The real reason Mary Trump’s book is so devastating to Donald Trump
UFO skeptic Robert Sheaffer tells of the sobering effect of being physically on the scene where an interplanetary visitor allegedly landed. The pure ordinariness of the surroundings kills much of the work done by the imagination. There are no mists, no darkening swamps, no skeletons of clutching, leafless trees bending and creaking in the wind, just an ordinary, daylit American scene. The difference between the canvas painted by the imagination and the image photographed by reality can be both shocking and intensely demystifying.
Unlike many idolatrous Trump disciples who carry sacred, messianic icons of an imagined Donald Trump around in their wee little heads, Mary Lea Trump was actually there. And, like the reporter on the ground as opposed to the worshipper from afar, she reports what she saw with the intellect of a trained clinical psychologist with a PhD. It’s all in her new book, “Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man.”
The picture that emerges from Mary Trump’s manifestly laser-sharp mind is one that is far more messy than messianic, distinctly more mange than manger. Sorry to let you down, Trump lovers, but Donald Trump’s antecedents are every bit as tawdry and disreputable as I and others have guessed over the years. He is what we always said he was, a fake hero, a phoney, a lying, manipulating, hateful little loser from the very beginning. Donald Trump is a piece of crap, and that is exactly how he started life. As a piece of crap.
That’s how his niece Mary L. Trump tells it, and she was there and you weren’t. She was in, as it were, the womb where it happened. It’s time to learn some lessons about what Donald Trump is really like — and it isn’t pretty.
What emerges from her book is that Donald, from the start, was motivated by cruelty and spiteful jealousy, misogyny, bigotry and insecurity, so much insecurity in fact that he had no confidence in his own native abilities. And so he cheated — at everything. He even used the family money to bribe someone else to take his high school Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) for him, so he could gain admission to a college that he wasn’t qualified to attend. For Donald, cheating became a way of life.
The image that emerges from the book is one of an oafish vulgarian, intellectually limited and so inept at business that his father had to constantly step in to save him from himself. His attitude toward his own family is characterised by cruelty and crass, inappropriate conduct. “Holy shit, Mary, you’re stacked!” is what the 48 year old Trump told his 29 year old niece when he first saw her in a bathing suit.
Dr. Trump also notes that of the nine diagnostic criteria for narcissism, her uncle Donald Trump satisfies them all — and then some. For example, he also meets the criteria for antisocial personality disorder, which in its most severe form is generally considered sociopathy. “The fact is,” Dr. Trump writes, “Donald’s pathologies are so complex and his behaviors so often inexplicable that coming up with an accurate and comprehensive diagnosis would require a full battery of psychological and neurophysical tests that he’ll never sit for.”
The best parts about this demystifying book are, first, it’s going to ruin much of Donald’s fun. Trump loves to lie about what a child prodigy he was and how brilliant a student he was. Now he will carry around in the back of his mind the certain knowledge that many in his audience read Mary Trump’s book and they will all know better. (His own elder sister, retired judge Maryanne Trump Barry, scoffed at Donald’s presidential run, calling him “a clown” while poking fun at his five bankruptcies.)
Second, the book is going to further hurt Trump’s chances for re-election. At a time when his chances are fading fast, the book represents another ten penny nail in his considerable titanium political coffin. And we can’t have too many of those nails. I cannot think of a more fitting end for this child raping, murdering monster, than for him to be brought down by someone who actually knows him for who and what he is. And, as ever, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.