Too Much and Never Enough

How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man

Mary L. Trump

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781471190155
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Biographies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

* THE INTERNATIONAL AND SUNDAY TIMES NUMBER ONE BESTSELLER * 'Even in the darkest of Dickens novels, no family comes across quite as mendacious, grasping and avaricious as the Trumps' Financial Times A REVELATORY PORTRAIT OF DONALD J. TRUMP AND THE TOXIC FAMILY THAT MADE HIM – WRITTEN BY HIS NIECE, MARY L. TRUMP Mary Trump spent much of her childhood in her grandparents' large, imposing house in New York with Donald and his four siblings. She describes a nightmare of traumas, destructive relationships and a tragic combination of neglect and abuse. As a first-hand witness and a trained clinical psychologist, Mary explains how specific events and general family patterns created the damaged man who occupied the Oval Office. Written by the only Trump willing to speak out, Too Much and Never Enough is a fascinating and unnerving analysis on one of the world's most powerful and dysfunctional families. Mary Trump's insight and intimate familiarity means she alone can tell the truth on what makes Donald, and the rest of her clan, tick.

PART ONE The Cruelty Is the Point

CHAPTER ONE The House

“Daddy, Mom’s bleeding!”

They’d lived in the “House,” as my grandparents’ home was known, for less than a year, and it still felt unfamiliar, especially in the middle of the night, so when twelve-year-old Maryanne found her mother lying unconscious in one of the upstairs bathrooms—not the master bathroom but the bathroom she and her sister shared down the hall—she was already disoriented. There was blood all over the bathroom floor. Maryanne’s terror was so great that it overcame her usual reluctance to disturb her father in his bedroom, and she flew to the other end of the house to rouse him.

Fred got out of bed, walked quickly down the hall, and found his wife unresponsive. With Maryanne at his heels, he rushed back to his bedroom, where there was a telephone extension, and placed a call.

Already a powerful man with connections at Jamaica Hospital, Fred was immediately put into touch with someone who could get an ambulance to the House and make sure the best doctors were waiting for them when they arrived at the emergency room. Fred explained the situation as best he could to the person on the other end. Maryanne heard him say “menstruation,” an unfamiliar word that sounded strange coming out of her father’s mouth.

Shortly after Mary arrived at the hospital, she underwent an emergency hysterectomy after doctors found that serious postpartum complications had gone undiagnosed after Robert’s birth nine months earlier. The procedure led to an abdominal infection, and then further complications arose.

From what would become his usual spot by the telephone table in the library, Fred spoke briefly with one of Mary’s doctors and, after hanging up the phone, called Maryanne to join him.

“They told me your mother won’t make it through the night,” he said to his daughter.

A little while later, as he was leaving for the hospital to be with his wife, he told her, “Go to school tomorrow. I’ll call you if there’s any change.”

She understood the implication: I will call you if your mother dies.

Maryanne spent the night crying alone in her room while her younger siblings remained asleep in their beds, unaware of the calamity. She went to school the next day full of dread. Dr. James Dixon, the headmaster of Kew-Forest, a private school she had begun attending when her father joined the board of directors, came to get her from study hall. “There’s a phone call for you in my office.”

Maryanne was convinced that her mother was dead. The walk to the principal’s office was like a walk to the scaffold. All the twelve-year-old could think was that she was going to be the acting mother of four children.

When she picked up the phone, her father simply said, “She’s going to make it.”

Mary would undergo two more surgeries over the next week, but she did indeed make it. Fred’s pull at the hospital, which ensured that his wife got the very best doctors and care, had probably saved her life. But it would be a long road back to recovery.

For the next six months, Mary was into and out of the hospital. The long-term implications for her health were serious. She eventually developed severe osteoporosis from the sudden loss of estrogen that went with having her ovaries removed along with her uterus, a common but often unnecessary medical procedure performed at the time. As a result, she was often in excruciating pain from spontaneous fractures to her ever-thinning bones.

