy leaves his father’s business to pursue an airline pilot career, but tragically can’t seem to completely divorce himself from his father’s influence and bullying.  Instead of enjoying the freedom of independence and being his own man, doing what he loves to do for a living, he descends into drunkenness and undermines his flying career being forced to resign for his drinking.  He crawls back to his father who now relishes in a brutal game of revenge where he puts him up in one of his housing complexes and on the bottom of the repair list leaving his bedroom freezing in the winter.  This is remarkable and incredible cruelty. 

I remember a story about a couple of siblings.  A brother was spoiled by the parents and the sister was abused, and you would expect the brother to feel remorse and guilt, but quite the contrary, the brother blamed the sister for her poor treatment.  And you can’t really blame him.  How could you possibly reconcile in your mind that both your preferential treatment was undeserved and your sister’s maltreatment was undeserved?  It would drive you nuts.  To believe that the parents who showed you so much love and adoration were actually unjustifiably cruel and abusive to your sister is incomprehensible.  It’s like one day waking up to find out that the country you love and adore, the country that has allowed you to become a wealthy, successful person, is also the country that mass incarcerated black people and kills people overseas without trial.  You can’t come to terms with that, so inevitably, you blame black people for being in prison and foreign people for being probable terrorists. 

Perhaps in the back of Donald’s mind, he knows that his father unjustifiably mistreated his brother, but this would also be a great source of confusion and frustration.  It’s much easier to believe that he deserved his father’s positive attention and support and his brother was completely to blame for being weak, sensitive, and disobedient.  Of course, the weakness was not in defying his father but actually in Freddy’s incessant desire to please him.  So many idiots think of Donald as some alpha male who mocks the weak, but they simply don’t get it.  People who bully, mock the weak, and are tone deaf to their own emotions and ignore their own weaknesses are actually tremendously fragile and weak.  It’s all a show, theater.  Strong, robust people don’t need to put on a show.  They’re not afraid of sometimes appearing uncertain, weak, sensitive, etc.  Just like a straight person who supports gay rights.  They’re not afraid of being called gay for supporting gay rights, but someone who questions their sexuality would never dare support gay rights and in fact would attack gay people as some perverse theater to try to prove that they’re not gay. 

So often, when we grow up with passive-aggressive parents, we think that someone who is not aggressive is being passive and someone who is not passive is being aggressive.  We can’t wrap our minds around assertive people who are neither passive nor aggressive.  Often times, it is the father who adopts the aggressive posture while the mother adopts the passive posture, but in reality, the father is perhaps 60% aggressive and 40% passive while the mother is 60% passive and 40% aggressive. 

One of the most interesting things is how Donald is attracted to autocrats, namely Putin and Kim Jong-Un.  He probably sees his father in Putin, a cold, sinister tough guy who never shows his emotions.  He probably sees himself in Kim Jong-Un, a faithful son who has sacrificed his own interests and life to serve in his father’s footsteps.  He gets them.  He doesn’t get any single other person on this planet.  All the ‘soft’ democratic leaders of the world confuse him.  He doesn’t get consensus, collaboration, and cooperation.  In his small mind, it’s all about dominance, intimidation, and winner-take-all.  If you’re not being aggressive, you’re being passive, and in his mind, passive people get abused, exploited, bullied, and driven to alcoholism and death.

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One thing a lot of people misunderstand about rich kids is that they think life is a bowl of cherries.  They live in a nice house in the nice part of town, they go to a nice school, they wear nice clothes, they get ridiculously outlandish presents, they have jobs lined up in their parent’s companies, etc.  First of all, they forget that when you’re born into wealth, your normal is not everyone else’s normal.  You take everything for granted, and everything below that is horrifying poverty.  Second, their parent(s) use money as a weapon.  When you’re obedient, you get nice things.  When you’re disobedient, you get to live like everyone else in squalor.  This is an incredibly horrible trap.  They don’t know what it’s like to live middle class much less in poverty.  To them, it’s a fate worse than death. 

For the rest of us, we know that while poverty sucks, it’s not a daily misery, and we adapt.  For them, it’s unimaginable punishment and their imagination is the worst part of it.  For us, we’ve lived in cockroach-infested, small shitholes, and we survived, so losing everything and going back to that isn’t the end of the world.  We can work our way back.  For them, it would be a death sentence.  Likewise, most Americans don’t know true poverty like Third World poverty.  They don’t know life without electricity, gas, plumbing, insulated walls, and being relatively free of serious crime and the possibility of rape and sex trafficking.  Imagine your father telling you, if you don’t do everything that I tell you to do, I’m sending you off to Somalia, and you’re going to live in a hut without plumbing, and every day, your neighbor, who’s a pimp, is going to try to pimp you out.

