TOO MUCH AND NEVER ENOUGH

De Amazon — TBR

This memoir gives us a tale of deceits and disappointments in a dysfunctional family. The dysfunction starts with Fred Trump, the patriarch of the family.1 Son of an immigrant from Germany, he took over his father Friedrich's construction business at the age of 13, when Friedrich died in the 1918 influenza epidemic. He was dedicated to making money and through diligence and a knack for cultivating local politicians and others of influence,2 he built a real-estate empire and became wealthy. He admired a kind of macho toughness that had no time for softer emotions such as a man typically feels for his wife and children, or for knowledge and the arts for their own sake. His concept of the ideal man was a killer — not someone given to violence, but a man driven to succeed in business at all costs. In the end, he paid an enormous cost for this; but the greater tragedy of the story is the great costs he imposed on his family and, indirectly, on America as a whole.

Fred's wife, a woman from Scotland's Outer Hebrides, was named Mary. His oldest son was named Fred (often "Freddy" in the book.) Freddy's daughter by his wife Linda, the author of this book, is also named Mary, and she has a brother named Fritz. Donald was Fred Senior's second male child (the fourth of five children: two girls, three boys.) As the younger Mary tells it, Fred's eldest son did not measure up to his idea of a proper scion of his family, the man who would take over his business empire. He constantly humiliated Freddy, instilling in him a poisonous sense of inadequacy. Watching this treatment and seeking to avoid a similar fate, Donald remade himself into a distorted image of his father: someone without empathy or the willingness to cooperate with peers, but also without the business ability and self-discipline his father possessed.

To make a long story short, the first generation of the family (Fred's children) ended up at odds with each other while maintaining a superficial decorum. Special scorn fell on Freddy; try as he might, he never measured up to his father's expectations. After some time in relatively unimportant jobs for Trump Management, he managed to break away to pursue his love of flying, and became a pilot for Trans World Airlines. But he was already drinking heavily. After a year, TWA forced him to resign. He spent more years with Trump Management, but the drinking eventually killed him at the age of 42.

Donald became the apple of his father's eye, and after graduating from college he was given top jobs in Trump Management. But here too, per Mary's analysis, Fred was deluding himself: he had rested his hopes on an unworthy successor. As time went on, Donald became more brash and flamboyant; he started grandiose projects that he lacked the acumen to carry through. Fred supported him through bankruptcy after bankruptcy, because Donald provided the showmanship he never achieved himself.

At last Fred, healthy into his eighties, began to fail. Dementia set in. At one point, Donald schemed to take over his father's estate by inserting a codicil into the will disinheriting his siblings. This was discovered and reversed. But after Fred's death, Mary and Fritz found themselves with next to nothing in the way of inheritance from their grandfather's vast fortune.3 When they protested, their health insurance was cut off. Long years of litigation resulted finally in a settlement.

So, after another decade or so, we come to 2016 and Donald's fluke election to the presidency. It was at this point that Mary decided to write her tell-all book. I don't consider her motives venal; she had earned a PhD in psychology and established her own career. There is no doubt that the information she provides here illuminates an essential formative aspect of Donald Trump's character. Furthermore, I think she provides a largely honest account. But that account is pure narrative; it lacks corroborative detail in many places, and there are no footnotes or endnotes. It does have a good index, which goes some way to redeeming it. In the end, though, I do not trust it completely. The primary defect, to my mind, is vagueness about her father's drinking.4 She does not say when it first became a problem, how much he drank, or exactly how it affected his job performance at TWA. If forced to assign a number, I would call it 90% credible. To sum up, I mark it down one notch but rate it a must-read. This is why it's a must-read:

To contact Chris Winter, send email to this address.
Copyright © 2020 Christopher P. Winter. All rights reserved.
This page was last modified on 25 September 2020.