I'm reading Mary Trump's book and holy shiiiit.

Here's a thread of stuff that punches me in the gut.
"...we can’t evaluate his day-to-day functioning because he is, in the West Wing, essentially institutionalized. Donald has 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."
COVID-19, a looming depression, social division, etc "have created a perfect storm of catastrophes that no one is less equipped than my uncle to manage."

The biggest yikes is the lack of hyperbole
"it felt as though 62,979,636 voters had chosen to turn this country into a macro version of my malignantly dysfunctional family."

I'm not even a Trump and I relate to this
"Donald, who understands nothing about history, constitutional principles, geopolitics, diplomacy (or anything else, really)"
"In the midst of obscene plenty, one person ... would benefit himself and, conditionally, his immediate family, his cronies, and his sycophants; for the rest, there would never be enough to go around, which was exactly how my grandfather ran our family."
"By the time this book is published, hundreds of thousands of American lives will have been sacrificed on the altar of Donald’s hubris and willful ignorance. If he is afforded a second term, it would be the end of American democracy."
I just. Seriously, read this book. It somehow manages to be heartbreaking without evoking a shred of pity or sympathy for Donald Trump.

My heart breaks for everyone else.
"I hope this book will end the practice of referring to Donald’s “strategies” or “agendas,” as if he operates according to any organizing principles. He doesn’t."

Mary Trump makes it clear that Trump is as he is largely because he has never, ever faced accountability. Ever.
Trump's mom "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."

Boy, that sounds familiar.

(Unlike Trump, though, my dad was not a garbage nightmare)
Holy shit

Trump's grandfather came to the US IN ORDER TO DODGE THE DRAFT IN GERMANY

When Germany wouldn't let him return, the US took him

And he later DIED IN THE 1918 FLU PANDEMIC

I MEAN

THE HYPOCRISY
This feels like a good time to point out that my own great-grandmothers, Trump's parents' contemporaries, would refer to Trump as "ethnic" because his grandfather got here from Germany around the turn of the century, while they can trace their families back to the Mayflower.
My great-grandmothers would have called him "ethnic" and "new money" and probably forbade us all from voting for him on those grounds.

"At least one can pronounce 'Rodham Clinton,'" I can hear them sniff.

Which goes to show you racism is a major mindfuck
Trump's dad's fortune - you know, the one Trump inherited and then blew on bankrupting casinos - was possible largely due to the Federal Housing Administration.

Has Trump destroyed the FHA yet? I lose track.
I find it very unfair that Donald Trump and Alan Rickman were born in the same year but only the shitty one is still alive.
"When the first Italian American family moved to the neighborhood in the 1950s, Fred was scandalized."

I KNOW SOME FOLKS WHO WERE SCANDALIZED WHEN YOUR DAD ROLLED INTO TOWN IN 1885, MY DUDE
"As Donald was later alleged to do with Trump Tower and his casinos in Atlantic City, Fred was said to have worked discreetly with the Mob in order to keep the peace."

WHAT?

NO

SURELY NOT
Trump's dad was an acolyte of Norman Vincent Peale, peddler of a proto-prosperity gospel slash "The Secret" type philosophy that basically argued that if you believed you were rich, you'd be rich (and you deserved it for being such a good believer).

...wow.
"Weakness was perhaps the greatest sin of all, and Fred worried that Freddy was more like his own brother, John, the MIT professor: soft and, though not unambitious, interested in the wrong things, such as engineering and physics, which Fred found esoteric and unimportant."
"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)"

Donald ended up being what Freddy wasn't. It was the only way to get something like approval.
"In other words, protecting his love for his father was more important than protecting himself from his father’s abuse."

Relatability factor 1000
On Donald Trump: "A large minority of people still confuse his arrogance for strength, his false bravado for accomplishment, and his superficial interest in them for charisma."
As a kid, Donald Trump apparently enjoyed tormenting his kid brother enough to get his brother in trouble for lashing out or defending himself.

I bet he pulled the wings off butterflies, too.
"Mary remained a bystander. She didn’t intervene in the moment and didn’t comfort her son, acting as if it weren’t her place to do so."

Starting to understand why Trump hates women, especially powerful women, so much.
Omg

When Donald was seven, his older brother dumped a bowl of mashed potatoes on Donald's head to get Donald to stop tormenting their younger brother.

Donald never got over it. Ever. He pouted when it came up at a family dinner in 2017.

