Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created The World's Most Dangerous Man, by Mary Trump
If there is anything scarier than having a well trained-Psychologist in the family handing down psychological assessments of family members, I have no idea what it is?
If there were one in my family it would scare the bejesus out of me too.
Here, Mary Trump paints an unflattering portrait of her uncle the 45th President of the USA.
What the reader will see here is how exceedingly small, insecure and scared the 45th President of the USA is, according to the author's picture.
According to her, he earned those stripes the old fashion way, like most of us did, through the dynamics of a dysfunctional family.
His mother was often sick and emotionally unavailable, so he relied mostly on his dad for love and emotional stability.
But Fred senior was a crude emotionless man, a product of WW-I and the Spanish flu. He judged emotional neediness as a weakness, and thus was not dispensing out much love or emotional stability in the Trump family.
He preached the Norman Vincent Peale brand of the Prosperity Gospel: "Self-worth is equal to financial worth."
Fred was rich because he was entitled to be rich.
He was a man who hated paying taxes, but did not mind paying the mob, and thought going into the military was for losers and suckers.
His eldest son made an unforgivable mistake when he joined the Air National Guard, and became a pilot for TWA.
Little Donny watched his older brother, Fred Jr, get psychologically brutalized and dismantled, and through this didactic emotional whiplash, got the vicarious message to never stray from his father's rigid line. He lived in mortal fear of his dad.
He used this fear to cash-in on the dangerous tension within the family and shamelessly replaced his older brother as his father's favorite. It was the path of least anal retentive resistance.
With his father's strategic doting as cover, little Donny not only became the family bully and terror, but also became a high-functioning sociopath: He was indifferent to right and wrong, lacked empathy or any interests in the rights of others, developed a facility for lying, and was generally abusive and out of control. By teenage, he was shipped off to a military academy, which within the family, was little more than a euphemism for juvenile delinquency reform school.
Being strategically anointed as his father's favorite, was "too much but still was never quite enough."
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