Too Much and Never Enough:
How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man
By Mary L. Trump, Ph.D.
Simon & Schuster. 240 pp. $28
By Ginette Novello
Amidst the flood of books and articles about the most outrageous, bombastic, and alarming president in history, one publication stands out: Mary Trump’s book about her uncle, Donald John Trump.
Too Much and Never Enough sold nearly a million copies on the first day it went on sale in July. The author’s purpose was not to titillate or exploit by revealing embarrassing secrets that every family harbors. Rather, Mary Trump sought to explain. She believed the public desperately needed to understand the origins of Donald’s psychological flaws, and she was uniquely placed to present them. Not only did she have the information and perspective from inside, but Mary Trump had the clinical training to be far more than an amateur psychologist breaking down the dysfunctions of the Trump clan. In her prologue the author writes, “Donald, following the lead of my grandfather and with the complicity, silence, and inaction of his siblings, destroyed my father. I can’t let him destroy my country.” The result is a book like no other in the vast literature about American presidents, which includes a fair share of psychological portraits.
Mary Trump’s campaign to expose the truth antedated her book. Following its publication, it was revealed that she was the source of financial records obtained by The New York Times in 2017, which led to a series of Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reports about the legerdemain behind the Trump real estate empire. Her campaign also continued after publication when Mary Trump took the unusual step of releasing some of her most important source material. She provided excerpts from recordings secretly made in 2018 and 2019 during conversations with her aunt Maryanne Trump Barry, Donald’s eldest sibling. In the recordings, Maryanne (born 1937) can be heard candidly describing her younger brother (born 1946) as stupid, cruel, selfish, and mendacious. Maryanne, a retired federal judge, was the source for the allegation that Donald paid a bright student to take his SAT exams for entrance into the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business. The brutal picture the president’s sister paints is that of a spoiled brat who was a menace to all of the family.
