I can’t wait to read Mary Trump’s tell-all. This Politico review lays out why it could be the most important of all of them:
For anybody who’s done the reading these last five years—from Wayne Barrett’s biography that was published in 1992 to Gwenda Blair’s multigenerational study from 2000 to psychology experts’ more recent efforts to explain this president—it’s a takeaway that’s not altogether unfamiliar. And the glut of books about Trump and his aberrant administration has contributed almost inevitably to a tendency to treat even the most hyped fresh releases as cash-grab ephemera to speed-read for damning tidbits and just as quickly forget amid the ruthless whirl of crises.
But hold up here for a sec—for the most devastating, most valuable and all-around best Trump book since he started running for president. In the vast Trump literature, this one is something new.
That’s because of the unprecedented access, and its pathos, which is because of the source—the president’s only niece, the 55-year-old daughter of his oldest brother, who died at 42 in 1981 in her estimation as a result of a pathological, decades-long destruction at the hands of his own twisted kin.
Mary Trump, to be sure, is a partisan (a registered Democrat who’s expressed public admiration for Hillary Clinton) with an ax to grind (she and her brother were all but excised from passed-down riches), and she writes, too, with palpable sadness and anger stemming from the long-ago loss of her father. The White House, meanwhile, predictably has dismissed her account as rife with “falsehoods” and “ridiculous, absurd allegations.” But she also holds a Ph.D. in psychological studies. And in these taut 211 pages, she puts us in new rooms, shows us new scenes with new details and lets us hear from members of the president’s nuclear family who have been conspicuously and obstinately mum. She is, after all, and by blood still, one of them—and “the only Trump,” as she puts it, “who is willing” to dish on what she calls “my malignantly dysfunctional family.”
He points out, rightly, that this book will probably have little effect on the election. There’s just too much else going on and poeple know what they think of Donald Trump at this point. But:
What this book does do is help us understand him, offering the most incisive rendering yet of why he is the way he is.
No matter what happens in November, historians will have to contend with the influences that forged the personality of one of the most consequential presidents ever—and in Mary Trump’s telling, the current occupant of the Oval Office, the man just shy of 63 million voters thought was the most preferable choice to lead their nation, is “a narcissist” whose “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 neuropsychological tests that he’ll never sit for,” whose “deep-seated insecurities have created in him a black hole of need that constantly requires the light of compliments that disappears as soon as he’s soaked it in.” She says he is “a petty, pathetic, little man.” She says he is “ignorant” and “incapable” and “lost in his own delusional spin.” She says deep down he “knows he has never been loved.” She says his reelection “would be the end of American democracy.”
I asked Trump biographers—people who’ve spent extended periods of their lives attempting to plumb his psyche—what they thought of her book.
Michael D’Antonio told me he found it “chilling.”
And Tim O’Brien? He believes it’ll be “indelible.”
“There were a lot of mob movies before ‘The Godfather,’ but ‘The Godfather’ gave us a very specific understanding of being in a mob family because it was this rich, detailed, inside account of how a family dysfunctioned together,” he said. “There was nothing new in ‘The Godfather’ about how mobsters rolled, but the portrait it painted was so searing and rich and authentic that it defined our understanding of a criminal family. And, yes, there have been other books about the Trump family—Wayne’s, mine, Gwenda’s—but none of us captured his family life in the way that she has.”
O’Brien predicted Mary Trump’s work will have “a seismic imprint.” “It gives,” he said, “the deepest understanding of his family dynamics that anyone has provided, and how that shapes his psychosis, and why he’s such a dangerous leader.”
I haven’t received mine yet. But I’m going to devour it. I have always thought he was a twisted and deformed character so I’ll be interested to see where that comes from.
The next project will be figuring out why Republican officials were so cowed by this deranged man-child. (Were they all abused as children too?) And then there is the important question of why tens of millions of Americans would worship such a bizarre person? What does that say about our culture?