Too Much and Never Enough

 

Mary Trump, “Too Much and Never Enough,” Kindle Edition, 2020, ??? pp.

Mary L. Trump holds a PhD from the Derner Institute of Advanced Psychological Studies and taught graduate courses in trauma, psychopathology, and developmental psychology. She lives with her daughter in New York.  This book is a portrait of Donald J. Trump and the toxic family that made him, Mary L. Trump, a trained clinical psychologist and Donald’s only niece, tells the dystopian history of their family in order to explain how her uncle became the man who now threatens the world’s health, economic security and social fabric.

 Author Mary Trump spent much of her childhood at her grandparents’ house in New York, where Donald and his four siblings grew up. She describes a nightmare of traumas, destructive relationships and a tragic combination of neglect and abuse. She explains how specific events and general family patterns created the deranged man who currently occupies the Oval Office, including the strange and harmful relationship between Fred Trump and his two oldest sons, Fred Jr. and Donald.

My Notes:

Location 1432-1449:  In 1973, the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division sued Donald and my grandfather for violating the 1968 Fair Housing Act by their rental practices.  It was one of the largest federal housing discrimination suits ever brought, and the notorious attorney Roy Cohn offered to help.  Cohn was embraced by a certain segment of the New York elite and hired by a diverse pool of clients such as Rupert Murdoch, John Gotti, Alan Dershowitz, and the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York.  In any event, there was no admission of wrongdoing, but they did have to change their rental practices to avoid discrimination. Even so, both Cohn and Donald considered it a win because of all the press coverage.

Location 1665:  Grandpa Fred’s treatment of my father had always served as an object lesson to his other children—a warning.

Location 1822:  At my Dad’s funeral, (Mary was 16) I caught up with my grandfather to make one final plea. “Grandpa,” I said, “we can’t bury Dad’s ashes.” “That’s not your decision to make.” He started to walk away, but I grabbed his sleeve, knowing it would be my last chance. “Wasn’t it his?” I asked. “He wanted to be cremated because he didn’t want to be buried. Please, let us take his ashes out to Montauk.” As soon as the words came out of my mouth, I realized that I’d made a critical mistake. My grandfather realized it, too. He associated Montauk with my father’s frivolous hobbies, such as boating and fishing, activities that had distracted him from the serious business of real estate. “Montauk,” he repeated, almost smiling. “That’s not going to happen. Get in the car.”

Location 1876:  In the last twelve months, the Taj Mahal, Donald’s favorite Atlantic City casino, had declared bankruptcy just a little over a year after it had opened; his marriage was a disaster, thanks in part to his very public affair with Marla Maples; the banks had put him on an allowance; and the paperback version of his second book, Surviving at the Top, had been published under the title The Art of Survival. Despite the fact that he’d brought it all on himself,

Location 1915:  By then Donald’s ventures already carried billions of dollars of debt (by 1990, his personal obligation would balloon to $975 million). Even so, that same year he bought Mar-a-Lago for $8 million. In 1988, he’d bought a yacht for $29 million and then, in 1989, the Eastern Air Lines Shuttle for $365 million. In 1990, he’d had to issue almost $700 million in junk bonds, carrying a 14 percent interest rate, just to finish construction on his third casino, the Taj Mahal.

Location 1932-1959:  It is hard to understand the fact that the banks and investors in Trump’s first two Atlantic City casinos didn’t object more strenuously to his opening a third, which would cut into their own bottom lines.  In addition to fronting Donald the money to cover his businesses’ operating expenses, the banks reached an agreement with Trump in May 1990 to put him on a $450,000-a-month allowance—that is, almost $5.5 million a year for having failed miserably. That money was just for personal expenses: the Trump Tower triplex apartment, the private jet, the mortgage on Mar-a-Lago. In order to sell his image, Donald needed to be able to continue living the lifestyle that bolstered it. In order for the banks to keep tabs on him, Donald had to meet with them every Friday to report on his expenditures as well as progress he’d made selling assets such as the yacht.  Despite the restrictions, Donald continued spending cash he didn’t have, including $250,000 for Marla’s (Maples) engagement ring and $10 million to Ivana as part of their divorce settlement.

Location 2047-2057:  Donald secretly approached two of his father’s longest-serving employees, Irwin Durben, his lawyer, and Jack Mitnick, his accountant, and enlisted them to draft a codicil to my grandfather’s will that would put Donald in complete control of Fred’s estate, including the empire and all its holdings, after he died. His siblings, Maryanne, Elizabeth, and Robert would effectively be at Donald’s financial mercy, dependent on his approval for the smallest transaction.  Unfortunately for Donald, his father was having one of his more lucid days and  sensed that something was not right, although he couldn’t say exactly what. He angrily refused to sign.  It didn’t take long for Donald’s scheme to be uncovered. As a result, my grandfather’s entire will was rewritten, replacing one he had written in 1984, and Maryanne, Donald, and Robert were all named as executors. In addition, a new standard was put into place: whatever Fred gave Donald, he would have to give an equal amount to each of the other three children.