He cannot. Deal. with embarrassment.
"Encouraged by his father, Donald eventually started to believe his own hype."

I have wondered whether Trump believes Trump's bullshit. Apparently so.
This seems incredibly important given the upcoming election:

"Anything that helped you maintain power was by definition right, even if it wasn’t always fair."

A lesson Mary Trump says Donald learned from his father and also at military school.
Trump's older brother joined the National Guard after college, which their father disapproved of: "For Fred, who had no use for military service, it was a waste of his employee’s time."

Starting to see where Private Bone Spurs gets his contempt for the armed forces.
"Donald was enabled from the beginning, every one of his projects funded and supported by Fred and then by myriad other enablers right up to the present."
One of Agatha Christie's Parker Pyne stories features Pyne during a rich women's ennui by turning her into a peasant farmer.

I often wonder what Donald Trump would do if he woke up in a similar situation.
*curing
"Donald may not have understood the origin of their father’s contempt for Freddy... but he had the bully’s unerring instinct for finding the most effective way to undermine an adversary."
"Fred was, and always had been, the ultimate arbiter of his children’s worth (which is why, even late into her seventies, my aunt Maryanne continued to yearn for her long-dead father’s praise)."

I've watched my 85yo grandmother do this for her mother, dead 20+ years, and 😭
According to Mary Trump, Trump's sister did his homework for him in undergrad, and he hired someone to take his SATs for him.

I almost hope there is a libel suit so we can all see the juicy receipts.
To give you an idea of how big a dick Trump's dad was: Fred Trump refused to fix a gaping hole in the wall in the apt his son Fred Jr rented from him. When Jr tried to buy a house, Fred blocked his mortgage.

All because Fred blamed Jr for a bad real estate deal.
Even though all the kids had trust funds, the three oldest were basically in poverty in their 20s. Because Fred controlled the funds, which meant they had to ask for access, and asking for help = showing weakness. Which Fred would immediately punish.

Wow, this sounds familiar.
The oldest got by by asking her mom for "change for laundry." Her mother would give her the change from the laundry rooms in Trump apartment buildings - which she collected in Crisco cans.
"my grandfather appointed Donald vice president of several companies that fell under the Trump Management umbrella, named him “manager” of a building he didn’t actually have to manage, gave him “consulting” fees, and “hired” him as a banker."

Donald was 22.
I just.

When I was 22, I was being told to be grateful for my non-living-wage entry-level job that paid me enough to live with two roommates, kind of.

As Millennials say, "As if life would ever just hand you lemons."
"Donald discovered he had a taste for the seamier side of dealing with contractors and navigating the political and financial power structures that undergirded the world of New York City real estate."

"Drain the swamp"? Dude has been drinking swamp water for decades.
Fred Trump charged Jr's family rent even though Jr's family were part owners of the building (the one with the wall Fred refused to fix).

Did that money go into the Jr family's accounts? Haha no it did not (at least not from what I can tell from this book).
My great-grandmothers with the racism would also have called the Trumps "new money," shorthand for "rich but still trash."

On that, I completely agree.
Why Trump thought he could hack it as POTUS:

"Fred promoted Donald, then only twenty-four, to the position of president of Trump Management. He’d been on the job for only three years and had very little experience and even fewer qualifications, but Fred didn’t seem to mind."
This book's title should have been BECAUSE NO ONE TOLD HIM NO.
Oh, and that bad real estate deal that Fred screwed Jr out of a house over?

FRED MADE $1.3 MILLION OFF IT.

That's in 1970s money.

Fuuuuck this guy.
Mary Trump describes Donald's job as "being driven around Manhattan by a chauffeur whose salary his father’s company paid, in a Cadillac his father’s company leased to 'scope out properties'."

Also "lying about his accomplishments" and refusing to rent to Black people.
Fred Trump collected wooden Indians.

Like, the old cigar mascot kind.

He had a basement and office full of them, according to Mary Trump's memory.
"In 1973, the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division sued Donald and my grandfather for violating the 1968 Fair Housing Act by refusing to rent to die Schwarze, as my grandfather put it."
"When Donald hitched his fortunes to the likes of Roy Cohn, the only things he had going for him were Fred’s largesse and a carefully cultivated but delusional belief in his own brilliance and superiority."
"Fred was willing to stake millions of dollars on his son because he believed he could leverage the skills Donald did have...to achieve the one thing that had always eluded him: a level of fame that matched his ego and satisfied his ambition in a way money alone never could."
Years later, 62 million voters would stake their votes on Trump for precisely the same reason.
"Despite the fact that he’d brought it all on himself, he seemed put upon rather than humbled or humiliated."

