Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man
- Oct 3, 2020
- 2 min read
★★★☆☆
Donald J. Trump is perhaps the most polarized—and polarizing—man on the planet. If not on the planet, certainly in politics, and if not in all of politics, certainly American politics. How he became the man people either love, hate, or love to hate is the focus of Mary L. Trump’s Too Much and Never Enough. At 250 pages, it’s a nominal time investment for anyone who has seen the trainwreck and wants to understand how it happened.
There’s little new here for anyone who’s been paying attention but because it comes from an insider, Mary is Donald’s niece, it hasn’t been presented in quite this way and there is, if not empathy, at least some genuine sympathy for Donald. But lots of people have lousy parents, terrible childhoods, get too much or not enough, and suffer tragedy or trauma and manage to—well, I don’t know what they manage. Some cope or overcome and become reasonable members of society. Others don’t and become something else, something destructive, either to themselves or to others.
Donald J. Trump is the perfect storm: a solipsistic asshole who managed to convince others that his weaknesses and character flaws were virtues and used them to ride the Republican party’s anti-intellectualism wave into the White House. More than that, though, he’s taught a lesson to millions of people, mostly uneducated white men, that being a crude, ignorant, chauvinist, racist bully is not just okay, it pays! When we stop being civil to one another despite our differences and disagreements, when we shout down and trample the better angels of our nature, when the indecorous becomes decorous, well, then we are truly lost. We can be hopeful that Trump’s brand, both personal and political, will be but a blip in the course of history, and we can be thankful that someone like him doesn’t come along every day.
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