Location 2368:  Fred Trump died on June 25, 1999. The following day, his obituary was published in the New York Times under the banner “Fred C. Trump, Postwar Master Builder of Housing for Middle Class, Dies at 93.”

Location 2373-2376:  Because of an interview with the NYT’s, Robert was raked over the coals by his siblings for having told the Times that my grandfather’s estate was worth between $250 million and $300 million. “Never, never give them numbers,” Maryanne lectured him, as if he was stupid.  In any event, Robert’s claimed  valuation was absurdly low—eventually we would learn that the empire was probably worth four times that —but Maryanne and Donald would never have admitted that it was even that much.

Location 2481:  My brother called Gam (my Grandmother) to see if he could explain what we were really asking for in our lawsuit against the estate.  But her parting shot to him was: “When your father died, he didn’t have two nickels to rub together.” In the world of my family, that was the only thing that mattered. If your only currency is money, that’s the only lens through which you determine worth; somebody who has accomplished in that context as little as my father was worth nothing—even if he happened to be your son. Further, if my father died penniless, his children weren’t entitled to anything.

Location 2494:  Less than a week after we served the executors, Jack received a letter from Lou Laurino, a short, wiry pit bull of a lawyer who was representing my grandfather’s estate. The medical insurance that had been provided to us by Trump Management since we were born had been revoked. Everyone in the Trump family was covered by it.  My brother depended upon this insurance to pay for his son’s crushing medical expenses.

Location 2498:  Taking away our insurance, which had been Maryanne’s idea, didn’t benefit them at all; it was merely a way to cause us more pain and make us more desperate. My nephew was out of the hospital by then, but he was still susceptible to seizures, which more than once had put him in a state of cardiac arrest so severe that he would not have survived without CPR. He still required round-the-clock nursing care.

Location 2556:  Before the vows, Jared’s father, Charles, who’d been released from prison three years earlier, rose to tell us that when Jared had first introduced him to Ivanka, he had thought she would never be good enough to join his family. It was only after she had committed to converting to Judaism and worked hard to make it happen that he had begun to think she might be worthy of them after all. Considering that Charles had been convicted of hiring a prostitute to seduce his brother-in-law, taping their illicit encounter, and then sending the recording to his sister at his nephew’s engagement party, I found his condescension a bit out of line.

Location 2685-2699:  On October 2, 2018, the New York Times published an almost 14,000-word article, the longest in its history, revealing the long litany of potentially fraudulent and criminal activities my grandfather, aunts, and uncles had engaged in.  The article documented that over the course of Fred’s life, he and my grandmother had transferred hundreds of millions of dollars to their children. While my grandfather was alive, Donald alone had received the equivalent of $413 million, much of it through questionable means: loans that he had never repaid, investments in properties that had never matured; essentially gifts that had never been taxed.  Fred had refused to heed his lawyers’ advice to cede control of his empire to his children before his death in order to minimize estate taxes. That meant that Maryanne, Elizabeth, Donald, and Robert would be responsible for potentially hundreds of millions of dollars of estate taxes.  My grandfather had amassed extraordinary sums of cash. His properties carried no debt and brought in millions of dollars every year. The siblings’ solution was to establish All County Building Supply & Maintenance. At that point, my grandfather was effectively sidelined by his increasing dementia—not that he would have objected to their scheme.

Location 2703-2728:  My aunts and uncles detested paying taxes almost as much as their father did, and it seemed the main purpose of All County was to siphon money from Trump Management through large gifts disguised as “legitimate business transactions,” according to the article. The ruse was so effective that, when Fred died in 1999, he had only $1.9 million in cash and no assets larger than a $10.3 million IOU from Donald. After Gam’s death the following year, the combined value of my grandparents’ estate was said to be just $51.8 million, a laughable assertion, especially since the siblings sold the empire for more than $700 million four years later.  In 2004, the vast majority of the empire my grandfather had spent more than seven decades building was sold to a single buyer, Ruby Schron, for $705.6 million.  Split four ways, they each got approximately $170 million. For Donald, it still wasn’t enough. Maybe it wasn’t for any of them. Nothing ever was.

Location 2831:  After the election, Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong-un, and Mitch McConnell, all of whom bear more than a passing psychological resemblance to Fred, recognized in a way others should have but did not that Donald’s checkered personal history and his unique personality flaws make him extremely vulnerable to manipulation by smarter, more powerful men. His pathologies have rendered him so simple-minded that it takes nothing more than repeating to him the things he says to and about himself dozens of times a day—he’s the smartest, the greatest, the best—to get him to do whatever they want, whether it’s imprisoning children in concentration camps, betraying allies, implementing economy-crushing tax cuts, or degrading every institution that’s contributed to the United States’ rise and the flourishing of liberal democracy.