I read Mary Trump’s new book about her dysfunctional family and her troubled uncle, Donald Trump. It’s indelible, revealing and obvious why the family has tried to block it. A review: bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
I began covering Trump in 1990 and there are important insights and episodes in this book that haven’t appeared elsewhere — all around the family’s very bent and destructive dynamics and what, exactly, Trump grew up around.
“Abuse can be quiet and insidious just as often as, or even more often than, it is loud and violent. As far as I know, my grandfather wasn’t a physically violent man or even a particularly angry one. He didn’t have to be; he expected to get what he wanted and almost always did.”
Amid a pandemic and social upheaval, with the powers of the presidency at his disposal, Trump's resentments metastasize. “He has suffered mightily,” Mary Trump writes of Donald’s worldview, “and if you aren’t doing all you can to alleviate that suffering, you should suffer too.”
