I first focused on Donald Trump at the end of 1987, after returning to New York City from four years in Japan. In just several months the year before, he had renovated Wollman skating rink in Central Park, a project that New York City had been unable to accomplish in several years.

I was highly impressed, and brought it up with my father, an architect who had worked in public housing, a field in which Trump’s father also worked. My father shook his head; yes, it was good the rink was done, but it was a publicity stunt, he explained. Donald Trump was a showman, whose father was an expert in siphoning off federal money for public housing, as my father had seen. I developed a respectful, but guarded, attitude towards the accomplishments of Donald Trump. 

In the late 80s in New York, Trump was a skyrocket, streaming ever higher over Manhattan, showering golden sparks. He was “brash”; and he was great entertainment. I was fascinated by his interview in Playboy Magazine in March, 1990. The cover showed an insouciant Trump in formal wear, though his jacket was off and partly covered up a busty lady, who was smiling and clearly dazzled by Donald. Here was a master of the universe!

The lead-in told the story, as he liked it to be told: In 1979, at 33, he had bought the site of an old department store for $20,000,000, won a $140,000,000 tax abatement, and three years later completed Trump Tower, a “68-story dazzler”. “Amassing a fortune his father never dreamed possible—a cash hoard of $900,000,000, a geyser of $50,000,000 a week from his hotel-casinos, assets thought to total 3.7 billion dollars—Trump soon became as captivated by mystique-making as by money-making.” Cash from the casinos was the secret, Donald explained: “I think the cash market is the great one right now—cash is king, and that’s one of the beauties of the casino business.” Cash is king!

Soon after, it all went bust. At the end of April, Forbes ran an article marking Trump’s wealth way down; in May, Trump missed a $30 million payment to contractors on his casinos; and by early June, Trump openly confirmed to the papers that he was “holding discussions” with the many banks that had financed his skyrocket empire. The value of his casino bonds collapsed, and along came tumbling down the rest of his empire. “Cash is king” had been a bluff; there was nowhere near enough. The skyrocket was plummeting back to earth – and before it was over, his main bank, Manufacturers Hanover, would be gone, too. Trump’s casinos went bankrupt, one after another, and often in serial fashion, each work-out failing in short order and failing again.

How had he managed to fool so many banks, for such a long period of time? It got to the point that no U.S. bank would ever lend to Donald J. Trump again, but they did not reach that point until billions and billions of their money had been lost – money which somehow wound up in his pockets anyway.

Clearly, he was a brilliant showman, who could fool a lot of sophisticated people. And think of the unsophisticated people he could fool! I was one of the few people in my circle of friends who thought that Donald Trump might be able to convince enough Americans that he would be a superb President, that his chance of winning in 2016 was real. Nonetheless, like many Americans, I was horrified when Trump actually did win, by whatever means he did so. I started drinking around 2 am on election night, and did not go to sleep until I had finished the bottle. I woke up 2 hours later, still drunk, my head buzzing for several days.

****

That is all to say that I have been interested in, and concerned about, Donald Trump for some time, and I welcomed the publication of Mary Trump’s new book, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man. 

It is surely “not for everyone”; Trump supporters will want nothing to do with it. But it is very important reading for anyone else who has an interest in the psychological makeup of this President. It also provides a useful overview of Trump’s many failures, and therefore gives a concerned voter more ammunition to think about where some of his weak points might possibly lie. 

Trump’s strongest point is his ability to convince people that he is invincible. He knows “more about” this, and “more about” that, than anyone; and he repeats his claims so often, with such deep assurance, that the credulous seem compelled to believe it. As Abraham Lincoln observed, you can fool some of the people all of the time; they are always out there. And Trump – especially with the Fox News and other right-wing media moguls at his side — knows perfectly how to reach them.

