Rating: 5/5, excellent
It feels odd writing this after Trump’s been voted out of the presidency. I want to be done talking about him, but this book was fantastic and deserves the attention.
Too Much and Never Enough is Mary L. Trump’s memoir/biography of the Trump family. Mary analyzes how Donald came to be the way he is: greedy, selfish, and mean.
The story is, Donald’s father (Fred Trump Sr.) had a really difficult childhood. Fred’s father died when he was twelve years old and he had to figure out how to provide for his mother and siblings. Fred worked in construction and started a building company. He was scrappy and cunning and eventually created a real estate empire. He despised paying taxes but wouldn’t shy away from using government funding to pay for his apartment projects.
Fred was working most of the time and didn’t pay much attention to his children. He put all the child-rearing responsibilities on his wife, who had health issues and also wasn’t terribly present to meet her children’s emotional needs. Mary Trump says that all of Fred’s children grew up somewhat emotionally stunted due to early lack of interaction, but Donald was hit the hardest because he was only two when his mother was experiencing her most severe health problems.
Much of the book focuses on what Fred Sr. did to Mary’s father, Fred Jr. (Freddy). If this is true, Fred Sr. treated Freddy terribly. Fred wanted Freddy to be a “killer”, he wanted him to be serious and show no weakness, but Freddy had a sensitive, kind, and playful personality that Fred crushed under his boot. Freddy wanted to follow his dream of becoming a pilot, but Fred Sr. wanted him to work at Trump Management.
However, Fred wouldn’t let Freddy have any true responsibility and stuck him doing grunt work like collecting rent and answering maintenance calls. Freddy was miserable working at Trump Management, but every time he tried to move away and do his own thing, Fred would pressure him into coming back. Fred disapproved of Freddy being a pilot and said it was like being a glorified bus driver. He thought he was a loser and ridiculed him, despite the fact that being a pilot was a lucrative and glamourous career (especially in the 60s when air travel was still novel). Donald followed Fred’s example and ridiculed Freddy as well.
By 1970, Freddy had a serious drinking problem. He died from an alcoholism-related heart attack in 1981, when he was forty-two and Mary was sixteen. Mary says Freddy’s drinking problem stemmed from the way Fred emotionally and verbally abused him.
These parts in particular resonated with me:
“That’s stupid,” Fred said whenever Freddy expressed a desire to get a pet or played a practical joke. “What do you want to do that for?” Fred said with such contempt in his voice that it made Freddy flinch, which only annoyed Fred more.
“Fred was simultaneously telling his son that he had to be an unqualified success and that he never could be. So Freddy existed in a system that was all punishment, no reward. The other children, especially Donald, couldn’t have helped but notice.”
When I read this, I felt like the world froze. A chill went down my back and I wanted to throw the book because it was so painful but true. My Dad had high expectations for the three of us kids and told us we were smart, but treated us like dummies in day-to-day life. I remember him making fun of things I liked, requests I made, and things I did pretty often (and doing the same to my siblings). It made the times he told me I was smart or he was proud of me ring hollow, because he didn’t express that with his behavior. It’s one thing to tell your kids no when they ask for something—every kid needs to hear that once in a while—but it’s going a step too far to ridicule them for asking. My Dad would do this to me a lot when I was growing up, and it made it hard for me to ask for things as I got older because my baseline expectation is to be denied and then mocked.
I think this kind of attitude towards children is really prevalent in high-achieving fathers… I don’t know why, but I have a couple ideas: simple venting of work or relationship stress, toxic masculinity and feeling the need to maintain dominance, gender roles of father as disciplinarian and mother as nurturer, feeling the need to “toughen up” children in preparation for society or the workplace, the American obsession with work and work ethic as the primary metric of personal worth, and many others. I think the bar for men as fathers is really low and in need of raising. It seems like as long as a man makes enough money to provide for his family and doesn’t abuse them physically, society will let emotional neglect and abuse slide. I hope the next generation of fathers will be more aware that emotional abuse is real and raise less traumatized children who can engage with the world more freely and openly.
It can be hard to find the line between good-natured ribbing and contemptuous mocking, but if you really pay attention and make an effort you can find it. A lot of men think it’s harmless to make fun of your kids, but it can really hurt their self-esteem and your relationship with them. There’s a reason a lot of teenagers are snarky and dismissive—they’re giving back that contemptuous energy that they received from their fathers growing up.
There are a lot of other lines in this book about Fred Sr. that reminded me of my father:
“Despite the millions of dollars pouring in from Trump Management every year, Fred still couldn’t resist picking up unused nails or reverse engineering a cheaper pesticide.”
This is something I totally could have seen my Dad doing. He would keep all kinds of nails and old electronics chargers and things that were kind of beat up and useless… it took months for my mom to finish going though all his old stuff in the garage. Still, it shows the positive side of cheapness, the thrifty, resourceful, waste-not-want-not side. Any home repair that he could do, my father would prefer to do himself instead of calling a contractor.
“But the three oldest children had been trained not to ask for anything ever, and if my grandfather was the trustee of those trusts, they were trapped in their financial circumstances.”
Our family didn’t discuss money often, either. We were supposed to get cash allowances, but it was rarely paid out and I hated to ask for it because I was afraid of seeming spoiled (because I thought that was how he already saw me). We did have credit cards, but he got the bills and we’d get yelled at if we spent money on something he deemed frivolous, so I grew to be really careful with money.
“Despite the piano lessons and private summer camps—of a piece with his notion of what was expected for a man of his station in life—his two oldest children grew up feeling ‘white poor.’”
I related to this, too. I was always treated by lower and middle-class people as though I was wealthy but I never felt wealthy because I didn’t control my own money. If I wanted to buy something unnecessary I had to make a really good case for it, so I never had the upper-middle-class status symbols that other upper-middle-class kids would recognize. People are right to criticize the use of “white poor”, though, since having a parent that’s strict with money is not as much of a struggle as being from a low-income household.
Fred Sr.’s high standard for economic efficiency helped him build an empire but strained his relationship with his family. Maybe he was trying to avoid spoiling his kids, but it sounds like he over-compensated and ended up mangling their self-esteem and independence. Fred Sr.’s legacy as a father is an object lesson in bad parenting. I think we hear a lot about spoiled kids, but we don’t really recognize that too much discipline can be harmful to children as well.
There are a couple of anecdotes that illustrate the depths of Donald Trump’s many sins, but I feel they take a backseat to Mary Trump’s description of the way Fred Trump Sr. ruined her father’s life. If you’re approaching this book like I was, expecting a take-down of Trump, you won’t be disappointed, but this book is so much more than just a left-wing hit piece. It gets at some serious neuroses buried deep in the American psyche.
It’s very brave of Mary Trump to publish something like this, and I think she deserves accolades for putting her own family problems out there for the good of society.
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