Highlights from Mary Trump’s tell-all book

On Tuesday, the manuscript of Mary Trump’s book titled “Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man," was released to the media, offering a scathing portrayal of her uncle and President, Donald Trump.

Mary is a clinical psychologist and has long been estranged from the Trump family. She is the daughter of Donald Trump’s late brother Fred Trump Jr., who died of alcoholism in 1981.

The release of the manuscript comes after the Trump family filed a lawsuit against Mary in an attempt to stop the publication of the book, stating that a confidentiality agreement she signed two decades ago during a dispute over her grandfather’s will prohibits her from doing so.

On June 30 a New York State Supreme Court judge in Duchess County issued a temporary restraining order blocking the publication of the book. But on July 1, a New York appellate judge reversed the lower court’s decision ruling that Mary’s book could be published since the book’s publisher, Simon & Schuster, was not bound to any confidentiality agreement.

The book is due for release on July 14.

Narcissism

In the manuscript, Mary asserts that her uncle fits all of the nine clinical criteria of a narcissist.

She writes, “This is far beyond garden-variety narcissism. Donald is not simply weak, his ego is a fragile thing that must be bolstered every moment because he knows deep down that he is nothing of what he claims to be."

However, she writes that even that label doesn’t entirely capture the complexity of his psychological issues.

“The fact is, 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 neuro-physical tests, that he’ll never sit for,” she writes at another point in the book.”

She describes the president as being sheltered from the real world and protected from the consequences of his actions all his life.

“Donald has been institutionalized for most of his adult life, so there is no way to know how he would thrive, or even survive, on his own in the real world.”

Donald’s ego has been and is a fragile and inadequate barrier between him and the real world, which, thanks to his father’s money and power, he never had to negotiate by himself.”

She adds that his presidency, being mired in so many crises in the past and at present, is the “end result of Donald’s having continually been given a pass and rewarded not just for his failures but for his transgressions — against tradition, against decency, against the law, and against fellow human beings.”

A dysfunctional family

Mary places much of the blame for the president’s psychological troubles on his father and her grandfather, Fred Trump Sr.

She says that the New York City real estate mogul “destroyed” Trump, by impeding on “his ability to develop and experience the entire spectrum of human emotion."

“Softness was unthinkable" for her grandfather, she writes, adding that he would become furious whenever either of his sons would apologize for their mistakes.

This was especially the case for her father, Fred Trump Jr.

She adds that the president “had plenty of time to learn from watching Fred humiliate" his eldest son.

“The lesson he learned, at its simplest, was that it was wrong to be like Freddy: Fred didn’t respect his oldest son, so neither would Donald."

“By limiting Donald’s access to his own feelings and rendering many of them unacceptable, Fred perverted his son’s perception of the world and damaged his ability to live in it."

Later, Fred Trump Sr. wanted his eldest son to take over the family real estate business but Fred Trump Jr. went on to pursue his passion, becoming a pilot for Trans World Airlines.

His father then had to hand over the business to Donald Trump who Mary says remained disappointed with the president’s “ineptitude.”

Mary writes, “When things turned south in the late 1980s, Fred could no longer separate himself from his son’s brutal ineptitude; the father had no choice but to stay invested."

Mary writes that on the night of her grandfather’s death caused by an alcohol-induced heart attack in 1981, the Trump family sent him to the hospital alone. She adds, “Donald went to the movies.”

Last year, the president told The Washington Post that he regretted his family’s pressure on Fred Jr. to take over the business.

“It was just not his thing. … I think the mistake that we made was we assumed that everybody would like it. That would be the biggest mistake. … There was sort of a double pressure put on him.”

Criticism of Trump’s COVID-19 response

Mary levels much criticism at the Trump administration’s response to the pandemic which has seen more than three million cases and 130,000 deaths in the US.

She writes that the president failed to address the threat of COVID-19 when the first few cases were reported in the nation because, “in Donald’s mind, even acknowledging an inevitable threat would indicate weakness.”

“Taking responsibility would open him up to blame. Being a hero — being good — is impossible for him.”

In a scathing criticism, she adds that the pandemic has revealed the president to be  a “petty, pathetic little man — ignorant, incapable, out of his depth, and lost in his own delusional spin.”

She adds, “He’ll withhold ventilators or steal supplies from states that have not groveled sufficiently. What Donald thinks is justified retaliation is, in this context, mass murder.”

On March 24, during a Fox News town hall, the president stated that he would only provide federal aid to governors dealing with the virus if they “treat us well,” adding that “it’s a two-way street.”

Mary further writes that her father “couldn’t retaliate when his little brother mocked his passion for flying because of his filial responsibility and his decency, just as governors in blue states, desperate to get adequate help for their citizens during the COVID-19 crisis, are constrained from calling out Donald’s incompetence for fear he would withhold ventilators and other supplies needed in order to save lives.”

“Donald learned a long time ago how to pick his targets.”

Other revelations

Mary also revealed that the president paid someone else to take his SAT exam, a standardized test that determines entrance to colleges in the US.

According to her, he was “worried that his grade-point average, which put him far from the top of his class, would scuttle his efforts to get accepted” to Fordham University in New York City.

She writes that he hired “a smart kid with a reputation for being a good test taker, to take his SATs for him" adding that “Donald, who never lacked for funds, paid his buddy well."

Mary also explains the president’s attitudes and behaviors against women.

She writes that he asked her to ghostwrite a book about him titled “The Art of Comeback," providing her with an “an aggrieved compendium of women he had expected to date but who, having refused him, were suddenly the worst, ugliest and fattest slobs he’d ever met.”

She adds that the president’s crudity in his campaign trails only reminded her “of every family meal [she’d] ever attended during which Donald had talked about all of the women he considered ugly fat slobs or the men, usually more accomplished or powerful, he called losers.” She adds that he gave suggestive comments on her body when she was 29 years old, despite being his niece.

Mary then states that if the president were to be reelected in the November elections, it would be the end of democracy in the US.

“By the time this book is published, hundreds of thousands of American lives will have been sacrificed on the altar of Donald’s hubris and willful ignorance. If he is afforded a second term, it would be the end of American Democracy.”

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