Mary’s account is as much about Trump’s father, Fred Trump, as about Trump himself. But this is important information, for the background lets us understand core aspects of who Donald really is. In her sober, intelligent, non-gossipy account, we learn about the values of Fred Trump and his wife, Fred’s expectations for his children, and the punishments meted out to children who did not meet them. After a telling and wryly entertaining opening chapter, Mary Trump recounts the failed efforts of her own father, Fred Jr. to meet the expectations of his father, and her father’s descent into a life of alcoholism and failure. These are not happy chapters, and the reader feels at times keenly that Mary Trump is working out some of her own issues as she writes. Yet her grieving is not too heavy, and is completely understandable.

Thereafter, however, her focus shifts to Donald, and we learn much about his early days, stealing toys from his younger brother Robert (just deceased), winning awards for neatness at the military academy where he was sent for discipline, and then, as Donald rises to take the role Fred had originally intended for Mary’s father, we learn the extent to which Fred Trump underwrote and organized Donald’s early successes: the Grand Hyatt and Trump Tower. Of course, Donald has always claimed that he is a self-made man, that all of his early successes were attributable to his own skill and planning; Mary is convincing, however, that this is rubbish, and that he was only successful when his father was actually running the show from behind the scenes.
For Fred Trump loved what Donald had, and what he lacked; while Fred had smarts and ruthlessness, and the instincts to lie or cheat whenever his calculations made it worthwhile, he did not have media “pzzazz”. He loved that Donald had it, since he felt that it reflected back on him. Fred Trump gradually, or perhaps from the get-go, became a big enabler of Donald’s excesses, apparently also taken in by what Donald was projecting. He believed Donald would make Fred’s original real estate empire, Trump Management, into a permanent edifice to the Trump name; instead, it was all sold off not long after the old man died.

Mary Trump has a Master’s degree in English literature from Columbia, and a PhD in clinical psychology from Adelphi University. Throughout the book, along with her clear narration of fact, she gives her own coherent and very plausible analysis of Donald Trump’s psychological makeup and his deficiencies. As told by an educated and professionally qualified insider, albeit with her own axe to grind, this account offers the reader a perspective on the President that cannot be obtained elsewhere.

Mary Trump is also able to recount stories, in her dry way, that are both illuminating and quite amusing. In Chapter 8, she describes a family Christmas gathering when she was a young teen, and the present she received from Donald:

I sat at the dining room table with the shoe in front of me, trying to figure out what the point of it was. I had looked through the remaining boxes under the tree, thinking that perhaps the shoe’s twin had been wrapped separately, but no, there was just the one a gold lamé shoe with a 4-inch heel filled with hard candy. Both the individual candies and the shoe itself were wrapped in cellophane. Where had this thing come from? I wondered. Had it been a door prize or a party favor from a luncheon?

Donald came through the pantry from the kitchen. As he passed me, he asked, “What’s that?”

“It’s a present from you.”

“Really?” He looked at it for a second. “Ivana!” he shouted into the foyer. She was standing on the other side of the Christmas tree near the living room. “Ivana!”

“What is it, Donald?”

“This is great.” He pointed at the shoe, and she smiled. Maybe he thought it was real gold.

. . . A year after the gold lamé shoe, the gift basket I received from Donald and Ivana hit the trifecta: it was an obvious re-gift, it was useless, and it demonstrated Ivana’s penchant for cellophane. After unwrapping it, I noticed, among the tin of gourmet sardines, the box of table water crackers, the jar of vermouth-packed olives, and a salami, a circular indentation in the tissue paper that filled the bottom of the basket where another jar had once been. My cousin David walked by and, pointing at the empty space, asked, “what was that?”

“I have no idea. Something that goes with these, I guess,” I said, holding up the box of crackers.

“Probably caviar”, he said, laughing. I shrugged, having no idea what caviar was.

I was ready to be interested, and felt my time was well spent with Mary Trump’s book. It is at times sad and painful, when she writes of her father, but throughout is written in a steady voice, and is not a difficult read; I finished the book in several days. Readers of Metapsychology Online Reviews will face no difficulties. 

For anyone concerned about the psychological make-up and the background of Donald Trump, I recommend Mary Trump’s book with both thumbs up. It is not great literature, it does not advance a bold new paradigm, but it is a useful, instructive, and often entertaining, inside account of a very important person in our lives today.

Gregory F.W. Todd, J.D., MSc History

New York City