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If we’re lucky, we have, as infants and toddlers, at least one emotionally available parent who consistently fulfills our needs and responds to our desires for attention. Being held and comforted, having our feelings acknowledged and our upsets soothed are all critical for the healthy development of young children. This kind of attention creates a sense of safety and security that ultimately allows us to explore the world around us without excessive fear or unmanageable anxiety because we know we can count on the bedrock support of at least one caregiver.

Mirroring, the process through which an attuned parent reflects, processes, and then gives back to the baby the baby’s own feelings, is another crucial part of a young child’s development. Without mirroring, children are denied crucial information both about how their minds work and about how to understand the world. Just as a secure attachment to a primary caregiver can lead to higher levels of emotional intelligence, mirroring is the root of empathy.

Mary and Fred were problematic parents from the very beginning. My grandmother rarely spoke to me about her own parents or childhood, so I can only speculate, but she was the youngest of ten children—twenty-one years younger than her oldest sibling and four years younger than the second youngest—and she grew up in an often inhospitable environment in the early 1910s. Whether her own needs weren’t sufficiently met when she was young or for some other reason, she was the kind of mother who used her children to comfort herself rather than comforting them. She attended to them when it was convenient for her, not when they needed her to. Often unstable and needy, prone to self-pity and flights of martyrdom, she frequently put herself first. Especially when it came to her sons, she acted as if there were nothing she could do for them.

During and after her surgeries, Mary’s absence—both literal and emotional—created a void in the lives of her children. As hard as it must have been for Maryanne, Freddy, and Elizabeth, they were old enough to understand what was happening and could, to some extent, take care of themselves. The impact was especially dire for Donald and Robert, who at two and a half years and nine months old, respectively, were the most vulnerable of her children, especially since there was no one else to fill the void. The live-in housekeeper was undoubtedly overwhelmed by the sheer volume of housework. Their paternal grandmother, who lived nearby, prepared meals, but she was as terse and physically unaffectionate as her son. When Maryanne wasn’t in school, much of the responsibility of taking care of the younger kids fell to her. (As a boy, Freddy wouldn’t have been expected to help.) She gave them baths and got them ready for bed, but at twelve there was only so much she could do. The five kids were essentially motherless.

Whereas Mary was needy, Fred seemed to have no emotional needs at all. In fact, he was a high-functioning sociopath. Although uncommon, sociopathy is not rare, afflicting as much as 3 percent of the population. Seventy-five percent of those diagnosed are men. Symptoms of sociopathy include a lack of empathy, a facility for lying, an indifference to right and wrong, abusive behavior, and a lack of interest in the rights of others. Having a sociopath as a parent, especially if there is no one else around to mitigate the effects, all but guarantees severe disruption in how children understand themselves, regulate their emotions, and engage with the world. My grandmother was ill equipped to deal with the problems caused in her marriage by Fred’s callousness, indifference, and controlling behaviors. Fred’s lack of real human feeling, his rigidity as a parent and a husband, and his sexist belief in a woman’s innate inferiority likely left her feeling unsupported.

Since Mary was emotionally and physically absent due to her injuries, Fred became, by default, the only available parent, but it would be a mistake to refer to him as a caregiver. He firmly believed that dealing with young children was not his job and kept to his twelve-hour-a-day, six-day-a-week job at Trump Management, as if his children could look after themselves. He focused on what was important to him: his increasingly successful business, which at the time was developing Shore Haven and Beach Haven, two massive residential projects in Brooklyn that were to date the most significant of his life.

Again, Donald and Robert in particular would have been in the most precarious position vis-à-vis Fred’s lack of interest. All behavior exhibited by infants and toddlers is a form of attachment behavior, which seeks a positive, comforting response from the caregiver—a smile to elicit a smile, tears to prompt a hug. Even under normal circumstances, Fred would have considered any expressions of that kind an annoyance, but Donald and Robert were likely even needier because they missed their mother and were actively distressed by her absence. The greater their distress, however, the more Fred rebuffed them. He did not like to have demands made of him, and the annoyance provoked by his children’s neediness set up a dangerous tension in the Trump household: by engaging in behaviors that were biologically designed to trigger soothing, comforting responses from their parents, the little boys instead provoked their father’s anger or indifference when they were most vulnerable. For Donald and Robert, “needing” became equated with humiliation, despair, and hopelessness. Because Fred didn’t want to be disturbed when he was home, it worked in his favor if his children learned one way or another not to need anything.

