Mary Trump Wants Journalists To Accurately Report On The Defining Issue Of Her Uncle's Presidency (His Mental State) Instead Of Explaining Away His Many Psychological Disorders Or Ignoring Them Completely

In Mary Trump's estimation, the White House is a "very expensive and well-guarded padded cell" for her uncle.

Donald Trump is "essentially institutionalized" in the West Wing, she writes in Too Much and Never Enough, which hit store shelves Tuesday. Indeed, Donald Trump has "been institutionalized for most of his adult life" in one way or the other. "There is no way to know how he would thrive, or even survive, on his own in the real world."

Donald Trump's niece sees him as "a petty, pathetic, little man", "ignorant", "incapable", and "lost in his own delusional spin". His "deep-seated insecurities have created in him a black hole of need that constantly requires the light of compliments that disappears as soon as he's soaked it in." Deep down, he "knows he has never been loved".

Michael Kruse, Politico, July 13, 2020:

Donald Trump is the damaged product of an absent mother and a sociopathic father.

That's in essence Mary Trump's assessment ... Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man. ... [It's] the most devastating, most valuable and all-around best Trump book since he started running for president. In the vast Trump literature, this one is something new.

That's because of the unprecedented access, and its pathos, which is because of the source—the president's only niece, the 55-year-old daughter of his oldest brother, who died at 42 in 1981 in her estimation as a result of a pathological, decades-long destruction at the hands of his own twisted kin. ...

[W]hat this book does do is help us understand him, offering the most incisive rendering yet of why he is the way he is.

No matter what happens in November, historians will have to contend with the influences that forged the personality of one of the most consequential presidents ever—and in Mary Trump's telling, the current occupant of the Oval Office ... is "a narcissist" whose "pathologies are so complex and his behaviors so often inexplicable that coming up with an accurate and comprehensive diagnosis would require a full battery of psychological and neuropsychological tests that he'll never sit for" ...

I asked Trump biographers—people who've spent extended periods of their lives attempting to plumb his psyche—what they thought of her book.

Michael D'Antonio told me he found it "chilling." And Tim O'Brien? He believes it'll be "indelible. ... It gives the deepest understanding of his family dynamics that anyone has provided, and how that shapes his psychosis, and why he's such a dangerous leader." ...

[Mary Trump writes that Donald Trump's mother] "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 often put herself first."

She was "emotionally and physically absent," she writes. "The five kids were essentially motherless."

Similarly unsparing are her descriptions of the president's father. The book actually reads at times like a portrait principally of him, sketching Fred Trump as a callous, sneering, domineering, lying, cheating, vindictive, workaholic bigot. ... He was ... "a high-functioning sociopath" who equated kindness with weakness and favored his second son at the disastrous expense of his four other children ...

"Fred," she writes, "dismantled his oldest son [Mary Trump's father] by devaluing and degrading every aspect of his personality and his natural abilities until all that was left was self-recrimination and a desperate need to please a man who had no use for him," she continues. "Fred destroyed Donald, too .... he short-circuited Donald's ability to develop and experience the entire spectrum of human emotion. By limiting Donald's access to his own feelings and rendering many of them unacceptable, Fred perverted his son's perception of the world and damaged his ability to live in it."

The upshot, in her judgment: "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," leading to "displays of narcissism, bullying, grandiosity," she concludes. "The rigid personality he developed as a result was a suit of armor that often protected him against pain and loss." ...

She presents her uncle ["an epic tragedy of parental failure"] as fundamentally and profoundly incapable of an empathetic or merely effective response to the challenges of this or any other era. "Donald," she concludes, "withdraws to his comfort zones—Twitter, Fox News—casting blame from afar, protected by a figurative or literal bunker. He rants about the weakness of others even as he demonstrates his own. But he can never escape the fact that he is and always will be a terrified little boy."

Dahlia Lithwick, Slate, July 13, 2020:

What is new and surprising is also that Mary Trump, who has a Ph.D. in clinical psychology, has given us a granular portrait of Trump's profound impairment: She says that her uncle has all nine clinical criteria for narcissism, although she insists that this diagnosis is only the tip of the psychological iceberg—he may also suffer from antisocial personality disorder, sociopathy, and/or dependent personality disorder, along with an undiagnosed learning disability that likely interferes with his ability to process information. ...

Too Much and Never Enough may be the first book that stipulates, in its first pages, that the president is irreparably damaged, and then turns a clinician's lens on the rest of us, the voters, the enablers, the flatterers, the hangers-on, and the worshippers. ... Mary Trump begins from the assumption that other analysis tends to end with: Donald Trump is lethally dangerous, stunningly incoherent, and pathologically incapable of caring about anyone but himself. So, what Mary Trump wants to know is: What the hell is wrong with everyone around him? As she writes in her prologue, "there's been very little effort to understand not only why he became what he is but how he's consistently failed up despite his glaring lack of fitness."

The book is thus actually styled as an indictment not of Donald Trump but of Trump's enablers. ... Mary Trump blames Fred Trump for Donald Trump's pathology, although she doesn't claim that her uncle is a tragic victim of abuse. She blames his family that propped him up (also her family, it should be noted), and then in concentric and expanding circles, the media that failed to scrutinize him, the banks that pretended he was the financial genius he was not, the Republican Party, and the "claque of loyalists" in the White House who continue to lie for him and to him in order to feed his insatiable ego and self-delusion. ... [W]hat Mary Trump describes here is not just her uncle's addiction to adulation, fame, money, and success, but a nation's—or some part of a nation's—unfathomable addiction to him.

