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Mary Trump's Book

I'm finding the book far more interesting than I thought I would. Mary's insight into her family and how it shaped Donald is fascinating. In essence, Donald's mother, Mary, was an emotionally needy woman who was often ill and used her children to meet her own emotional needs rather than attending to theirs. She left the 'mothering' of her children to her eldest daughter, Maryanne. Mary Trump says her grandfather, Fred, was a sociopath.
Whereas Mary was needy, Fred seemed to have no emotional needs at
all. In fact, he was a high-functioning sociopath.
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My grandmother was ill equipped to deal with the problems caused
in her marriage by Fred’s callousness, indifference, and controlling
behaviors. Fred’s lack of real human feeling, his rigidity as a parent and a husband, and his sexist belief in a woman’s innate inferiority likely left
her feeling unsupported.
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Sound familiar?

ETA: Reading more about how Fred T believed taking care of children was 'women's work', how he failed to pay attention to his young children but instead devoted himself to his work is pretty much how Ivana T described Donald as a father. We also know he had/has little interaction with his daughter by Marla Maples, Tiffany.

ETA:
"Although frugal, Fred was neither modest nor humble. Early in his career,
he had lied about his age in order to appear more precocious. He had had a
propensity for showmanship, and he often trafficked in hyperbole—
everything was “great,” “fantastic,” and “perfect.”
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Like father, like son.
 
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I'll bet George Soros bought them all to make Trump look bad!

(I have occasionally seen claims that Soros is behind all sorts of things that could theoretically be manipulated by money, including presidential betting pools.)
 
Meadmaker said:
I'll bet George Soros bought them all to make Trump look bad!

(I have occasionally seen claims that Soros is behind all sorts of things that could theoretically be manipulated by money, including presidential betting pools.)
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They blame Soros for everything. Yet Soros doesn't donate to Democratic candidates a fraction of what the Koch brothers donate.
 
One thing that is clearly shown in the book is that the Trumps are one really screwed up family. Talk about dysfunctional! The same scenario is being played out in the next generation with Trump's older three children: the desire to please a cold and authoritarian father at all costs. It's really rather sad.
 
Stacyhs said:
One thing that is clearly shown in the book is that the Trumps are one really screwed up family. Talk about dysfunctional! The same scenario is being played out in the next generation with Trump's older three children: the desire to please a cold and authoritarian father at all costs. It's really rather sad.
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Screw them. What's sad is what they've done to the rest of us.
 
Stacyhs said:
One thing that is clearly shown in the book is that the Trumps are one really screwed up family. Talk about dysfunctional! The same scenario is being played out in the next generation with Trump's older three children: the desire to please a cold and authoritarian father at all costs. It's really rather sad.
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To be fair, one of Fred's kids is a federal judge, and another one is the President of the United States. They seemed to have weathered their dysfunction fairly well.

Ok....and....one died young as an alcoholic. Three out of four ain't bad.
 
Meadmaker said:
To be fair, one of Fred's kids is a federal judge, and another one is the President of the United States. They seemed to have weathered their dysfunction fairly well.

Ok....and....one died young as an alcoholic. Three out of four ain't bad.
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Maryanne, the judge, had to pay her own way through law school even though she was the daughter of a multi-millionaire. When she wanted to go to college, her father told her to go to vocational school and be a receptionist. She was forced to stay in an unhappy marriage for years because her family refused to help her. She also became a judge on the US District
Court for the District of New Jersey after being an asst. district attorney for years because she asked Donald to see what he 'could do' for her. He had Roy Cohn call Ed Meese, the NJ Attorney General, and ask for 'a favor'. Maryanne was nominated in Sept. and confirmed in Oct. Donald thought it would be to his advantage to have his sister on the bench in a state he was planning to do a lot of business in.

There were five Trump siblings, not four: Maryanne, Fred Jr., Elizabeth, Donald, and Robert.

They were a hugely dysfunctional family.
 
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Stacyhs said:
Maryanne, the judge, had to pay her own way through law school even though she was the daughter of a multi-millionaire. When she wanted to go to college, her father told her to go to vocational school and be a receptionist. She was forced to stay in an unhappy marriage for years because her family refused to help her. She also became a judge on the US District
Court for the District of New Jersey after being an asst. district attorney for years because she asked Donald to see what he 'could do' for her. He had Roy Cohn call Ed Meese, the NJ Attorney General, and ask for 'a favor'. Maryanne was nominated in Sept. and confirmed in Oct. Donald thought it would be to his advantage to have his sister on the bench in a state he was planning to do a lot of business in.