Fred’s parenting style actually exacerbated the negative effects of Mary’s absence. As a result of it, his children were isolated not just from the rest of the world but from one another. From then on it would become increasingly difficult for the siblings to find solidarity with other human beings, which is one of the reasons Freddy’s brothers and sisters ultimately failed him; standing up for him, even helping him, would have risked their father’s wrath.

When Mary became ill and Donald’s main source of comfort and human connection was suddenly taken away from him, not only was there no one to help him make sense of it, Fred was the only person left that he could depend on. Donald’s needs, which had been met inconsistently before his mother’s illness, were barely met at all by his father. That Fred would, by default, become the primary source of Donald’s solace when he was much more likely to be a source of fear or rejection put Donald into an intolerable position: being totally dependent on his father, who was also likely to be a source of his terror.

Child abuse is, in some sense, the experience of “too much” or “not enough.” Donald directly experienced the “not enough” in the loss of connection to his mother at a crucial developmental stage, which was deeply traumatic. Without warning, his needs weren’t being met, and his fears and longings went unsoothed. Having been abandoned by his mother for at least a year, and having his father fail not only to meet his needs but to make him feel safe or loved, valued or mirrored, Donald suffered deprivations that would scar him for life. The personality traits that resulted—displays of narcissism, bullying, grandiosity—finally made my grandfather take notice but not in a way that ameliorated any of the horror that had come before. As he grew older, Donald was subjected to my grandfather’s “too-muchness” at second hand—witnessing what happened to Freddy when he was on the receiving end of too much attention, too much expectation, and, most saliently, too much humiliation.

From the beginning, Fred’s self-interest skewed his priorities. His care of his children, such as it was, reflected his own needs, not theirs. Love meant nothing to him, and he could not empathize with their plight, one of the defining characteristics of a sociopath; he expected obedience, that was all. Children don’t make such distinctions, and his kids believed that their father loved them or that they could somehow earn his love. But they also knew, if only on an unconscious level, that their father’s “love,” as they experienced it, was entirely conditional.

Maryanne, Elizabeth, and Robert, to greater or lesser degrees, experienced the same treatment as Donald because Fred wasn’t interested in children at all. His oldest son and namesake received Fred’s attention simply because he was being raised to carry on Fred’s legacy.

In order to cope, Donald began to develop powerful but primitive defenses, marked by an increasing hostility to others and a seeming indifference to his mother’s absence and father’s neglect. The latter became a kind of learned helplessness over time because although it insulated him from the worst effects of his pain, it also made it extremely difficult (and in the long run I would argue impossible) for him to have any of his emotional needs met at all because he became too adept at acting as though he didn’t have any. In place of those needs grew a kind of grievance and behaviors—including bullying, disrespect, and aggressiveness—that served their purpose in the moment but became more problematic over time. With appropriate care and attention, they might have been overcome. Unfortunately for Donald and everybody else on this planet, those behaviors became hardened into personality traits because once Fred started paying attention to his loud and difficult second son, he came to value them. Put another way, Fred Trump came to validate, encourage, and champion the things about Donald that rendered him essentially unlovable and that were in part the direct result of Fred’s abuse.

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Mary never completely recovered. Restless to begin with, she became an insomniac. The older kids would find her wandering around the House at all hours like a soundless wraith. Once Freddy found her standing at the top of a ladder painting the hallway in the middle of the night. In the morning her children sometimes found her unconscious in unexpected places; more than once, she ended up having to go to the hospital. That behavior became part of the life of the House. Mary got help for the physical injuries she sustained but none for whatever underlying psychological problems made her put herself into high-risk situations.

