Too Much and Never Enough review: Mary Trump
thumps Donald
The president’s niece follows John Bolton’s right hook
with a sharp left to the ribs. Revenge Trump-style is grimly engrossing
Mary Trump says her aunts and uncles ‘all knew where
the bodies were buried because they buried them together’
Lloyd Green
Published
onSun 12 Jul 2020 06.00 BST
Mary
Trump’s tell-all will not make her uncle’s re-election bid any easier. The
president’s late-night walk of shame is already a classic campaign moment. His
niece’s allegation that he paid someone else to take his college entrance exams
resonates as true, because of his reported disdain for reading and capacity to inadvertently
invent new words like “swiffian”.
Adding
insult to injury, Maryanne Trump Barry, Trump’s sister, appears to be the key
source for this smorgasbord of dysfunction. She is a retired federal judge who
left the bench with an ethics cloud over her head. Fittingly, as Mary Trump
lacerates multiple sets of vital organs, her pen a stiletto, she thanks her
aunt “for all of the enlightening information”.
It is score-settling time, Trump-style. Go big or go
home. Few are spared.
Too Much
and Never Enough doubles as mesmerizing beach reading and a memorable
opposition research dump, in time for the party conventions. Think John
Bolton-quality revelations, but about Trump’s family. It is the book Michael
Wolff, the author of Fire and Fury, likely wishes he had written but isn’t kin
so he couldn’t. It is salacious, venomous and well-sourced.
Sadly, it
is also a book born of tragedy and pain. The author’s father, Fred Trump Jr,
died in his early 40s. He drank hard, was jettisoned by his father and
siblings, and treated as a cautionary tale. Mary Trump is angry, not
self-pitying. Although she casts her book as a warning to the American public,
it is 200-plus pages of revenge served with the benefit of time and distance.
Yet the narrative remains compelling.
Fred Jr
found joy in flying and serving his country. He was a member of the national
guard and a TWA pilot. In most homes, that would be deemed an achievement. But
the Trumps were not most folks. Fred Sr saw his oldest son as weak. His brother
Donald humiliated him, his mother Mary stood by and watched. As for Fred Jr’s
military service, Trump père found little value there. As for Donald, “bone spurs”
were his path to avoid Vietnam.
When Fred
Jr was dying, in 1981, the future president thought it an opportune time to go
to the movies. Past became prelude. When Roy Cohn, Trump’s friend and
consigliere, was dying of Aids a decade later, Trump walked away again. A
stunned Cohn reportedly remarked: “Donald pisses ice water.”
But it was
the aftermath of Fred Sr’s death that put Mary Trump and the older generation
on a collision course. Fred Jr’s two children were cut out of Fred Sr’s will.
Maryanne and her brothers did their best to thwart their claims to an
inheritance.
Tensions
spiraled, then subsided. The matter was settled, and the parties filed a
stipulation in surrogate’s court. Ostensibly, the agreement barred disclosure
regarding Fred Sr and his legacy. Maryanne was an executor of the estate.
Ironically, she has emerged as her niece’s muse. The judge leaked like a sieve.
According
to Too Much and Never Enough, Trump and Cohn played a pivotal role in
Maryanne’s elevation to the federal bench. At the time, she was only an
assistant federal prosecutor, an usual launchpad to a federal judgeship.
Strings were pulled. When Maryanne had the temerity to tell Trump his
presidency was failing, her niece now writes, he reminded her that he made her.
Like Fred Sr, Trump brooks no hint of disloyalty.
A New York
Times investigation in the origins of Trump’s wealth brought the past roaring
back. Questions surrounding the family fortune abounded. Tax evasion appears as
one possibility. After resisting overtures for assistance from Susanne Craig of
the Times, Mary Trump began to cooperate. In the process, she came to doubt the
rationale for her own settlement.
As for Aunt
Maryanne’s role in the mess, Mary Trump lumps her in with the rest of them:
“They all knew where the bodies were buried because they buried them together.”
This may be
the first time a family member of a sitting president has publicly accused him
of paying a surrogate to take the SATs – a claim the alleged surrogate’s widow
denies. Looking back, Trump’s obsession with Barack Obama’s college transcripts
appears to have been a fusion of envy, projection and racism. As an institution
of learning, Trump University was truly created in its namesake’s image.
Amid all
this, mockery is unavoidable. And as Mary Trump observes, the president hates
to be mocked. Think of Stormy Daniels dishing about Toad and Mario-Kart – an
image best forgotten.
Donald
Trump and Maryanne Trump Barry stand outside their late mother’s house in Tong
on the island of Lewis, in 2009. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/The Guardian
The author
also stresses that Trump’s prejudices mirrored his parents. Both Trump and his
father were sued by Richard Nixon’s justice department, for housing
discrimination. Mary Trump also contends that Fred Sr regarded “Jew” as a verb
and was “scandalized” when “the first Italian American family moved into the
neighborhood”. Trump’s mother, she writes, derided Elton John as a “little
faggot”. The author was in a same-sex relationship at the time.
Trump’s
nostalgia for all things Confederate approaches the organic. In his view,
hoisting the Confederate battle flag is free speech but Colin Kaepernick taking
a knee is blasphemy. As an election strategy, it doesn’t seem to be working.
Below the Mason-Dixon line, Trump trails Joe Biden in Florida and North
Carolina and is in a tight fight in Georgia.
In this
cycle, race-based appeals energize communities of color and repel suburbia.
Trump generally turns off college-educated women.
There’s
more, of course. Mary Trump writes that if the president “can in any way profit
from your death, he’ll facilitate it, and then ignore the fact that you died”.
As her book appears, Covid-19 cases are exploding, the pandemic moving to the
country’s interior. More than 200,000 Covid-related deaths are projected by
election day. The Grim Reaper’s scythe is unsheathed.
Trump is
undeterred. He falsely claims the situation is improving and demands schools
re-open while his White House looks to numb us into submission. A modern-day
Moloch, the president expects the nation to sacrifice itself. Not
everyone appears willing, least of all his niece.
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