He’s been hollow within for decades, arguably since age 7. He’s profoundly insecure and not good at stuff. Not in a small way, in a chronic way. He doesn’t have the confidence to admit failing and instead lies and blames other people. These traits render him incapable of solving problems.
Mary Trump, niece to Donald Trump with a PhD. in psychology, has written a deep analysis of her family. The throughline is how Donald and his siblings grew up with odd and undemonstrative parents. How the siblings branched out from the same weird trunk provides interesting contrasts to one another. Donald, full of bluster and ambition and blundering, easily surpassed his siblings at the top of his father’s affections because his father, Fred Trump, was awkward in public and liked having a charismatic son as a front for the family business. Fred Trump did not view his son as competent, just a front, and Fred continued to run things and rescue his son from failures over and over.
Once Fred died, the bankruptcies accelerated. The tacky branding of Trump steaks or the Trump airline or the demonstrable fraud of Trump University merely starts a long list of fiascos and evidence of Donald’s horrible inability to make deals or even know what’s in the books with his name on them. He ruins his projects and robs his business partners and contractors. He was a financial wreck when he got a t.v. show that pretended he was a financial success and much of the public thought, well, if they saw him on t.v. getting into a helicopter on a skyscraper helipad, he must be a rich guy.
I listened to the audiobook, which Mary Trump capably narrates. Her tone is measured and calm throughout. She has decades of research and pinpoints the factors at play far better than pundits who pad their analyses with armchair psychology.
The pathologies she describes are not surprises. But she capably makes the case that at this point her uncle Donald’s behavior cannot change and will not change. It is foolish to wait for any reflection by him. He has no multi-layered strategy. He is a creature of appetite and impulse.
She diagnoses uncle Donald as incapable of ever being happy. The main things that give him pleasure are bullying others and getting away with things. He boasts and preens to win the approval of his father, who is dead and can never give him the praise he so desperately needs. Donald desperately clamors for attention and approval from a phantom. He is a failure who claims to be self-made but has gone bankrupt five times and been bailed out by his father with a total of $413 million (she is the primary source of Trump family financial records in the New York Times’ epic “Trump Engaged in Suspect Tax Schemes as He Reaped Riches Off His Father” in October 2018). He is a tax cheat, cruel, indifferent to family and has contempt for the people who voted for him, but they’re the only ones who give him praise so he taps them over and over to fill the void within.
He is dumb about history and does not understand government. He wants to be perceived as a success, no matter the cost or the lies, and the rest of us are disposable.
There is no person to recover at this point. There is only whether to allow him and his enablers to further ruin and rob us.
