Mary Trump has got the wrong man.
Her glitzy, buzzy new book, released Tuesday amid a whirlwind of anger, pain and recrimination, is titled “Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man.’’
The titular bogeyman is, of course, her uncle, President Donald J. Trump, who’s presented here as a cross between Hannibal Lecter and Bozo the Clown — a frightening and ridiculous figure who looms titanic over every aspect of Mary’s waking and sleeping life. In 214 often bleak, raw and tear-jerking pages, she sets out to avenge the untimely death of her father, Frederick Christ Trump Jr., known as Freddy.
As she tells it, Donald’s once-handsome and vital older brother, the guy bred to run the Trump family real estate business, died, broken and bitter, in 1981 at age 42. Mary was 16. Both were forced to watch passively, she writes, as Freddy’s dimmer and less talented little bro not only usurped his birthright and grabbed heaps of cash from his father, Fred Sr., but ran the company into the ground before, by some unjust fluke of nature, being elected leader of the free world.
Her reason for telling the tale now is simple and urgent: Mary Trump believes, with the conviction of the Hillary Clinton supporter she was, that she must prevent her uncle’s re-election — by any means necessary.
It is a family tragedy worthy of Shakespeare, and, like the Bard’s work, it is one of fiction. Because, as Mary Trump acknowledges reluctantly, Freddy Trump never wanted to work for Trump Management, and did everything in his power to escape, earning his pilot’s license, buying fishing boats and fancy cars, and attempting to live as something his father sneeringly called a “chauffeur in the sky.’’
But he lost his dream job as a TWA pilot, followed by a series of gigs at smaller carriers, not because of family pressure, but because of decades of chronic alcoholism. His wife, Mary’s mother, Linda, divorced him sometime after he aimed a gun at her face while laughing uproariously.
Still, Freddy’s father took him back into the family business, which Freddy contemptuously felt was beneath him.
Donald had no such reservations about working in real estate, an industry he embraced wholeheartedly with the enthusiasm of a carnival huckster. The media loved him (today’s media is obsessed with him) and, until he hit an iceberg with casinos in Atlantic City, he was good for the bottom line.
As Donald became his father’s favorite, Freddy wasted away, spending his final days alone, ill and prematurely aged, in a Trump-owned apartment building before being felled by a heart attack.
Mary introduces herself as a trained clinical psychologist, and does not hesitate to indulge in psychobabble to diagnose Donald’s alleged mental disorders. She writes that her uncle displays all nine criteria for narcissism, and may also suffer from antisocial personality disorder, sociopathy, and/or dependent personality disorder, along with an undiagnosed learning disability that likely interferes with his ability to process information.
She claims that Donald routinely refers to women as “fat slobs’’ and more-accomplished men as “losers.’’ But these seem like warmed-over, oft-repeated accusations, as viewers of the “Access Hollywood’’ “grab ‘em by the p—y’’ recording know well.
Horrors!Being a member of the Trump clan, even one who looks down on the means to the family fortune, brings with it loads of privilege, from holiday gatherings in the Queens mansion where Donald grew up with his kin, to family dinners for the eventual non-meat-eater at Peter Luger Steakhouse in Brooklyn, private educations, free health insurance and apartments in the outer boroughs of New York City. Yet Mary’s complaints are varied and, at times, unintentionally hilarious: She moans that her dad had to pay rent to the company for his apartment (so why didn’t he move elsewhere?) and complains that his flat was kept at freezing temperatures. Plus, the building had no doorman.
But after the death of her grandfather, Fred Trump Sr., in 1999, Mary and her son were essentially cut out of his will, leading to a court battle that was settled, the details undisclosed, in 2001.
Still, she proceeded to accept her uncle’s 2017 invitation to the White House, where she was shocked to observe a partially eaten apple on a table in the Lincoln Bedroom. But if she ever learned the perpetrator of Applegate, she didn’t tell.
Perhaps the book’s title should be adjusted to reflect the reality that Donald Trump may be many things — brash, blustery, and, in the eyes of houseguest Mary, disastrous for the country. But dangerous to whom?
It is Mary who is attempting to cash in by committing attempted character assassination against her own uncle, accusing him of everything from teaming up with his father to run her dad into the ground to making the unprovable claim that Donald hired someone to take the SAT for him.
All in all, Mary’s diagnosis of President Trump fails to persuade. But baring all her family’s secrets may be therapy for her. Psychologist, heal thyself.
https://nypost.com/2020/07/14/mary-trumps-takedown-of-president-proves-shes-the-one-whos-crazy/
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