Mary L Trump's devastating left hook trumps prez

Roopinder Singh

Advertisement

Family gatherings are fun, and someone inevitably airs out certain embarrassing details. And, there is always someone who is on the other side of the tracks, and one way to get even with the more privileged is to drum up humiliating history.

Donald Trump’s niece Mary’s recounting of the tale of Trump is a comeuppance that the US President tried hard to stop. The morbid fascination that the Trump saga inspires has guaranteed sales around the world, and an instant exposure that would be the envy of the spin-master himself.

What does the President’s not-so-favourite niece, daughter of his late elder brother Freddy, think of him? “Lying, playing to the lowest common denominator, cheating, and sowing division are all he knows.” Yes, this statement reflects the tone of the take no-prisoners approach of the book as one Trump takes on another.

Let’s start with her grandparents: “Whereas Mary was needy, Fred seemed to have no emotional needs at all. In fact, he was a high-functioning sociopath.” They had five children: Maryanne (now a retired Federal judge), Frederick Jr (Mary’s late father who died in 1981 after a long struggle with his father’s disapproval and alcoholism), Elizabeth, Donald, and Robert. “Like planets orbiting a particularly large sun, the five of them were kept apart by the force of his will, even as they moved along the paths he set for them.”

Fred created the persona of Donald, and stiffed the rest of the family, micro controlling their lives. “Everyone in my family experienced a strange combination of privilege and neglect,” says the author.

The siblings don’t have a high opinion of the President. “What has he even accomplished on his own?” Mary asked her aunt. “Well,” Maryanne said, as dry as the Sahara, “he has had five bankruptcies.”As the author points out, the media failed to question why no one in the Trump family (except his nuclear unit) said a word in his support.

Donald’s bankruptcies, his playing fast and loose with rules, lack of even basic decency, were all seen and ignored, just as it happened during his campaigning. “I began to feel as though I were watching my family history, and Donald’s central role in it, playing out on a grand scale. Donald’s competition in the race was being held to higher standards, just as my father had always been, while he continued to get away with — and even be rewarded for — increasingly crass, irresponsible, and despicable behaviour. This can’t possibly be happening again, I thought. But it was,” rues the author.

“It felt as though 6,29,79,636 voters had chosen to turn this country into a macro version of my malignantly dysfunctional family, she says, recounting her reaction to President Trump’s victory. The state of affairs in the White House does feel like it is a replay of sorts of the family drama that was the staple of the Trump household. “The people with access to him are weaker than Donald is, more craven, but just as desperate. Their futures are directly dependent on his success and favour. They either fail to see or refuse to believe that their fate will be the same as that of anyone who pledged loyalty to him in the past.”

As Mary says: “Donald has always struggled for legitimacy—as an adequate replacement for Freddy, as a Manhattan real estate developer or casino tycoon, and now as the occupant of the Oval Office who can never escape the taint of being utterly without qualification or the sense that his “win” was illegitimate… His cruelty serves, in part, as a means to distract both us and himself from the true extent of his failures. The more egregious his failures become, the more egregious his cruelty becomes.”

What do we make of the book? It is revealing without many sensational disclosures — by now we are quite ready to believe that Trump cheated in his SATs — yet it is an intimate account of a family of a person who has turned the White House into a circus.

“He is as incapable of adjusting to changing circumstances as he is of becoming “presidential”,” says the niece whose history, sense of hurt over the treatment of her father and her family, clinical psychologist credentials, and ability to tell a story all combine into a devastating attack on the incumbent President of the United States of America. Familiar and horrifyingly fascinating, the book sheds harsh light on the affairs of a family that tries its best took control the narrative and restrict access.