22 The New York Review
Trumps on the Couch
Anne Diebel
Too Much and Never Enough:
How My Family Created the World’s
Most Dangerous Man
by Mary L. Trump.
Simon and Schuster, 225 pp., $28.
In 1996, at a boozy lunch in Manhat-
tan, a Connecticut lawyer was told
about the Trump Organization’s “pun-
ishment room” by an Atlantic City
lawyer who said that he had repre-
sented Donald Trump’s casino inter-
ests. According to the story, the truth
of which is unconfirmed, employees
there devised ways to punish
Trump’s enemies, including the
journalists who wrote critically
of him. One supposed method
was to send the IRS a fake Form
1099, showing that the target
had been paid a considerable
sum for contract work. The aim
was to trigger a bill or an audit
when the IRS discovered the
putative payee had not reported
the income. The victim might
eventually straighten things out
with the government, showing
no such money was received: the
point was the hassle.
Such stories about Trump are
unavoidable if you’ve lived in
New York City for a while. Some
have become public. Many—like
the one above, told by the Con-
necticut lawyer to my partner
in the summer of 2016—have
not. But no tale of dishonesty,
vindictiveness, bullying, and
advantage- seeking is surprising.
To Trump, everyone is either a
crony to be exploited or an ad-
versary to be defeated and hu-
miliated. He demands loyalty
but refuses to give it, except, it’s
generally assumed, to certain
members of his family.
In 1990 Donald secretly en-
listed a lawyer to draft a codicil
to the will of his father, Fred Sr.
The addendum put Donald in complete
control of Fred’s vast estate; his sib-
lings would need his approval for the
smallest transaction. According to To o
Much and Never Enough by Mary L.
Trump, the daughter of the late Fred
Trump Jr. (Trump’s older brother,
known as Freddy, who died in 1981),
the document was presented to Fred Sr.
at his home in Queens as if it had been
his idea. Fred, who was eighty-five and
in the early stages of Alzheimer’s, was
lucid that day and refused to sign. He
talked to his wife, Mary, who called the
eldest of their five children, Maryanne,
by then a federal judge. She agreed that
the whole thing “didn’t pass the smell
test.” Fred swiftly had a new will drawn
up, one that ensured equality among
his four living children.
A slightly different version of this
story, like several in Mary Trump’s
book, appeared in a New York Times
exposé of the Trump family’s finances
in October 2018. There is a certain
justice in the granddaughter’s get-
ting to tell the story herself: when
Fred Sr. died, in 1999, Mary and her
brother, Fred III (whom she calls
Fritz), discovered that their father
had been cut out of their grandfather’s
will, and that they were to receive the
same modest individual bequests as all
the other grandchildren. When negoti-
ations with their uncle Robert stalled,
Mary and Fritz sued for a larger share
and eventually agreed to a settlement.
Grandmother Mary, known as Gam,
was angry about the lawsuit and cut
them out of her own will entirely (she
died in 2000).
A few months after Donald became
president, Mary gave nineteen file
boxes of documents from the litiga-
tion—including Fred’s wills and bank
records, and the depositions of var-ious family members—to a team of
Times reporters. When their work was
published, Mary learned a great deal
about her own family: that Fred and
Gam had in their lifetimes transferred
over $1 billion to their children, often
through dubious tax-dodging schemes
that helped reduce Fred’s heritable as-
sets to scraps, and that Donald, who
had long claimed to be self-made, had
received $413 million from his father
over the years.
Within months, her book proposal
was making the rounds. When news of
the book’s imminent release broke in
June, Robert Trump tried to stop pub-
lication on the grounds that his niece
was violating a nondisclosure agree-
ment related to the estate settlement. In
an affidavit, Mary said she had learned
from the Times investigation that the
valuations used to determine her com-
pensation in the settlement agreement
were “fraudulent”; thus, her lawyers
argued, the agreement (including its
confidentiality provisions) was invalid.
For unrelated reasons, temporary re-
straining orders against Mary and her
publisher were lifted, and the book was
pushed out two weeks before its sched-
uled release.
