It's like an episode of Big Brother. This window into Trump family life is deeply cringeworthy, yet strangely compelling. You can't help but watch, albeit while half covering you...
It's like an episode of Big Brother. This window into Trump family life is deeply cringeworthy, yet strangely compelling. You can't help but watch, albeit while half covering your eyes. It fits the narrative of the Trump presidency perfectly, in which the White House has been like the set of a reality TV show.
The rest of the Trump family unsuccessfully sued to prevent the book, by his niece Mary, from being published. That's unsurprising, given that it tells a tale of fear, greed, narcissism and a degree of psychological abuse that, by Mary Trump's estimation, ran deep in the Trump clan and formed the man who is now the President of the United States.
"He's a clown," his older sister Maryanne tells Mary during the 2016 campaign. "This will never happen."
As the author points out, this is the first real family insight into the creation of Donald Trump, and it makes for eye-watering reading.
"The media failed to notice that not one member of Donald's family apart from his children, son-in-law and his current wife said a word in support of him during the entire campaign," she writes.
In many ways, though, the book is more about Mary's father Freddy than her uncle Donald. And her seething anger colours the narrative from the beginning. Fred jnr should have been the heir to the Trump empire, but, she says, was so undermined and bullied by Fred Trump snr that he developed deep depression and alcoholism and died of heart disease at 42.
"My father had withered and died beneath the cruelty and contempt of my grandfather," she says. "We need to start with my grandfather and his own need for recognition, a need that propelled him to encourage Donald's reckless hyperbole and unearned confidence that hid Donald's pathological weaknesses and insecurities."
Consider Donald Trump's Twitter feed and his propensity for name-calling and lashing out, and making outlandish claims and promises.
Mary Trump is a clinical psychologist and theorises that Donald felt abandoned when his mother became seriously ill when he was a young child, and his workaholic father ignored the five children. He learnt, she says, from their father's scathing treatment of Donald's elder brother to never show weakness, even if that meant lying and cheating to succeed.
She claims, for example, that he paid a friend to sit his exams to get into university.
"As Donald grew up, he was forced to become his own cheerleader … he began to believe his own hype, even as he paradoxically suspected on a very deep level that nobody else did."
The book points out that while the reality show The Apprentice traded on his image as a self-made deal-maker, in truth he was made by his father, and was in effect a failed tycoon. Yet by the time Donald Trump kicked off his 2016 presidential campaign, many Americans had bought his success story.
Saying something often enough that it becomes the truth remains the bedrock of Trumpism. Donald's surviving siblings, Maryanne, Robert and Elizabeth "had learned early on that there was no point in contradicting their father's obvious preference", she says. Their role was "defer to him as though nobody was as important as he was." A long list of former White House staff and advisers could be described in a similar way.
Speaking of cringeing, moderate Republicans may do so reading this deeply scathing book.
"First, they remain silent no matter what outrages are committed; then they make themselves complicit by not acting. Ultimately, they find they are expendable when Donald Trump needs a scapegoat," Mary Trump writes.
Mary Trump has denied that she wrote the book for money, or out of bitterness after she and her brother were denied their late father's share of the empire when Fred Trump snr died. But why didn't she speak out about her deep reservations about a Trump presidency in 2016?
In part, she says it's the pandemic that has prompted her to do so now.
If Mary Trump expects this book to sway voters, that seems unlikely. It will only confirm the biases of those who read it. Those who support Donald Trump simply won't.
She dismisses any suggestion that there is a strategy behind her uncle's presidency. This is something I don't entirely agree with, having closely observed his use of chaos theory to control the narrative, while implementing his desired policy changes under the cover of distraction.
Mary Trump though, acknowledges that above all else he's learnt to survive. "No matter what happens, no matter how much damage he leaves in his wake, he will be OK."
Source: Zoe Daniel is a former US bureau chief for ABC News.
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