You also have the rich parents, like Warren Buffett, who feel that wealth is corrupting, so despite being a billionaire, he doesn’t gift his children much.  There are many stories of rich kids stealing things, because their parents like to think that growing up in poverty will toughen them up just as it did for them.  What they fail to appreciate is that when you send your kids to a school full of rich kids whose parents gift them expensive cars and trips to France, your kids will feel inadequate.  Yes, if you sent them to a public school in a poor neighborhood, they would fit right in, but you’re sending them to a school full of rich kids with very nice things, so inevitably, your kids will wind up feeling inadequate and steal things from their wealthier peers or just shoplift.

It’s also truly a dilemma for rich parents.  If you don’t gift your kids, they’ll feel inadequate compared to their peers, but if you do gift them, it’s probably conditional on them pleasing you, in which case, you have no idea if they’re behaving well because they love you and want to truly please you or because they want a new iPhone or videogame console.  Money cheapens everything.  One possible solution is to keep your wealth a secret from your kids, which means not sending them to a fancy private school but perhaps just living in a nice part of town with a good public school.  It would also mean not showing off your wealth with a nice car and too exotic or fancy a vacation. 

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According to the author, the notion that Donald was a self-made Manhattan real estate mogul, perhaps with a little seed funding from his dad, was a fiction, a tale Fred manufactured to prop up his son as a self-made genius.  It is also quite probable that a federal lawsuit against them for discrimination against blacks gave Donald the requisite exposure to succeed in the Manhattan real estate market.  Undoubtedly, Donald had skills, and this is an oft argument for billionaires.  Nobody is saying they’re half-wits who could barely get through working a shift at McDonald’s.  What people are saying is that there are countless people smarter than them, harder worker and more skilled, who only make a few million in life.  Getting to the billion-dollar level takes both hard work and mostly luck as well as cheating the taxman.  As I learned in the book Super-hubs, one person inevitably gets ahead of the crowd, and often by chance, and once they get ahead of the crowd, everyone notices them, and that in-and-of itself adds to their notoriety which fuels interest in investing and helping them.  Gradually, they become a super-hub.  Just like an up-and-coming famous singer or actress, once they gain sufficient fame, everyone wants to work with them, and this is where they go from just successful to superstardom.  Fred had already made important connections in the political world to get favorable deals, but news about their federal discrimination lawsuit shot them into the stratosphere of fame in Manhattan needed to become a big player there. 

The author also reveals all the tax deals, interest-free loans, and FHA support they received which supports the idea that government is not in the business of helping the public as much as they are in the business of helping out the rich and creating the impression that they are helping out the poor.

* * *

It is shocking how horribly Fred treated his son Freddy.  It seems to make no sense.  Freddy is Fred’s blood, why on Earth would he treat him so horribly?  It reminds me of any cult or criminal group where you always need a scapegoat, an example.  A drill sergeant will always pick on one person to make an example of.  They will relentlessly mock and punish them or set them up to be punished by their peers.  The purpose of this is to instill fear in everyone else.  It reminds me of the videos of people using stuffed animals to scare their pets.  They take the stuffed animal and try to feed it, but they shake the stuffed animal’s head, so they punch and smack the stuffed animal around.  Then they try to feed their pet, and their pet gladly eats the food.  Likewise, when you see an authority figure mistreat and abuse someone, this is all theater to instill fear in you, to make you think, if you disobey, this might be you next.  Freddy served just this purpose.  There was a point where Freddy tried to return to the family business, but that wasn’t enough.  Imagine being Donald and watching your brother getting such horrific mistreatment.  There was no way Donald would ever disobey his father and risk winding up like poor, tormented Freddy. 

What Fred saw in Donald was not just an obedient son but rather someone with a serious character flaw.  Why is that important?  When you happen to be running a company that uses clandestine tactics and political favors and may often be conducting criminal activities, the last thing you want is an heir with a conscience.  Perhaps worse than just being independent-minded, he saw in Freddy a man with a conscience who didn’t want to hurt people and abuse the system, someone who saw the bigger picture in life, enjoying it, sharing, helping others.  Fred saw himself in Donald, someone who acted like a sociopath, someone who only cared about himself and winning, someone who was willing to bend, maybe break the rules to get the job done. 

Similarly, in the outlaw world of modern finance, what bosses are looking for is not necessarily merely a good salesman or skilled quant, but rather, someone with character flaws.  So you take them out to strip clubs, give them a line of coke, ply them with booze, and hire some escorts and see how they respond.  Are they shocked and repulsed or are they having the time of their lives?  If they are shocked and repulsed, you get rid of them.  Who needs these straight-lace nerds to go reporting your activities to the FTC?  This is one reason why there’s so much discrimination against women in finance.  How many women do you think you could take to a strip club and have them snort coke off hookers?  If they are partying it up and breaking the law happily, there you have a sociopath willing to sacrifice their morals for a good time.  Not to say that women aren’t willing to commit crimes to get ahead, but it seems they’re much more likely to blow the whistle and not identify with the whole fraternity, boy’s locker-room bullshit where women are often objectified as living sex toys.

