A Freudian Fly on the Wall: Niece Shrinks Trump in Analytical Biography

Mary L. Trump’s Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man proudly joins the growing genre of “tell-all” Trump tomes. 

Mary warns: “If he is afforded a second term, it would be the end of American democracy.”  

Omarosa Manigault Newman’s 2018 Unhinged and John Bolton’s 2020 The Room Where It Happened were written by White House insiders, and 2016’s The Making of Donald Trump was reported by Pulitzer Prize-winner and tax expert David Cay Johnston. The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, 37 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President is edited by Yale’s Dr. Bandy Lee. 

But Mary, as Donald Trump’s only niece, has the advantage of having been an eyewitness to some of the President’s oldest misdeeds—as well as possessing the insights of a trained psychologist who earned a Ph.D. from the Derner Institute of Advanced Psychological Studies. 

Her book attempts to explain Trump’s often crude, contrarian behavior, wherein the President does exactly the opposite of what logic demands: withdrawing from the Paris Agreement as climate change rages; pulling out of the Iran nuclear treaty that appeared to be working; seeking to overturn Obamacare during a global pandemic; deriding mask-wearing and COVID-19 testing; and leaving the World Health Organization. 

Citing the President’s “egregious and arguably intentional mishandling of the current catastrophe,” Mary Trump warns that “Donald’s failings cannot be hidden or ignored because they threaten us all.” 

The daughter of Trump’s oldest brother takes readers on a riveting tour inside the grotesque freak show that is Trumpworld. Bolton may have been in the “Room,” but Mary was in what she calls “the House” where it happened. 

She describes the family’s Jamaica Estates residence in Queens, New York, as an “imposing redbrick Georgian colonial with the twenty-foot columns” with racist “lawn jockeys,” where Mary’s father Freddy, the eldest son, grew up with his four siblings, including Donald. Fred Trump Sr. built the five-bedroom  house in the exclusive, all-white neighborhood with money garnered from a real-estate empire profiting through tax avoidance and generous government housing subsidies.

According to Mary, Fred inherited the capital to establish his business from his father, Friedrich, a German immigrant who owned brothels in British Columbia during the Gold Rush. Friedrich died in Queens during the influenza epidemic when Fred was twelve; he and his mother, Elizabeth, eventually established “E. Trump and Son,” building apartments and homes. 

Mary describes her workaholic grandfather as “an iron-fisted autocrat at home and in his office” and as “a high-functioning sociopath” who, his children said, was “tighter than a duck’s ass.”

Fred was an acolyte of Norman Vincent Peale, that avatar of “positive thinking” and of what Mary calls the minister’s “proto-prosperity gospel,” in which “financial worth was the same as self-worth, monetary value was human value.” In Trumpworld, she explains, money was used not merely for personal pleasure and status, but for “cruelty” and control. Fred joined Peale’s money-mad midtownManhattan church (where Donald and Ivana were married in 1977). 

Mary’s namesake, her grandmother Mary Anne MacLeod, was born into humble circumstances on a Scottish isle. Mary pithily points out that Donald’s mom was, given his immigrant-bashing rhetoric, ironically “a classic example of ‘chain migration.’” 

In 1930, Mary Anne migrated to America, where she met and married Fred. By 1948, she developed serious health problems that plagued her for the rest of her life, necessitating frequent surgeries and hospital stays. Mary calls her “Gam” an “insomniac” who “wander[ed] around the House at all hours like a soundless wraith.”

As a trained clinical psychologist, Mary dissects how the Trump family’s interpersonal dynamics wound up twisting Donald’s psyche. She argues that Donald’s largely emotionally unavailable father and his often absentee mother arrested the development of a troubled adult who “always will be a terrified little boy” who “knows he has never been loved.” 

Hence, the trust fund baby’s trauma enables him to tap into the sense of personal grievance of voters—who, Mary reminds us, he would never hobnob with outside of rallies.   

Much of Mary’s tour de force is preoccupied with Fred Sr.’s crippling disapproval of Freddy’s decision to become a pilot instead of following in his footsteps, contributing to his alcoholism and early death. This led to Donald, eight years younger, becoming the heir apparent of the family business and his enabling by Fred, who lavished money on his brash, loudmouthed son whose clownish antics courted media saturation.   

Trumpers may reject Mary as a disgruntled, disinherited heiress seeking vengeance on her uncle—whom, she claims, cheated her and her father out of their share of the family fortune. Those who eschew introspection might dismiss Mary’s analysis as mere “psycho-babble” (the White House unsuccessfully tried to gag the author and her book, which Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany claimed was “ridiculous” and full of “falsehoods”). 

But readers who consider Mary to be a Freudian fly on the wall will likely believe she has painted a profound, perilous portrait of the pathological personality of her uncle as embodying capitalism’s “me-first” ethos. 

Although Mary never uses the term “affluenza”—which combines “affluence” and “influenza”—Donald appears to personify what Psychology Today defined as “a disorder” due to a “privileged upbringing . . . that coddled [one] into a sense of irresponsibility and clouded his sense of right and wrong.” 

After Donald’s election, Mary was approached by reporters for The New York Times and determined “I had to take Donald down.” She provided documents that enabled the paper to publish, in 2018, its longest story ever, about alleged Trump tax schemes that won a Pulitzer Prize.

Now Mary says she’s speaking out before November’s election because her uncle’s bungling has reached epic proportions, with 138,000-plus dead now from the ongoing COVID-19 crisis, more than any other nation on Earth. She describes her uncle as a “simple-minded . . . petty, pathetic little man—ignorant, incapable, out of his depth, and lost in his own delusional spin.” 

Mary chillingly notes that her uncle’s 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.” These include the myths that he is some sort of “master dealmaker” and a “self-made man,” which Mary debunks. The self-fulfilling prophecy of the “American carnage” Donald ranted about in his Inaugural speech has taken us from “America First” to “America Worst,” and Mary warns: “If he is afforded a second term, it would be the end of American democracy.”  

Too Much and Never Enough is the strongest argument against inherited wealth since King Louis XVI was beheaded. But for all his alleged imbecility and lunacy, Donald Trump was the first to notice his niece’s literary gift—ironically, he got one thing right. The talented young woman whose uncle nicknamed her “honeybunch” went on to pen a devastatingly perceptive page-turner with the power and potential to expose the tragically flawed delusional man who would be king—but who is, in reality, just a court jester in disguise.