Katie Roche's Blog

Book Review-"Too Much and Never Enough" by Mary Trump

Mary Trump’s Book, “Too Much And Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man”, was published last week. Mary Trump is the daughter of Donald Trump’s eldest brother, Fred Trump Jr, and his niece. She is also a clinical psychologist. Politically, she is not a Trump fan. So, like every other left-winger, I want to side with her, and say this is a great book. But it just isn’t.

The biggest problem with the book is that it tells us very few things we didn’t already know. The only big revelation that hadn’t been published long before is that Trump may have paid another student to take his entrance exams to get into the University of Pennsylvania. This isn’t much of a surprise- if anything, it makes a lot of sense in explaining how, Trump, who was never very academic, managed to get a place in an elite university. Aside from this, it feels as if it could have easily been written by someone who had never actually met Donald Trump. She writes about Trump’s failed casino business and his poor business skills, the details of which were already published in Trumped! By Jack O’Donnell 30 years ago. She tells us that he is narcistic, uncaring and sadistic which practically everyone describing Trump’s personality says. While it’s worth briefly discussing these topics, the way the book focuses on these gives the feeling that Mary Trump knows little of her family beyond what has been written about them elsewhere. Aside from being cruel and money-grabbing, what are the Trumps like as people? This book doesn’t give much of a sense of that.

The second problem is that Mary doesn’t seem to have the most reliable recollections of the past. Mary and her brother tried to sue Donald Trump and his siblings in the 2000s after her grandfather died. Fred Sr.- Mary’s grandfather and Donald Trump’s father, had five children. Mary’s father died in the 1980s of alcohol-related health problems. When Fred Sr. died in 1999, his assets were shared between the four surviving siblings, while his grandchildren each received $200,000. Mary felt that she and her brother should have received her father’s share of the estate instead of just getting the same money as her cousins. She tried to sue her aunts and uncles, claiming they had tricked Fred Sr. into changing the will for their benefit.

But it doesn’t quite make sense. Fred Sr. is consistently described as cruel. He had an especially low opinion of Fred Jr. and his children. The problem is, if you were trying to make the case that Fred Sr.’s surviving children had made him change the will, you would have to show that the action was totally out of character to do such a thing. Based on Mary’s account, it sounds completely believable that he would change the will of his own volition. Donald did try to get Fred Sr. to sign a will that made him in control of the whole estate, but Fred refused to sign it. And Fred did go on to be diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. But in 1989, a year before the will was written, Fred had threatened to disown her, perceiving her to be lazy and greedy. Toward the end of this paragraph, she states that he had been suffering from dementia for a while when he said this. But in 1990, when the will was written, Fred Sr. was still very active in the business and regularly handled large sums of money. Indeed, the infamous casino chip bailout, where Fred Trump tried to save Donald’s failing casino business by purchasing gambling chips and never using them- happened in the same year the will was written.

When she describes Fred’s later life, he is wicked when it suits her to be, and at the same time, is too confused to understand what’s going on, when it fits her agenda. In 1990, Fred is apparently too demented to understand what he was doing when he rewrote his will, but still lucid enough to be credited with making tens of millions of dollars for Trump Management and for bailing out Donald’s failing casino business. Mary is never clear about the timeline of events, so it makes it difficult to establish when Fred’s cognitive decline began.

Mary's self-serving memory brings us to the third issue with this book. As Chris Taylor in Mashable notes, Mary lives in a little bubble of privilege. Imagine you found out you were going to inherit $200,000 from a relative you didn’t like. How would you feel? Ecstatic? Elated? Overjoyed? Or would you feel disappointed? Would you even go as far as to describe being greeted with this information as “bad news”, or refer to this sum as “nothing”? If you’re Mary Trump, that’s exactly how you’d react to this situation. Interestingly, Mary Trump never actually tells us the sums of money involved in her book. Furthermore, some of the “abusive” behaviours she describes in Fred Sr. include making his children walk to school and take public transport to the city. Things that most children from families that aren’t incredibly rich have to do. As well, when describing her father’s financial difficulties, she mentions that he was able to purchase aeroplanes and boats, proving Fred Sr’s point about his poor business skills. She doesn’t appreciate how much she actually has. Or that her family don’t actually owe her anything.

Overall, the book was a disappointment. It had been built up as a damming take-down of Donald Trump, employing both Mary’s personal connections to him, along with her insights as a psychologist. It did not deliver that. However, the whole situation reminds us how thin-skinned the Trumps are. Instead of fighting the publication (which we all knew wasn’t going to succeed), why weren’t they smarter about fighting it? They could have put their side across, which actually doesn’t show Mary or her father in the best light. And, if it hadn’t have gone to court, the book probably wouldn’t have gotten the good sales it did. It is a prime example of the Streisand effect.

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