“No one knows how Donald cameto be who he is better than his own
family,” Mary writes, calling herself
“the only Trump” willing to tell that
story. Part of the frenzied reception of
her book owes to the thrill in hearing
from someone—an educated, progres-
sive, gay, vegetarian, human-seeming
someone with a pineapple and a copy
of Clarissa in her Zoom background—
who sat through the bland meals and
absorbed the family lore (she was not
quite the “seldom seen niece” of her
uncle’s dismissive tweet). Adding to
her appeal is her professional back-ground: she received a Ph.D. in clinical
psychology in 2009 and briefly worked
at a state psychiatric hospital (be-
fore remaking herself as a life coach:
“There is no wealth without wellness,”
her website counseled).
“Not many facets of the Trump ap-
parition have so far gone unexam-
ined,” Martin Amis wrote in Harper’s
in August 2016. “But I can think of a
significant loose end. I mean his san-
ity.” Since then, both mental-health
professionals and devoted lay commen-
tators have plumbed Trump’s psycho-
pathologies as they bear on his fitness
for office. Last fall, the conservative
lawyer George Conway suggested, in
The Atlantic, that Trump’s narcissism,
evident to anyone paying attention,
makes it “impossible for him to carry
out the duties of his presidency in the
way the Constitution requires.” (A re-
lated discussion about Trump’s cogni-
tive decline has gained prominence in
recent months, as have assertions about
Joe Biden’s.)
Mary is dismissive of these efforts,
including those by “armchair psychol-
ogists.” She agrees that Donald “meets
all nine criteria” for narcissism, and
suggests that he may have other per-
sonality disorders, as well as a learn-ing disability, but she cautions that any
DSM label “gets us only so far.” She ar-
gues that we must also understand the
origins of those pathologies through a
“thorough family history.”
And so, duly catering to the mar-
ket, the book is presented as a psycho-
biography of the author’s uncle, whose
military academy class photo adorns
the cover. But in Mary’s history, there
are more important Trumps than Don-
ald. Not only are Fred and Freddy her
liveliest characters and those she knows
best—a fearsome Dickensian scoun-
drel and his sensitive, wayward
firstborn son—but her moral
reckoning, too, seems to lie else-
where, not in the accounting of
Donald’s sins but in the story of
Fred’s cruelty.Fred Trump Sr. did not have
the chance to earn his own fa-
ther’s approval or disapproval.
Friedrich Trump was born in
Kallstadt, in the Palatinate re-
gion of southwestern Germany,
and left at sixteen, in 1885. After
a few years working as a barber
in Manhattan, he went west to
Washington State. There, and
later in British Columbia and the
Yukon, he built and ran hotels
for miners that included rooms
for prostitution. A tent restau-
rant he set up on the route north
served the flesh of fallen horses,
and the hotel- restaurant he
erected in the town of Bennett,
and then moved up the river to
White Horse, offered such del-
icacies as fresh currants and
swan. In 1901, having amassed
a substantial fortune, he re-
turned to Kallstadt and married
a neighbor. They would have
stayed there had the Bavarian
government not deported him
for shirking his military service
years earlier. And so he settled with his
wife in Woodhaven, Queens, where he
got into the real estate business. One
afternoon in 1918, when Fred, their
middle child, was twelve, Friedrich
started feeling unwell; he died the next
day from the Spanish influenza.
Friedrich had been worth about half
a million dollars in today’s terms, but
with postwar inflation the family was
left to scramble. Fred built garages for
neighbors while he was still in high
school, and as soon as he graduated
he found a job in construction, haul-
ing wood up icy Queens streets for $
a week, a wintertime substitute for a
mule. Within a couple of years he was
building simple one-family homes,
and his business flourished throughout
the 1920s. Following the stock market
crash, he briefly ran a supermarket
but returned to building as soon as he
could. In 1933, according to Gwenda
Blair in The Trumps: Three Genera-
tions of Builders and a President (first
published in 2000), he put in a bid for
the mortgage-servicing department of
a bankrupt Brooklyn real estate com-
pany. When he encountered opposi-
tion, he wrote an indignant letter to
the trustees that fudged both his cre-
dentials and his plans for handling theIllustration by Tom Bachtell