Journalists are now sharing some excerpts from Mary Trump’s upcoming book, “Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man.” The New York Times says the book, which comes out a week from today “depicts a multigenerational saga of greed, betrayal and internecine tension and seeks to explain how President Trump’s position in one of New York’s wealthiest and most infamous real-estate empires helped him acquire what Ms. Trump has referred to as ‘twisted behaviors’ — attributes like seeing other people in “monetary terms” and practicing ‘cheating as a way of life.'”
The newspaper reveals that:
As a high school student in Queens, Ms. Trump writes, Donald Trump paid someone to take a precollegiate test, the SAT, on his behalf. The high score the proxy earned for him, Ms. Trump adds, helped the young Mr. Trump to later gain admittance as an undergraduate to the University of Pennsylvania’s prestigious Wharton business school.
The Washington Post says the book emphasizes Trump’s troubled relationship with his father:
The president, Mary Trump wrote, is a product of his domineering father and was acutely aware of avoiding the scorn that he heaped on his older brother, called Freddy, Trump writes.
“By limiting Donald’s access to his own feelings and rendering many of them unacceptable, Fred perverted his son’s perception of the world and damaged his ability to live in it.”
Mary Trump wrote that her grandfather’s children routinely lied to him but for different reasons. For her father, “lying was defensive — not simply a way to circumvent his father’s disapproval or to avoid punishment, as it was for the others, but a way to survive.”
The Daily Beast cites this disturbing paragraph:
“If he is afforded a second term, it would be the end of American democracy… Donald, following the lead of my grandfather and with complicity, silence, and inaction from his siblings, destroyed my father. I can’t let him destroy my country.”
USA Today adds:
At the end, Mary Trump writes “Donald isn’t really the problem after all” – it is his enablers, from his father to the celebrity media to the congressional Republicans who acquitted him of impeachment.
“This is the end result of Donald’s having continually been given a pass and rewarded not just for his failures but for his transgressions – against tradition, against decency, against the law, and against fellow human beings,” she writes.
