Horror clouds every page of Mary Trump's book about her Uncle Donald [View all]
Mary Trump’s book about her Uncle Donald is dark. Right from the get-go, when it begins with this feel-good epigraph from “Les Miserables”: If the soul is left in darkness, sins will be committed.
Already notorious, “Too Much and Never Enough” is Donald Trump’s story, written by his niece, a clinical psychologist and Trump family dissident. It‘s being released this month after a failed effort, nominally by Donald’s brother Robert, to get a court to stop its publication.
You can see why President Trump doesn’t want anyone to read this thing. It gives the lie to many of his most cherished myths about himself, including the howler that he’s self-made.
According to the book, Uncle Donald’s ineptitude goes so deep it’s hard to fathom. Mary reports that one of his sisters, casting around for something to give Donald credit for, proposed his five bankruptcies.
That kind of revelation produces a snicker from a reader like me, but that’s all that passes for levity here. Horror clouds every page. I expected to encounter some seamy stuff in any history of the Trump family’s fortune. After all, the money comes from brothels, tax evasion, bankrupt casinos, sketchy real-estate deals and a more or less stolen election.
But I also expected at least a little gritty urban romance. If not the sumptuous passions of “The Godfather,” the Trump saga would — I hoped — contain a moment or two of “Sopranos”-style wit.
Nothing doing.
The president’s life story is narrow, provincial and grim — a joyless grind of fraud and cruelty evoked not by the gruesome glitz of Trump Tower but by the dreary Trump apartment Mary lived in as a child with her mother and father, Linda and Freddy Trump. Sloppily installed air conditioners rotted the drywall, and no amount of plastic sheeting could keep out the bitter wind; Trump Management, run by Freddy’s father Fred and brother Donald, refused to fix it.
https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2020-07-09/mary-trump-donald-trump-too-much-and-never-enough
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