Beyond his wife’s occasional injuries, Fred was aware of none of this and wouldn’t have acknowledged the effects his particular brand of parenting had on his children then or later, even if he had recognized them. As far as he was concerned, he had been, for a brief time, faced with the limits of his wealth and power in fixing his wife’s near-death health crisis. But ultimately Mary’s medical challenges were a small blip in the grand scheme of things. Once she was on the mend and his Shore Haven and Beach Haven real estate developments, both phenomenal successes, were nearing completion, everything seemed once again to be going Fred’s way.

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When eight-year-old Freddy Trump asked why his very pregnant mother was getting so fat, talk at the dinner table ground to a halt. It was 1948, and the Trump family, which now consisted of four children—ten-year-old Maryanne, Freddy, five-year-old Elizabeth, and one-and-a-half-year-old Donald—were weeks away from moving into the twenty-three-room house that Fred was in the process of building. Mary looked down at her plate, and Fred’s mother, also named Elizabeth, an almost daily visitor to the house, stopped eating.

Table etiquette at my grandparents’ house was strict, and there were certain things Fred did not tolerate. “Keep your elbows off the table, this is not a horse’s stable” was a frequent refrain, and Fred, knife in hand, would tap its handle against the forearm of any transgressor. (Rob and Donald took over that task when Fritz, David, and I were growing up, with a bit too much enthusiasm.) There were also things the children were not supposed to talk about, especially in front of their father or grandmother. When Freddy wanted to know how the baby had gotten there, Fred and his mother stood up as one, left the table without saying a word, and walked off. Fred wasn’t a prude, but Elizabeth, a stern, formal woman who adhered to Victorian mores, very likely was.

Despite her own rigid views regarding gender roles, however, she had, many years earlier, made an exception for her son; a couple of years after Fred’s father had died suddenly, Elizabeth had become her fifteen-year-old son’s business partner.

That was made possible in part because her husband, Friedrich Trump, something of an entrepreneur, had left money and property valued at approximately $300,000 in today’s currency.

Friedrich, born in Kallstadt, a small village in western Germany, left for the United States when he turned eighteen in 1885 in order to avoid mandatory military service. He eventually made the bulk of his money through ownership of restaurants and brothels in British Columbia. He lit out for the Yukon territories in time for the Gold Rush, cashing out just before the boom collapsed near the turn of the century.

In 1901, while visiting his family in Germany, Friedrich met and married Elizabeth Christ, a petite blond woman nearly twelve years his junior. He brought his new bride to New York, but one month after the birth of their first child, a girl they named Elizabeth, the couple returned to Germany with the intention of settling there permanently. Because of the circumstances under which Friedrich had originally left the country, he was told by authorities that he could not stay. Friedrich, his wife—now four months pregnant with their second child—and their two-year-old daughter returned for the last time to the United States in July 1905. Their two sons, Frederick and John, were born in 1905 and 1907, respectively. They eventually settled in Woodhaven, Queens, where all three children grew up speaking German.

When Friedrich died of the Spanish flu, twelve-year-old Fred became the man of the house. Despite the size of her husband’s estate, Elizabeth found it difficult to make ends meet. The flu epidemic, which killed upward of 50 million people worldwide, had a destabilizing effect on what otherwise might have been a booming wartime economy. While still in high school, Fred took a series of odd jobs in order to help his mother financially and began to study the building trade. Becoming a builder had been his dream for as long as he could remember. He took every opportunity to learn the business, all aspects of which intrigued him, and during his sophomore year, with his mother’s backing, he began building and selling garages in his neighborhood. He realized he was good at it, and from then on he had no other interests—none. Two years after Fred’s high school graduation, Elizabeth created E. Trump and Son. She recognized her son’s aptitude, and the business, which enabled her to handle financial transactions for her underage middle child—in the early twentieth century, people didn’t attain legal majority until the age of twenty-one—was her way of supporting him. Both the business and the family thrived.

When Fred was twenty-five years old, he attended a ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Author’s Note
• Prologue
• Part One: The Cruelty is the Point
• Part Two: The Wrong Side of the Tracks
• Part Three: Smoke and Mirrors
• Part Four: The Worst Investment Ever Made
• Epilogue: The Tenth Circle
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Index
• Copyright