The release date of Mary L. Trump's book Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man has been moved up to July 14 (next Tuesday!).
Details are spilling out, as media receive review copies. From the book's cover:
Today, Donald 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. His father, Fred ... firmly believed that dealing with young children was not his duty . . . From the beginning, Fred's self-interest skewed his priorities.Mary Trump is a clinical psychologist and she states that Fred Sr. "destroyed" his son Donald by short-circuiting his "ability to develop and experience the entire spectrum of human emotion".
Donald's 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. ...When she writes about Fred Sr. that "the cruelty was the point", it sounds exactly like Donald Trump:
Donald is not simply weak, his ego is a fragile thing that must be bolstered every moment because he knows deep down that he is nothing of what he claims to be.
One of the few pleasures my grandfather had, aside from making money, was humiliating others. Convinced of his rightness in all situations, buoyed by his stunning success and a belief in his superiority, he had to punish any challenge to his authority swiftly and decisively and put the challenger in his place.Which makes you wonder what the hell was done to Fred Trump Sr.?
The Washington Post shared some of the contents:
She describes Trump's father, Fred, as not just domineering but a "sociopath." He was verbally abusive to his children, especially Fred Jr., insisting that they become "killers" unhindered by emotion. "Fred perverted his son's perception of the world and damaged his ability to live in it," she writes. ...If Donald Trump ever possessed any virtues as a human being, his niece writes, they were eradicated by a cruel father who saw apologies as a sign of weakness.
When Fred Sr. died, Mary was told his estate was worth only around $30 million; the portion of that figure that became her inheritance was the subject of the dispute that led to a financial settlement and her NDA. She later gave Fred Sr.'s business records to the New York Times, which published a blockbuster story showing that the patriarch had transferred over $1 billion to his children (a scheme mostly carried out after Fred Jr.'s death), potentially defrauding the U.S. government of half a billion dollars in tax revenue.
On a trip to Mar-a-Lago when she was 29, Mary came out in a bathing suit and shorts. "Holy shit, Mary. You're stacked," her uncle said to her, with all the grace and sensitivity we've come to expect from him.
For a time, Trump hired Mary to ghost-write his book "The Art of the Comeback." At one point a Trump employee sent her some pages of material Trump wanted to include in the book. "It was an aggrieved compendium of women he had expected to date but who, having refused him, were suddenly the worst, ugliest, and fattest slobs he'd ever met," including Madonna and Olympic figure skater Katarina Witt.
At a White House dinner in 2017, the president gestured toward his son Eric's wife; the two at that point had been together for eight years. "I barely even knew who the fuck she was, honestly, but then she gave a great speech during the campaign in Georgia supporting me," Trump said.
"Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong-Un, and Mitch McConnell, all of whom bear more than a passing psychological resemblance to Fred," Mary writes, "recognized … that Donald's checkered personal history and his unique personality flaws make him extremely vulnerable to manipulation by smarter, more powerful men."
Fred hated it when his oldest son screwed up or failed to intuit what was required of him, but he hated it even more when, after being taken to task, Freddie apologized. 'Sorry, Dad,' Fred would mock him. Fred wanted his oldest son to be a 'killer' in his parlance (for what reason it's impossible to say — collecting rent in Coney Island wasn't exactly a high-risk endeavor in the 1950s), and he was temperamentally the opposite of that. ...While Donald was constantly verbally abused, Mary Trump writes:
For some of the Trump kids, lying was a way of life, and for Fred's oldest son, lying was defensive — not simply a way to circumvent his father's disapproval or to avoid punishment, as it was for the others, but a way to survive. For Donald, lying was primarily a mode of self-aggrandizement meant to convince other people he was better than he actually was.
his personality [also] served his father's purpose. That's what sociopaths do: they co-opt others and use them toward their own ends — ruthlessly and efficiently, with no tolerance for dissent or resistance. 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.Donald Trump has claimed for many years that his admittance to the Wharton School of Finance at the University of Pennsylvania was proof that he was a "super genius". But Mary Trump reveals that Donald's oldest sister, Maryanne, "had been doing his [high school] homework for him" and when it was time for his SATs, Donald "enlisted a smart kid with a reputation for being a good test taker". (The Wharton admissions officer was a close friend of Fred Jr. and he saw no evidence of a "super genius" when he interviewed young Donald. Also, how many MENSA members threaten to take their high school and college to court if they release their "super genius" transcripts?)
White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany told reporters that she
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