Mary Trump is referring to Donald's very public divorce from Ivana and how badly his second book was doing, but she could be talking about literally anything.
"Over time that attitude—that he knew better—would become even more entrenched: as his knowledge base has decreased (particularly in areas of governing), his claims to know everything have increased in direct proportion to his insecurity, which is where we are now."
"For Donald, too much of a good thing was a better thing; Atlantic City had unlimited potential, he believed, so two casinos were better than one."

As we all know, this story ends brilliantly.
NOBODY HAS EVER SAID NO TO THIS MAN

EVER

NO WONDER WE HAVE A TODDLER RUNNING THE COUNTRY
Fred once threatened to disown Mary Trump because he didn't like the way she signed her name when she endorsed checks.

No wonder Fred Jr. was dead by age 42. The Trump patriarch was a real sack of crap.
Actually, you know who Fred Trump reminds me of?

Henry VII.

No wonder Donald and Henry VIII have so much in common.

(At least Henry's mom cared about him more than Donald's did.)
Apparently the check-signing thing was during Fred's slide into dementia.

...okay, but I also watched my multimillionaire grandfather get dementia, and he told me the same story about fishing in the Ozarks a dozen times. He did not threaten to disown me for my handwriting.
"Everyone in my family experienced a strange combination of privilege and neglect."

Brb, getting this on a bumper sticker.
"While Fred kept churning out projects and solidifying his status... he was fattening his wallet with taxpayer money by skimming off the top and allegedly committing so much tax fraud that four of his children would continue to benefit from it for decades."
"The difference between the two, however, is that despite his dishonesty and lack of integrity, Fred actually ran a solid, income-generating business, while Donald had only his ability to spin and his father’s money to prop up an illusion."

Now he has the entire US Treasury.
Holy shit.

Apparently, Donald Trump tried at one point to get his dad to sign a codicil that would have put Donald solely in charge of the entire family fortune. Fred, however, was not so far gone from dementia not to smell that rat.
Donald Trump spent part of a family Christmas explaining how Mary Trump's mom's $600 per month alimony + child support (combined, for two kids) was "a big mistake" because it made her dependent.

Trump was receiving $450,000 a month from banks at this time to prop up his image.
As I've said before, Trump does have a highly consistent moral code.

It's "Anything Trump wants is good, right, and necessary; anything Trump doesn't want is bad, wrong, and frivolous."
Mary Trump describes Mar-a-Lago as having an 1800 square foot living room.

My entire HOUSE is 1300 square feet. The house I grew up in was 700.
Donald hired Mary at one point to write his third book. His publisher eventually nixed that arrangement, but Mary Trump says she didn't mind, as Donald never gave her an interview and she never really did figure out what his job was despite spending a bunch of time in his office.
Oh my GOD

So the whole family is crammed into Fred's hospital room as he is, finally, exiting this Earth.

Trump's sister complains that she's missing out on polo with Prince Charles.

Meanwhile Mary Trump is trying to figure out how to postpone her wedding.
At the funeral, "Donald was the only one to deviate from the script. In a cringe-inducing turn, his eulogy devolved into a paean to his own greatness."

Maryanne begs her niece not to let Donald or any other Trump sibling speak at her funeral.
"When the service was over, the six oldest grandchildren (Tiffany was too young) accompanied the casket to the hearse as honorary pallbearers, which meant, as was often the case in our family, that others did the heavy lifting while we got the credit."
And then after all that, Fred cuts Mary and her brother out of the will.

He distributes Fred Jr's share among his remaining kids, not to them.

They are included in the "grandchildren's bequest," but it's a fraction of what Fred Jr's share would have been.
Who wants to bet that Donald himself has a tontine-style will - last child standing gets it all?
Mary asks Donald's brother Rob what's up with the will:

"when we asked Rob to explain why my grandfather had done what he had, Rob said, “Listen, your grandfather didn’t give a shit about you. And not just you, he didn’t give a shit about any of his grandchildren.”"

THANKS FRED
... Rob said, “Any of [the other grandkids] could be disowned at any time. Donny was going to join the army or some bullshit like that, and Donald and Ivana told him if he did, they’d disown him in a second.”

I am DYING to know if this is true. Did Don Jr REALLY?
“Do you know what your father was worth when he died?” she said. “A whole lot of nothing.”

