World’s Most Dangerous Man, Indeed

By Susan Bergeron

While on hiatus from exhausting the literary mushroom cloud of disgust that the soon-to-be-former-president continues to cause to explode daily from my head, I’ve engaged in some reading over the holidays. For Christmas I received Mary L. Trump’s fast read “How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man”---her unauthorized biography of her world famous uncle, President Donald J. Trump.

I was excited to receive the gift, as it was on back order for weeks. I love listening to Mary Trump tell her stories on the cable news shows and love reading her Twitter feed. Mary has a PH.D. in psychology, but because she has intimate knowledge of her subject, President Trump, this puts her out in front of scores of armchair psychologists who have broken with the Goldwater Rule in trying to diagnose the President from afar. And despite this intimate knowledge, she makes the disclaimer that he would still need to sit for a battery of tests and evaluations by expert mental health professionals in order to sort out his complex plethora of personality and mental disorders caused by an extremely dysfunctional upbringing devoid of the love and nurturing she claims he never received as a child. And she also states that of course, he will never agree to that. So we are left to conjecture and speculation. But because his other family members remain silent, probably out of fear of him, we have only Mary’s stories to go by. And fascinating stories they are!

This book is a real page-turner. Chapter after chapter has me going “Oh---so thatexplains it!” There’s the tale of how Donald used to steal his young baby brother Robert’s toy trucks and hide them---knowing they were Robert’s favorite toys. He did it just for laughs. When Robert would cry Donald threatened todismantlethem if he didn’t shut up! Pure evil. This story also reminded me about the dismantling of something else---mail sorting machines, the State Department, The Consumer Protection Agency. Even at a tender age, Donald found nefarious joy from dismantling things for no good reason.

There’s the time sixteen year old Donald, shortly before cheating his way into Wharton, drives up in his spiffy new sports car to his older brother Fred’s apartment in Marblehead, MA. Sent on a mission by patriarch Fred Trump, Sr., Donald spends a night bullying and belittling his pilot brother for leaving the family real estate business to pursue a career in the airline industry. He stabs a knife through Freddy’s heart with words like, “Dad’s embarrassed by you” and “…he’s sick of you wasting your life…” and tells the older brother that their father considers Robert’s choice of job as a TWA pilot nothing more than a “glorified bus driver.” Fred Jr. was Mary, the author’s father. She tells a sad tale of his alcoholism triggered by rejection and emotional abuse by her grandfather (Trump’s father). She claims that after this particularly cruel and emotional dismantling of her father at the hands of Donald, the drinking began in earnest and it was the beginning of the end of his airline career. After growing up in a household literally devoid of alcohol, he died in his forties from alcohol related illness and Mary blames her grandfather for pushing Freddy over the edge and not getting him any help. 

Donald also was cunning enough to see the writing on the wall. His evil rat brain figured out that the sociopathic father of theirs had given up on the eldest son as heir apparent to the family business. Donald quickly moved in to take over as Fred Sr.’s Number One Son, and become the “killer” that Fred Trump, Sr. had failed to produce in his eldest son, Freddy. Later in the book Mary tells the awful story of how a cold and callous Donald grabs his equally uncaring sister Elizabeth and trots off to the movies, leaving Freddy to die in the hospital at age 42, sick and all alone.  

I was impressed with how Mary Trump remained fairly non-judgmental throughout her telling of the horrors of this incredibly dysfunctional family and the monster that they produced. If you’ve ever seen her on TV she comes across just that way---dry and very calm in her demeanor. She talks about her uncle with a sense of deep understanding, but makes clear she does not condone any of his behavior. I’m of the opinion that even when we suffer a dysfunctional up-bringing (and let’s face it, most of us probably do if we’re being honest) we are still responsible for our behavior as adults. It’s up to us to fix it. To simply go through life settling for the results of that and punishing the world around us because we didn’t have a cakewalk of a childhood is selfish and wrong. There is help available. Change begins with the desire within.

Mary Trump is a fine writer, to boot. I’m guessing there’s no ghost writer involved because she’s a well-educated woman and I’ve heard her speak often. She writes in the style of what Truman Capote developed in the 1960’s called the non-fiction novel. It is not a journalistic biography of Donald Trump’s life by any means. There is a lot of vivid dialogue and carefully recreated historical scenes that leave the reader wondering, “How did Mary know about that?” But we must remember she is not just a reporter here, she was an intimate family member who knew the President for many years and must have been a good listener (an important quality in treating mental patients, after all) and she must have heard many stories from her many relatives. Because of that, I do believe her story, even if written as creative non-fiction. It was a good choice in style, on her part, as it’s much more readable that way. Capote trail blazed a style that never went away in journalism.

If you lived through the 1970’s and watched Donald Trump embarrass himself time and again on the front pages of the New York tabloids you probably wouldn’t have guessed he would ever become the Leader of the Free World, let alone the World’s Most Dangerous Man. But indeed, he has done just that. Mary L. Trump’s telling of how it happened is a well-chronicled warning to parents everywhere. The full title of her book is “Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man.” I think the too much refers to money and the not enough refers to what happens when the most important ingredient is left out of child-rearing---love.