* * *

Near the end, after Fred dies, we learn that the author’s family has been mostly left out of the will, although, they continue to receive the family healthcare and apparently shares from other family sources.  It appears that they bargain away those shares in exchange for some cash settlement contesting the will, but that is not made clear.  You can then assume that this entire book is the author’s way of getting even with the rest of the family, which it probably is.  The author has no reason to be nice to the rest of the family.  They were supposed to receive 20% of their grandfather’s estate, the author estimated at over a billion dollars, before the grandfather decided for whatever reasons to leave them out.  That 20% was for her father, Freddy, but after Freddy died, it should have gone to his wife and kids, but Fred decided otherwise.  It’s shocking that the author would ask the family attorney for advice in hiring a lawyer to contest the will.  It sounds like the family attorney suggested a dimwit who probably would have experienced a bizarre conflict of interest fighting the family lawyer after being recommended by that same family lawyer! 

It’s remarkable that someone who has been such a failure in business, someone who exhibits such an immature mentality can become leader of the most powerful nation in the world.  But then you think of all the other folks who have led countries, Adolf Hitler, notably, an Army corporal who suddenly finds himself telling generals how to run a war.  Obviously, no single person can do everything alone.  Hitler had just as many economic aids helping him reconstruct the German economy as he had logistics aids helping him get Jews to concentration camps.  What is shocking is how we allow a single, unstable person to have so much power over so many people and resources. 

Of course, fortunately, we live in a democracy where we can vote Trump out of office.  Keep in mind, of course, that Hitler came to power democratically and simply got rid of the democracy.  For all our checks and balances and background checks and media scrutiny, the people can still overrule that to put a truly dangerous person in a position of incredible power.  But when you think about it, there are no such checks and balances for billionaires, and they have an outsized influence on the economy and the nation.  Who voted for Bezos or Musk?  Why should they have so much power and wealth to change the world in their image?  You could argue that Steve Jobs was a narcissistic maniac.  Ought there be a check and balance on billionaires? 

* * *

If what the author conveys is true or even half true, it’s shocking.  Instead of a self-made billionaire expert dealmaker, Donald Trump comes across more as a brilliant actor, someone who played that part while actually it was his father Fred who was the expert dealmaker, mostly through using political connections, who made a billion dollars that was eventually eroded by subsidizing Donald’s huge business losses.  Fred had made Donald believe that he could do no wrong, and he sold the world on the idea that his son was the brains behind the operations and self-made.  Donald appears clueless as to how to actually make a profit.  He simply wants to make very big, very public deals in order to keep media attention on himself.  Whether they are designed to make a profit or not doesn’t seem anywhere as important as how big the deals are so he can perpetuate his popularity and fame.  Interestingly, this is corroborated in an interview I watched on Donald Trump in a documentary that is now playing on Netflix.  Donald admits that the bigger the deal, the more attention it gets, and he’s a whore for media attention.  He equates it with self-worth.

Media attention is intoxicating, perhaps as much or more so than wealth.  When you’re walking down the street and people are virtually worshipping you, you start to believe the hype.  You start to believe that you are truly special, truly valuable, and especially if you have low self-esteem, this is like a dream come true.  For the first time in your life, people are telling you that you are not worthless, that you are actually the best thing that ever happened to them that day, just taking a photo with you made their day, perhaps their year.  Like any drug, you want more and more of it, and like any drug, the high gets less and less.  Who cares if it’s positive or negative attention.  If you can’t get media attention through positive means, why not negative.  Trump had to put two and two together when he divorced Ivana and got perhaps the most media attention he’d ever gotten for a development project.  Dumping Marla was probably more about getting another bump of media attention than being tired of Marla. 

* * *

Not to apologize or diminish the terrible things Donald Trump has done while in office, but I would argue that at least he never got us into a new  war since Carter and he avoided war with Iran which seemed to be where everyone in Washington seemed to be headed.  But being a well-qualified bureaucrat and sycophant isn’t exactly the greatest thing either as a President, as they seem to be equally cornered into perpetuating policies that kill people and hurt our country in the long run.  While Obama did reduce the number of extrajudicial illegal drone assassinations, I would consider Trump’s administration considerably better than George W Bush who allowed Rumsfeld and Cheney free rein to run the country and invade Iraq.  At least Trump was smart enough not to have a Rumsfeld and Cheney telling him how to run the country and which countries to bomb. 

As bad as he was, it’s extraordinary how the left has vilified and satirized him so much more than they did with George W Bush, almost as if to say that while they hate the right, what they hate even more is a populist outsider on the right.  Their vitriol was just echo chamber preaching to the choir, but I feel it actually backfired as the right were in need of something, anything to piss off and annoy the coastal elite left, and they found it.  The worse the left squirmed, the more the right celebrated Trump who appeared to be the only one listening to the countless alienated, impoverished rural folk in flyover country.  Never mind that he looked down upon them and only used them for his own gains, they equally used him for their own gain in retaliating against the left and the leftist media which often mocked them as illiterate, inbred country bumpkins deserving of no voice in America.  And of course, the left and right media will never reconcile and propose uniting the country, because a divided country in turmoil keeps people tuned into the news more than a united one, constructively working together.  Whether you like it or not, there will be more Trumps to come.