26 The New York Review
Trump’s Castle, one of Donald’s fail-
ing Atlantic City casinos, and the next
day wired another $150,000. Fred had
no intention of using the chips; he was
helping Donald make a bond payment.
According to the Times, it was Fred’s
bookkeeper, Howard Snyder, not his
driver, who carried out the errand, and
the money was sent in the form of two
checks, not a bag of cash and a wire
transfer. It seems Mary got some of
her details from media reports, pub-
lished as early as 1991, that were based
on information from the New Jersey
Gaming Commission (which itself, in a
complaint about the illegal loan, identi-
fied the courier as Snyder). It is unclear
why Mary chooses not to rely on an au-
thoritative investigative analysis based
on records—some disclosed and some
still confidential—many of which she
herself provided.
The codicil episode is another such
mismatch, and a more consequential
one. Mary claims that Donald secretly
got two of Fred’s longest-serving em-
ployees, his lawyer Irwin Durben and
an accountant, to go along with his
“plan to betray his father and steal vast
sums of money from his siblings.” She
claims that Durben and the accoun-
tant drafted the codicil and presented
it to Fred as if it were his own idea.
According to the Times’s records, the
drafter was actually one of Donald’s
lawyers, one Fred had never met. The
Times does not mention who presented
the document to Fred, but does state
that Donald “sent instructions that he
needed to sign it immediately.” This is
rather less masterful, and potentially
more transparent; it makes Donald
both less skilled and less conniving
than he seems in Mary’s account.Mary’s analysis of Uncle Donald has
been widely characterized as surpris-
ingly humanizing and sympathetic,
with much attention paid to such sen-
tences as, “He is and always will be a
terrified little boy.” The portrait is also,
perhaps intentionally, belittling: Don-
ald is entirely his father’s creation.
As the Times investigation showed,
in grooming his successor Fred pro-
vided enormous financial and profes-
sional support:He made Donald not just his sal-
aried employee but also his prop-
erty manager, landlord, banker
and consultant. He gave him loan
after loan, many never repaid. He
provided money for his car, money
for his employees, money to buy
stocks, money for his first Manhat-
tan offices and money to renovate
those offices. He gave him three
trust funds. He gave him shares
in multiple partnerships. He gave
him $10,000 Christmas checks. He
gave him laundry revenue from his
buildings.Mary argues that Donald’s psyche
was also Fred’s creation. She claims
that Donald’s aggressive personality
served Fred’s purpose once Freddy had
proved inadequate. Even Donald’s acts
of resistance against Fred were, tor-
tuously, a fulfillment of Fred’s hopes;
Donald was “able to push back because
Fred let him.”
Some of this logic of Fred’s influence
on Donald is, as elsewhere, working
backward from the conclusion, but be-
cause it is relatively well establishedwith prosaic details of the two men’s
relationship, the broad strokes are
persuasive. According to Mary, when
Donald joined Trump Management
full-time, Fred learned that his son,
who had “very little experience and
even fewer qualifications,” didn’t have
the disposition for day-to-day opera-
tions but did have “bold ideas and the
chutzpah to realize them.”
Fred had long aspired to break into
the Manhattan real estate market, real-
ized Donald could secure a foothold for
the family business there, and became
“intimately involved in all aspects of
Donald’s early forays.” The contract
to renovate the old Commodore Hotel
next to Grand Central, a deal for
which Donald later took full credit,
was made possible through Fred’s po-
litical connections and his money. The
media started covering Donald, and
he showed a remarkable talent for self-
promotion, presenting himself as both
a playboy and a brilliant dealmaker.
Fred played along. He understood the
value of media coverage—starting in
the 1930s, when doing so was unusual,
he filled the papers with press releases
on his projects and initiatives. The level
of fame his son rapidly achieved, ac-
cording to Mary, “matched his ego and
satisfied his ambition in a way money
alone never could.” When the Times
profiled Donald in 1976, Fred told the
paper, “He has great vision, and every-
thing he touches seems to turn to gold.”
When the Times did another profile in
1983, Fred said his son had gone “way
beyond” him.
