So, I promised some book reviews, specifically Daniel Ziblatt's How Democracies Die, Mary Trump's Too Much and Never Enough and Stuart Stevens' It Was All a Lie..
I found Stuart Stevens' book the most illuminating and will save it for last. How Democracies Die makes a good companion piece for It Was All a Lie. Both, really, are about the role of political parties and party professionals in making democracy function, and the danger when parties are unable to contain dangerous demagogues. Ziblatt makes the case from the outside, in somewhat abstract terms, as a political scientist, and Stevens makes the case from the inside, with concrete specifics, as a party man.
So I will begin with Mary Trump. I had read accounts of Mary Trump's book before actually reading it, and it made me think of Svetlana Alllivluyeva, Stalin's daughter. Alliluyeva undertook the hard and painful task of letting go of everyone's natural idealization of their parents and facing her father (posthumously) for what he really was. In her case, it was doubtless made easier because he drove her mother and half-brother to suicide, and sent her boyfriend to Siberia. But many people have continued to idealize their fathers, even when hurt by them, especially when they have no one else to turn to. Alliluyeva was able to face up to what her father was by instead idealizing her mother and making her mother the heroine of her story.
So I what I had read about Mary Trump's book led me to expect something similar. Mary Trump had the advantage that she was only writing against her uncle and grandfather. Many reviewers commented that the real villain of the story is not Donald Trump, but his father, Fred Trump. So I expected Mary's father, Fred, Jr., to be the hero of the story. Fred, Jr. rebelled against his father, made a career as a pilot instead of in the Trump family business, but was ultimately crushed by his grandfather.
Not quite.
First of all, it could not have been too hard for Mary Trump to speak out against her uncle and grandfather. She was already completely estranged from them after a bitter inheritance dispute after her grandfather cut her and her brother out of his will and Donald, as executor, enforced it to the letter. The episode, by the way, does not reflect well on either her or her aunts and uncles. Mary's brother, Fred III comes across the best. He had a son with severe medical problems and needed the money and health insurance for his son. Mary, by contrast, comes across as a self-justifying money grubber. But so does everyone else in the story, as is often the case in inheritance disputes.
Second, it is clear that Fred Trump, Jr. was a complete failure as a father. He was accepted as a pilot on his first try, but his career lasted only a few months before he was forced to leave due to alcoholism. The rest of his life, Fred, Jr. either worked for his father's business or lived as a poor relation off family money, in dingy, run-down apartments on his father's properties or when his health no longer allowed him to live alone), in his parents' 23 room house.
When Mary was two and a half years old, her father pointed a gun at her mother and laughed. (Mary walked in and saw it). Despite his wife's fear of snakes, he kept a python in the den, forcing her to go by it every time she had to do laundry or go to her son's room or leave the house. Unsurprisingly, they divorced. From then on, her father was a rather distant presence in Mary's life, a worthless drunkard living in run-down apartments with his pet snakes and, later, in and out of hospitals, mostly for alcoholism-related illnesses. For a time he moved to Florida, presumably to escape his autocratic father (owner of all the apartments he rented). But his health failed and in the end he had to move back in with his parents. At 16, Mary decided she wanted to go to boarding school. Her father persuaded her grandfather to allow the family trust to pay the expenses, but he did not see her off. She only learned that he had been too sick to see her off after she started boarding school and got the call that he was dead. He was 42 years old.
So I have to suspect that Mary Trump's book is largely her way of working through her own issues with her father. Over time, she came to realize that her father's spirit was crushed by his father. Fred, Jr. liked boats and planes and pets and practical jokes. His father dismissed these as "stupid" -- all that mattered was business. Fred, Jr. lacked interest in business and regularly got things wrong. His father ridiculed him for it, and then got angrier when his son apologized. What he wanted was "toughness," and his way of achieving it was put-down's and ridicule. Fred, Sr. behaved in an intimidating manner and then was angry at his son for being intimidated. Fred, Jr. joined Air Force ROTC in college and found strong but consistent discipline. He got a pilot's license, developed a hobby boating and fishing, married a woman his parents considered beneath him, and qualified as a commercial pilot. Mary takes all of this as signs of her father's strength and rebellion. But ultimately he was not able to cut off contact with his father, and his father broke his spirit. All this is told in a remote, third-person way because it happened before Mary was born. She met only the broken man.
And now you know why Donald Trump was reluctant to name his oldest son Donald, Jr.
Once Fred, Sr's oldest son failed him, he pinned his hopes on his second son, Donald. Donald learned from his brother's mistakes that the most important thing was to create at least the impression of success as his father defined it. Mary grew up under strained circumstances, raised by a divorced mother living off the alimony and child support provided by the trust, knowing she had a rich uncle always flashing around extravagant signs of wealth and success that pleased his father. In fact, Donald was a lousy businessman who knew a lot more about creating the appearance of wealth than creating actual wealth. But, in the end, his father had psychologically invested so much in his second son that he couldn't bear to see him fail and puncture the image that he had created. So Donald's father kept bailing him out, no matter how badly his business ventures failed. And we can see from there the genesis of the Trump we know today -- a man convinced that appearance can take the place of reality, that if he can create the right illusion, it won't matter how disastrously he fails in fact.
Probably the most revealing passage in Mary's book describes how she was hired to ghost write Donald's book The Art of the Comeback after he had gone bankrupt and been put on an allowance by the banks -- of $450,000 per month.* Donald declined to provide a computer and printer, saying that was the publisher's job. The editor has no idea she had been hired. Mary trailed her uncle, but was unable to figure out what he actually did. When she spent time in his office, the main thing she saw him do was talk on the phone. The conversations were not about business; they were about gossip, golf, women, or asking for favors. Not necessarily inappropriate -- networking is an important part of the real estate business, after all -- but he never seemed to actually put together any development projects. He also read through newspaper clippings about himself. Finally, Donald had his secretary type up some pages for the book. They consisted of denunciations of women who refused to date him and how unattractive they were. (Unanswered -- if they were so unattractive, why did he want to date them?). Eventually the publishing company told her they wanted someone with more experience. Naturally, she was never paid. Again, this seemed emblematic of Trump's style as President.
And, of course, there was the big revelation in the book. Some time ago, the New York Times published a long and long-forgotten article showing that throughout his father's lifetime (Fred, Sr. died in 1999), Donald Trump was a complete failure as a businessman, continually propped up and bailed out by his father. The paper did not reveal its source. Its source turned out to be Mary Trump, who retrieved the information from her lawyers about the inheritance lawsuit. That was why their information ended when Donald's father died.
In short, lots of juicy family gossip. Some insight into how Donald Trump got to be how he is today. And revelations about his failures in business. No information about Donald Trump as a larger phenomenon, but that is not what a family history could be expected to so.
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*Just by way of comparison, keep in mind that Rudy Giuliani's ex-wife complained about his extravagance in burning through $900,000 in a year.
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