There were five Trump siblings, not four: Maryanne, Fred Jr., Elizabeth, Donald, and Robert.

They were a hugely dysfunctional family.
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Hmmm....I never heard of Elizabeth, and I don't know much about Robert. Well, really, I don't know much about any of them except....uhhh...that one.

Donald also has a daughter he never brings up, doesn't he? I think I've seen him with her once. Everyone knows about Ivanka, of course, and Don Jr. and Eric, but there's another daughter, and we will charitably assume that he is intensely devoted to his son, Barron, but wants to keep him out of the public eye, and that's why you would practically not know that the kid exists.

Yeah, it is pretty dysfunctional, isn't it?

ETA: Tiffany. That's her name.
 
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Meadmaker said:
Hmmm....I never heard of Elizabeth, and I don't know much about Robert. Well, really, I don't know much about any of them except....uhhh...that one.

Donald also has a daughter he never brings up, doesn't he? I think I've seen him with her once. Everyone knows about Ivanka, of course, and Don Jr. and Eric, but there's another daughter, and we will charitably assume that he is intensely devoted to his son, Barron, but wants to keep him out of the public eye, and that's why you would practically not know that the kid exists.

Yeah, it is pretty dysfunctional, isn't it?

ETA: Tiffany. That's her name.
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I don't know why you assume Donald is intensely devoted to his son Barron. I

don't think Donald is intensely devoted to anyone other than himself.
 
Meadmaker said:
Hmmm....I never heard of Elizabeth, and I don't know much about Robert. Well, really, I don't know much about any of them except....uhhh...that one.

Donald also has a daughter he never brings up, doesn't he? I think I've seen him with her once. Everyone knows about Ivanka, of course, and Don Jr. and Eric, but there's another daughter, and we will charitably assume that he is intensely devoted to his son, Barron, but wants to keep him out of the public eye, and that's why you would practically not know that the kid exists.

Yeah, it is pretty dysfunctional, isn't it?

ETA: Tiffany. That's her name.
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She just graduated from Georgetown Law. She sounds like she fits into the family mold. Maybe she can sign on to Daddy's defense team.
https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2020/05/tiffany-trump-graduated-law-school
 
I found this from the book amusing. Mary was hired by Donald to ghostwrite one of his books, The Art of the Comeback. Being unable to pin him down for an interview after several weeks (and still unpaid), he called her to tell her had some "really good" material for her to work with:

The next day, Rhona handed me a manila envelope containing about ten
typewritten pages, as promised. I took it to my desk and began to read.
When I finished, I wasn’t sure what to think. It was clearly a transcript of
a recording Donald had made, which explained its stream-of-consciousness quality. It was an aggrieved compendium of women he had
expected to date but who, having refused him, were suddenly the worst,
ugliest, and fattest slobs he’d ever met. The biggest takeaways were that
Madonna chewed gum in a way Donald found unattractive and that
Katarina Witt, a German Olympic figure skater who had won two gold
medals and four world championships, had big calves.
I stopped asking him for an interview.
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ETA: At Fred Trump's funeral, all the children spoke about their father. Mary said this about Donald:

Donald was the only one to deviate from
the script. In a cringe-inducing turn, his eulogy devolved into a paean to
his own greatness. It was so embarrassing that Maryanne later told her son
not to allow any of her siblings to speak at her funeral.
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Some things never change.
 
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Another compelling review:
.... Mary Trump begins from the assumption that other analysis tends to end with: Donald Trump is lethally dangerous, stunningly incoherent, and pathologically incapable of caring about anyone but himself. So, what Mary Trump wants to know is: What the hell is wrong with everyone around him? As she writes in her prologue, “there’s been very little effort to understand not only why he became what he is but how he’s consistently failed up despite his glaring lack of fitness.”
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https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/07/mary-trump-book-psychoanalysis-enablers.html
 
I finished the book. Well worth reading to help understand what makes Trump tick and why. So much is explained about him.
 
The more I hear about Trump from the book, the more I feel sorry for him.
Seems like he never had the chance to become a grownup.
 
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