Whereas Fred’s dazzlement seems to
have been partly genuine, the money
he gave Donald over the decades was
likely not an expression of doting; far
more plausibly it was an heir- making,
loyalty-building exercise that, when
Donald’s finances crumbled in the
early 1990s, turned into a rescue mis-
sion. By the time it was clear that
Donald tended to overextend himself
dangerously, Fred may have simply
made his peace with having a scion
with an erratic business record and a
scandal-fraught tabloid life that likely
embarrassed Fred and Gam’s conser-
vative sensibilities. “What kind of son
have I created?” Gam, per Brenner, is
said to have asked Ivana during Don-
ald’s first divorce and his affair with
the actress Marla Maples. (Around the
same time, twelve-year-old Don Jr. is
reported, per Brenner, to have offered
this astonishing assessment: “How can
you say you love us? You don’t love us!
You don’t even love yourself. You just
love your money.”) When Donald tried
to gain control of his father’s estate,
Fred confided in family members his
fear that Donald was going to use his
assets as collateral to save his failing
businesses. Fred instructed the lawyers
drafting the new codicil to “protect as-
sets from DJT, Donald’s creditors.”
When it comes to Donald, even the
few new stories and bits of perspective
Mary can provide add little—it’s not
that she doesn’t know him well, it’s that
anyone who has followed him with a
mild interest already knows him too
well to be surprised by revelations of
kind or of degree, or to be particularly
enlightened by expert opinions on his
well-documented traits and tendencies.
(To paraphrase Amis’s tautology, Don-
ald Trump is unfit to be president be-
cause he is Donald Trump.) Too Much
and Never Enough is ultimately much
more insightful about Fred than aboutDonald; the father was a private figure
whose personality and family life have
been far less well known.Mary has assumed the role of weary,
knowing Twitter hero and interview
star with apparent ease. “Is the writ-
ing of the book an extension of the
dysfunction of the family?” George
Stephanopoulos asked her. “Probably,”
Mary answered. As reported by the
Daily News in 2000, and again by the
Times this July, in 1991 one of Fred’s
lawyers attached a memo to the draft of
his new will, warning that giving Mary
and Fritz only their individual be-
quests (the other grandchildren stood
to inherit their parents’ portions as
well) was “tantamount to disinheriting
them.” “You may wish to increase their
participation in your estate to avoid ill
will in the future.” In the book, Mary
doesn’t mention this memo, and rarely
does she give any sense of her own per-
spective, at the time or with the benefit
of hindsight, on her uncle or anything
else.
In 1994, when she was twenty-nine,
Mary agreed to ghostwrite Donald’s
third book, The Art of the Comeback.
(The Art of the Deal, published in 1987
and ghostwritten by the journalist Tony
Schwartz, was the first book to appear
in Fred and Gam’s library.) It was not
a good experience: Donald wouldn’t
sit down for an interview or help her
understand what he did for a living;
he gave her “pages” that consisted of
lavish insults about women who had
rejected him, and he remarked on her
breasts. She was later fired by the pub-
lisher, who hadn’t been notified of her
hiring. But why did Mary take the job?
Did she think it would be interesting,
lucrative? Was it a lark, a way to curry
favor? Was she a dupe, or did she just
go along with the con?
Perhaps she doesn’t know why she
did it, or there’s nothing to be gained
by candor. She presents herself as a naïf
whose tantamount-to-disinheritance
inheritance suddenly disabused her of
sentimental notions about recognition
and love: “I’d thought I was part of the
family. I’d gotten it all wrong.” Perhaps
she hadn’t been paying attention to
Fred’s petty but well-advertised rules.
“Mary, you’ve got to play the game,”
Irwin Durben, Fred’s lawyer, told her
nearly a decade before Fred’s death,
when her grandfather was displeased
by her sloppy endorsement signature
on a check. She claims she didn’t un-
derstand what Durben meant.
It is perhaps no surprise, then, that
she avoids larger questions about her
family’s wealth, a lapse that would be
less conspicuous were it not for the
book’s presentation as a public service.
Regarding her grandfather’s “stun-
ning” final will, she provides scant
background and explanation, even
when it comes to matters that would
seem to fall outside her NDA—for in-
stance, that the previous version of
the will also gave most of the estate
to the four living children, according
to the Daily News. Nor does she rec-
oncile her claim that Fred’s estate was
worth “close to a billion dollars when
he died” with her acknowledgment
that most of that wealth had already
been transferred to his children and
would therefore seem to be excluded
from the heritable assets. Just after
claiming that she and Fritz “got noth-
ing” from their grandfather (“nothing”JOIN DANIEL
MENDELSOHN
AS HE DISCUSSES
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