On Latest Tell-All by Trump’s Niece: Oh Mary… -The iPINIONS Journal

As a reminder, here is how I previewed this highly anticipated book in a commentary on June 18:

His niece has written a family exposé that promises to make Mommie Dearest look like a lullaby. The book, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man, by Mary L. Trump, is scheduled for release on July 28. …

[It will] reportedly provide receipts for what Trump shows us every day, namely that he’s an ignorant, backstabbing, craven, lying, self-centered shyster.

(“Supreme Court Restores the Obama DACA Legacy Trump Hoped to Destroy. ‘Dreamers’ Can Wake Up!” The iPINIONS Journal, June 18, 2020)

Thanks, ironically (or perhaps all too predictably) to President Trump’s bungling efforts to block it, public interest in this book is spreading faster than Covid-19. Mary’s publisher, could not resist seizing the opportunity for a quick windfall.

Accordingly, Simon & Schuster not only moved up the release date to July 14, but delivered advanced marketing copies to news rooms across America to boot.

I hasten to note, however, that I am loath to join the frothing media influencers who show no compunction about disclosing every tidbit Mary chronicles in her titillating book. Instead, I shall suffice to share just a few general points, which I hope will tease more than satiate.

She draws on her training as a clinical psychologist to share searing insights into why Trump blusters, bullies, and brags to compensate for congenital ignorance and raging insecurities. Truth be told, though, Mary mostly affirms what I’ve been defining for years as Trump’s signature character trait:

The psychopathology afoot here is called projection. It is defined by people attributing to others traits, faults, and blame that inhere in themselves. And it explains almost every insult Trump has hurled at his opponents throughout this presidential campaign.

So when you hear him calling other people crooked, insecure, weak, beholden to special interests, liars, etc., be mindful that he’s just revealing self-conscious truths about himself, dimwittedly.

(“Forget the Clinton Foundation. Shut Down the Trump Organization!” The iPINIONS Journal, August 26, 2016)

But, boy oh boy, talk about serving revenge cold! For example, Mary details how Trump

Conspired with her uncles and aunts to scam her and her brother out of millions in inheritance.
Not only had his sister do his homework but paid a classmate to take his SATs. It was the only way this “stable genius” could get into the prestigious Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania that he’s always bragging about. Of course, only clinical projection explains why he spent his presidential campaign feigning demands for Obama to release his academic transcripts. This, while threatening every school he ever attended with a bankrupting lawsuit if any of them ever released his.
Ogled her sexually, the way he often ogles his own daughter Ivanka.
Betrayed his hollow head for business when his pitch for The Art of the Comeback consisted of 10-pages of bitter, petty grievances and insults directed at supermodels and A-list starlets who rejected his boorish advances.
Is a laughingstock even among his own siblings – with sister Maryanne dismissing him as a “clown” who “has no principles. None.”

That said, I’ll end with two comparative I-said, she-said quotes, which put my allusion to Mary affirming what I’ve been writing for years into literal context. Her excerpts are courtesy of yesterday’s edition of USA Today.

I. On World leaders manipulating Trump with idle flattery

I said:

Chinese President Xi will make sure Trump feels feted like the most important man to ever set foot in China. Because all leaders now know that, despite his ‘America First’ rhetoric, that’s all that really matters to Trump.

More to the point, Trump made quite a show, during his address to the South Korean National Assembly yesterday, of demanding that China cut diplomatic ties with and economic supplies to North Korea. But Xi knows from experience that it only takes a little flattery to get him to forget these demands.

(“China, Next Stop on Trump’s Traveling Circus Through Far East,” The iPINIONS Journal, November 8, 2017)

I have written on this embarrassing and foreboding theme in many other commentaries, including “Trump Is So Self-Absorbed, He Thinks Kim Is Equally Susceptible to Idle Flattery,” February 28, 2019; “Every Dictator Believes He Can Play Trump Like a Puppet on a String…,” October 11, 2019; and “Putin Cuckolds Trump with MbS Over Oil,” May 11, 2020.

She said:

His pathologies have rendered him so simple-minded that it takes nothing more than repeating to him the things he says to and about himself dozens of times a day – he’s the smartest, the greatest, the best – to get him to do whatever they want, whether it’s imprisoning children in concentration camps, betraying allies, implementing economy-crushing tax cuts, or degrading every institution that’s contributed to the United States’ rise and the flourishing of liberal democracy.

II. On Trump’s perverse relationship with his most ardent supporters

I said:

The legacy of his publicity stunt masquerading as a presidential campaign should be a Trump brand so tarnished that the only people willing to patronize his businesses are the fools who voted for him.

Given that the vast majority of them are poor and uneducated, by his own estimation, it would only be a matter of time before he’s forced into the mother of all his bankruptcies (i.e., for failing to make payments on the debt he brags about using to finance his businesses). And trust me, this Croesus-envying narcissist would rather go bankrupt than depend on the rabble-rousing suckers who attend his rallies to keep his real-estate empire afloat.

(“‘I can’t hear, or see, or say that name [TRUMP] without spitting’,” The iPINIONS Journal, March 14, 2016)

I have written on the Faustian gamble his supporters took on him in many other commentaries, including “(White) Evangelicals Supporting Donald Trump like Israelites Worshipping Golden Calf,” January 20, 2016; “Republicans Abandon Faith and Values to Hail Trump as ‘Chosen by God’,” March 6, 2019; and “P.T. Barnum Biographer Validates My Analogies to Trump,” October 7, 2019.

She said:

Donald’s need for affirmation is so great that he doesn’t seem to notice that the largest group of his supporters are people he wouldn’t condescend to be seen with outside of a rally.

That said, I urge you to buy this book. I argued in “Two Trump Tell-Alls: Boycott Bolton’s! But There’s Something About Mary’s…” on June 22 that Bolton’s book was motivated by money-grubbing cravenness that bordered on treason, whereas Mary’s was by self-sacrificing heroism that unfolded on Homeland.

Alas, despite my call for a boycott, Bolton’s sold nearly 800,000 in its first week. Therefore, I shall be crestfallen if Mary’s does not sell at least twice as many.

Enjoy!