TRUMP FAMILY INSIDER SPILLS THE BEANS ON DONALD

By Margaretta wa Gacheru (posted July 25, 2020)

Having booked my copy of ‘Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man’ the moment I got wind that Donald Trump’s niece was writing it, I knew the wait would be well worth it.

Mary Trump has her Ph.D in Psychology and is the first Trump family insider to write an expose on her late father’s brother, Donald. So I knew her book would not be an incidental work of non-fiction. I foresaw it being the most consequential of all the books written thus far about the current US president. More significant than the ones by Trump’s former National Security Advisor John Bolton or his former Secretary of Defense General James Mattis or even his 2016 presidential contender, Hillary Clinton.

I wasn’t wrong. Trump is an excellent writer who sticks to writing about what she knows from first-hand experience. Granted she editorializes and surmises a great deal about the psychology of all the members of the Trump family. But having a Master’s degree in comparative literature and doctorate in psychology, she is able to be articulate as well as self-reflective about not only her Uncle Donald and his father Fred, who was the real real-estate tycoon (not his boastful second son), about but all the family members who frequented the House (and empire) the Fred Senior built.

She doesn’t hide the way she and her brother Fritz were literally short-changed (in millions) by her aunts and uncles (spearheaded by Donald). Nor does she deny that she grew up believing her late father was a total failure, having died an alcoholic at aged 42. She was young when he passed on and thus, she hadn’t known the full story of her father’s struggle inside the Trump household until many years after his death.

Dr. Trump has been accused of writing a mean-spirited book simply because she was cut out of her grandfather’s will, given that Fred Senior had disinherited her dad soon after he died. But the story she tells should disabuse critics of what might seem to be spiteful motives for her writing such a revealing and damning book which reflects especially harshly on her Uncle Donald.

 Granted Mary and Fritz were grandchildren, not children of the late multi-millionaire. But they reasoned that their late father Fred Junior had been first-born of Fred’s siblings so they should have inherited at least a portion of their grandfather’s estate (especially as it amounted to almost $US1 billion).

The story is complicated and messy. But Mary Trump spells the circumstances out in simple, straight-forward language that I found compelling.

One of the most fascinating aspect of the book is the revelation of Mary’s role in the 2018 New York Times expose that unveiled the degree of tax fraud, theft and deceit involved in both Donald’s and his father’s money-making ventures. Somehow the brilliant investigative journalism of the NYT reporters did not dent Trump’s presidency. But Mary Trump’s book probably will, especially as the 2020 US Presidential elections is almost here.