This is Donald's mother describing Fred Jr, her oldest son, to Fred Jr's daughter.

Praise Jesus and all the saints I was not born into the Trump family.
"they acted as if they had earned every penny of my grandfather’s wealth and that money was so tied up in their sense of self-worth that letting any of it go was not an option."

This might be the best insight into what motivates Trump's tax fight than any I have read yet.
"Of course wills are about money, but in a family that has only one currency, wills are also about love."

Oof.
And then when her grandmother dies, her will even deletes Mary and her brother from the grandkids' bequest.

Of course she wrote this book. They enabled her to do it by severing the last strings by which they might otherwise have bought her silence. Awesome. Wow.
"Before the vows, Jared’s father, Charles, who’d been released from prison three years earlier, rose to tell us that when Jared had first introduced him to Ivanka, he had thought she would never be good enough to join his family."

Wait for the punchline....
"Considering that Charles had been convicted of hiring a prostitute to seduce his brother-in-law, taping their illicit encounter, and then sending the recording to his sister at his nephew’s engagement party, I found his condescension a bit out of line."
"Of course [aunt Maryanne] didn’t know I had a daughter...or that I had recently received my doctorate in clinical psychology. But she acted as if her lack of such knowledge was an insult to her."

Ah yes, I too come from one of these families.
By this point, even Donald's siblings are trying to one-up each other with "Donald likes me better" stories.

Daddy's golden boy has become a surrogate for Daddy.
Sometime in 2018, Maryanne tried to give Donald some "sisterly advice" by leaving a message at the White House.

He did not take it. Instead he embarrassed the crap out of the nation. Again.
All Fred wanted was, in the words of Hamilton, "to build something that's gonna outlive me."

Donald sold it.

None of his siblings stopped him.
And then Donald, the master business-ass, sold an estate valued at $1 billion for $700 million.

The Ferengi would throw him from the top of the Tower of Commerce for that screwup alone.
"Split four ways, they each got approximately $170 million. For Donald, it still wasn’t enough. Maybe it wasn’t for any of them. Nothing ever was."

Oof.
"the vast amounts of money the siblings had possibly stolen made their fight with us over my grandfather’s will and their drastic devaluation of our partnership share ... seem pathologically petty and their treatment of my nephew vis-à-vis our medical insurance even more cruel."
"Donald was to my grandfather what the border wall has been for Donald: a vanity project funded at the expense of more worthy pursuits."
"Fred kept propping up Donald’s false sense of accomplishment until the only asset Donald had was the ease with which he could be duped by more powerful men."

There's a Putin joke here I'm not crass enough to make.
"In the 1980s, New York journalists and gossip columnists discovered that Donald couldn’t distinguish between mockery and flattery and used his shamelessness to sell papers."

It's okay, 62 million voters can't tell the difference either.
"family business worked.
The more money my grandfather threw at Donald, the more confidence Donald had, which led him to pursue bigger and riskier projects, which led to greater failures, forcing Fred to step in with more help."
"Nobody has failed upward as consistently and spectacularly as the ostensible leader of the shrinking free world."

BRB, painting this on a billboard
"Then he makes his vulnerabilities and insecurities your responsibility: you must assuage them, you must take care of him. Failing to do so leaves a vacuum that is unbearable for him to withstand for long."

This is my mother.
"The walls of his very expensive and well-guarded padded cell are starting to disintegrate."
"Every time you hear Donald talking about how something is the greatest, the best, the biggest, the most tremendous...you have to remember that the man speaking is still...the same little boy who is desperately worried that he, like his older brother, is inadequate..."
"Perhaps most crucially, for Donald there is no value in empathy, no tangible upside to caring for other people."

Memorize this sentence. Tattoo it on your children. Scream it every hour of every day.
That was emotionally exhausting. Important, but exhausting.

Anyway, I'm not lying about my lack of a real estate empire when I say I do not have a real estate empire, and if you sent me a few $ I would be most thankful: http://ko-fi.com/verityreynolds 
And may you sleep secure in the knowledge that although Donald Trump controls more money than nearly everyone, all of us have richer lives than he will ever have.
PS: Here's a thread where I talk more about why "can't deal with embarrassment" vastly understates Trump's real problem: https://twitter.com/danialexis/status/1283381943862779905?s=19

It's important because that fear drives him at the most basic levels. That fear makes his decisions. And he has the nuclear codes.
You can follow @danialexis.
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