The bulk of the book focuses on the tale of Mary and her brother Fritz's abandonment by the rest of the Trump clan. ... [It] makes Mary, who has been let down by the so-called adults in the room almost since her infancy, perfectly positioned to explain and translate what happens to otherwise high-functioning adults—her aunt Maryanne, a competent federal judge; the lawyers and accountants tasked with fulfilling Donald's whims and hiding his failings; the sycophants and Republicans and evangelical Christians who support his campaign unquestioningly; and the officials who now populate the Senate, the Cabinet, and the Oval Office. All of them appear to be reasonably mentally sound. Yet they all cover for Donald, at the expense of real suffering and genuine human loss, just as the Trump clan ignored Freddy's disintegration and death. Mary Trump's childhood trauma has become America's trauma, and she really wants to know how that came to be. Again.

The section of the book that has garnered the most attention is likely Mary's claim that Trump cannot be evaluated for pathologies because he is "in the West Wing, essentially institutionalized" and that he has in fact "been institutionalized for most of his adult life. So there is no way to know how he would thrive, or even survive, on his own in the real world." We are not used to seeing entities like the White House described in this way—a "very expensive and well-guarded padded cell"—as a means of protection for the broken man inside rather than as a platform from which a leader can change the world. And her ultimate point is that even a shattered psyche, buffered from the real world, can still do irreparable damage to it. ...

[A]s Mary Trump is quick to observe ... Trump never, ever learns his lesson. Being cosseted, lied to, defended, and puffed up means that Donald Trump knows that, "no matter what happens, no matter how much damage he leaves in his wake, he will be OK." ... Trump's superpower isn't great vision or great leadership but rather that he is so tiny. Taking him on for transactional purposes may seem like not that big a deal at first, but the moment you put him in your pocket, you become his slave. It is impossible to escape his orbit without having to admit a spectacular failure in moral and strategic judgment, which almost no one can stomach. Donald Trump's emptiness is simply a mirror of the emptiness of everyone who propped him up. It's that reflection that becomes unendurable. This pattern, as Mary writes, "guaranteed a cascade of increasingly consequential failures that would ultimately render all of us collateral damage." ... [They continue to prop Trump up] because they can't admit the payoff is never coming, and to save themselves from the embarrassment of having to admit they were catastrophically wrong.

Eric Boehlert, Press Run, July 13, 2020:

In her widely touted new book ... clinical psychologist Mary Trump paints a devastating portrait of a deeply dysfunctional Trump family, and points to that as the root of the president's disturbing, antisocial behavior. ... "Donald today is much as he was at three years old: incapable of growing, learning or evolving, unable to regulate his emotions, moderate his responses, or take in and synthesize information," she writes.

Trump's niece also complains that the press hasn't been keyed into the defining issue of this presidency. "Mary takes the media to task for searching for a 'strategy' in anything Donald does and for soft-pedaling what she describes as multiple psychological disorders," Bloomberg's Tim O'Brien noted.

Mary's right about the media and its thin coverage of Trump's troubling mental health. There's not a working member of the Washington press corps today who watches Trump day in and day out and thinks, 'He's seems stable, and I have no questions about his mental capacity.' They all know it's an alarming, ever-present issue. But newsrooms don't want to suffer the backlash—the shouts of "Liberal media bias!"—that would rain down on journalists who tackle the story, even though it's so obviously newsworthy.

Once the press opens the Pandora's box by reporting aggressively on the president's personality disorders, that would require constant media coverage for months to come, including regular interviews with mental health experts in an effort to inform the public about the president's likely deteriorating condition and psychological impairments. (Currently, the issue only becomes news when Trump himself raises it.)

Just last month, Trump in rapid succession accused a cable TV host of murder, claimed a 75-year-old peace activist hospitalized by police was a terrorist sympathizer, charged Barack Obama with being a criminal mastermind, and threatened to unleash gunfire on Minneapolis protesters. Yet Trump's emotional instability, the essential issue of his presidency, has become the third rail of American journalism — a topic so dangerous it cannot be touched as a news story. There appear to be two simple truths in play: Trump fits the textbook definition of a psychopath, and newsrooms are too afraid to touch that story. (Opinion writers are not.) ...

Instead, much of the press clings to the fantasy that Trump remains mentally stable, and that the White House remains a functioning entity. It's not, as the Covid-19 pandemic clearly illustrates, and specifically as the administration's push to re-open schools highlights. The administration has absolutely no plan to help facilitate that gigantic undertaking. So no, there is no functioning White House today. Just like Trump is not a functioning, stable person.

[Mary Trump writes:] "He'll withhold ventilators or steal supplies from states that have not groveled sufficiently. What Donald thinks is justified retaliation is, in this context, mass murder."

Mary's insights come just weeks after Tony Schwartz, the ghostwriter for Trump's famous book, The Art of the Deal, and now a close chronicler and critic of the president, wrote that he's convinced Donald is a dangerous "psychopath," and that the issue needs to be widely discussed. "We can observe every day which psychopathic traits Trump manifests in his behavior. The highly regarded Hare Psychopathy Check list enumerates 20 of them. By my count Trump clearly demonstrates 16 of the traits and his overall score is far higher than the average prison inmate," Schwartz wrote. "The trait that most distinguishes psychopaths is the utter absence of conscience — the capacity to lie, cheat, steal, and inflict pain to achieve their ends without a scintilla of guilt or shame, as Trump so demonstrably does." ...

Appearing on CNN's "Reliable Sources" on Sunday, Schwartz, like Mary, scolded the media for "abdicating" their role in covering Trump's pressing mental health issues. When CNN host Brian Stelter said he didn't want to believe Schwartz's claim that Trump doesn't care about the 130,000-plus pandemic deaths in the U.S., the author's response was emphatic: "He's incapable."

Schwartz is right. Trump's personality disorders are the most important story of the his presidency, and the press needs to stop downplaying it.