How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man
By Marivir R. Montebon
New York – A must read!
Mary Trump’s Too Much and Never Enough (Simon and Schuster, 2020) deserves a 5 star rating because of the clarity of her writing. Her being a family member and a clinical psychologist gives her credibility to disclose Pres. Trump’s emotionally-deficient upbringing and the overall dysfunction of their family.
Trump’s lack of quality emotional bond with his parents has been pointed out by the author as a major factor for the president’s character. A child deprived of emotional support would tend to seek so much attention, and yet develop a sense of insecurity that anything would never be enough is the author’s deep yet non-judgmental message in this book.
During the last presidential election campaign, I thought I saw a five-year-old brat in an old man’s body. Amazing how Mary Trump looks at his character as a stuck three-year-old.
Being a part of the immediate family, Mary Trump has intimate knowledge of their history and relations and thus writes with first-hand information. As a behaviorist, she has the capacity for using a psychological framework for understanding human behavior and parental influence on children.
Highlighted here are two different sons of the same powerful patriarch Fred Trump which Mary Trump describes as cruel and a sociopath – highly driven by material achievement and detached from emotions (pointing out that outright expressions of love and kindness as weakness). This parental style produces a hesitant rebel and despondent older son Freddy who wanted to escape from his own father’s rigid and humiliating ways and a ‘mini me’ in the favorite younger son Donald.
Frustrated by his older son’s lack of interest and aggressive character, the old Trump turned to bolster Donald and develop him to be the heir to his empire. Mary Trump claimed it was the old Trump who enabled Donald to be the bold, bully-type, and ‘killer’ in business that he has become. He was always there to cover-up or save his son’s missteps in business.
For what it’s worth, Mary Trump renders a full disclosure of her family’s dysfunction and unmasks her grandfather’s hard work as not what media had painted it to be. Fred Trump, she writes, had shrewdly used government funds to build his real estate empire. She reveals further that her uncle Donald had become great at publicity and cover-ups to hide his failings.
Written at a time of Trump’s presidency, the timing at which Mary Trump has released the book is in question, as that of being politically motivated. And because she and her brother Fritz are apparently disinherited by the older Trump, a malicious intent of writing the book for vendetta has been imputed as well.
Regardless. The book is a narrative of Pres. Trump’s apparent lack of empathy and superfluous ego that now adds anecdotal color to Freud’s psychoanalytic theory and Adler’s superiority-inferiority individual therapy. #
