Thread by @CarlosLozadaWP

So I reviewed the Mary Trump book: washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/0…
But like with any review, there are things I didn't have space or time to discuss, stuff that is interesting but not vital to include in the review. So I'm going to run through the book and point out some stuff. Thread...

First, Mary Trump is funny! She captures people in quick, memorable descriptions. On seeing the VP in the WH, for instance:
"Mike Pence continued to lurk on the other side of the room with a half-dead smile on his face, like the chaperone everybody wanted to avoid." (2)

We know Don Jr. sucks up to his dad in public. But he does in family gatherings, too. Very awkward. When the extended family gathered in the WH for the birthday of Donald's sisters, Jr. gave a campaign-style toast. "Last November, the American people saw something special..." (3)

Maryanne, the oldest of the Trump siblings and a Catholic convert, freaked out when evangelicals started supporting Trump. "What the fuck is wrong with them? The only time Donald went to church was when the cameras were there. It's mind-boggling. He has no principles. None!" (4)

Mary writes that at family meals with his siblings, Donald "talked about all of the women he considered ugly fat slobs or the men, usually more accomplished or powerful, he called losers while my grandfather and Maryanne, Elizabeth and Robert all laughed and joined in." (5)

Trump talks about US interests solely in terms of $$, like NATO is ripping us off, etc. Mary says his father taught him to think that way. "The costs and benefits of governing are considered in purely financial terms, as if the US Treasury were his personal piggy bank." (6)

The first four chapters, dealing with the Trump family childhood, are organized under one section of the book titled "The Cruelty Is the Point" -- evoking the @TheAtlantic essay by @AdamSerwer: theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/…
She also highlights his work in her Author's Note. (7)

@TheAtlantic @AdamSerwer Donald's mother, Mary, had serious health problems when Donald was a toddler (emergency hysterectomy, multiple surgeries) and as a result was simply not around/able to care for him much. But their father was incapable of filling the void, so they younger kids were lost. (8)

@TheAtlantic @AdamSerwer Mary on Donald's paternal grandfather: "Friedrich, born in Kallstadt, a small village in western Germany, left for the United States when he turned eighteen in 1885 in order to avoid mandatory military service." He made $$ owning restaurants & brothels in British Columbia. (9)

Fred Trump, Donald's father, was a big fan of Norman Vincent Peale's THE POWER OF POSITIVE THINKING. It is one of the books/influences Donald Trump has often mentioned in his own books (10)

Mary Trump on how Donald's father (Fred) dealt with children: "He was still and formal around kids, he never played ball or games of any kind with them, and it seemed as if he had never been young." (11)

Trump sometimes brags about his uncle John, an MIT professor. But the Trump kids were taught that he was a poor example, "soft and, though not unambitious, interested in the wrong things, such as engineering and physics, which Fred found esoteric and unimportant." (12)

When Donald was 7 and Freddy 14, Donald wouldn't stop tormenting their younger brother at dinner. So Freddy picked up a bowl of mashed potatoes and dumped it on Donald's head. "It was the first time that Donald had been humiliated." Decades later he's still pissed about it. (13)

More memorable descriptions by Mary Trump: "By the time [Donald] was twelve, the right side of his mouth was curled up in an almost perpetual sneer of self-conscious superiority." Freddy called Donald "the Great-I-Am," echoing an Exodus package he'd learned in Sunday School (13)

Trump talks about his time in the New York Military Academy. He was sent there because he was acting out in his prior school way too much, even if Fred was a trustee. "Nobody sent their sons to NYMA for a better education, and Donald understood it rightly as a punishment." (14)

When Freddy tried to prove himself in the Trump biz by ordering new windows for a building, Fred humiliates him in front of the staff: "You should have slapped a goddamn coat of paint on them instead of wasting my money! Donald is worth ten of you." (Donald was in HS.) (15)

Fred wanted his son Freddy to join the family business but Freddy wanted to be a commercial airline pilot. Fred mocked this ambition, calling him a "bus driver in the sky." Donald joined in: "Dad's right about you: You're nothing but a glorified bus driver." Lots of cruelty. (16)

When Donald was at Fordham, he'd come by his old neighborhood and try to flirt w/ girls. Once he talked to a woman who said she'd gone to a school near his military academy. When she tells him which, Donald is unimpressed. "I'm so disappointed that you went to that school." (17)

Trump often brags about his brains and has called on Obama to release his transcripts and test scores. But Mary Trump writes that while Donald was at Fordham, his older sister Maryanne did his homework for him. Also, that he paid a friend of his to take the SATs for him. (18)

Not a lot of big readers in the Trump family, per Mary Trump anecdote: "When the whole family was together, we spent most of our time in the library, a room without books until Donald's ghostwritten The Art of the Deal was published in 1987." (19)

When Donald and Ivana were first married, they gave their niece Mary Trump a Christmas present: a 3-pack of underwear. They gave Mary's brother a nice leather-bound journal, but one that was two years out of date. Lots of other examples of cheapness, regifting in the book (20)

Mary says that when her father Freddy was staying at his parents' house and was gravely ill (heart condition), no one went with him in the ambulance to the hospital, and no one went to see him. He died that night. "As my father lay dying alone, Donald went to the movies." (21)

Maryanne asked her brother Donald for help in getting a judgeship. Donald enlisted Roy Cohn, who had connections in the Reagan administration. "Cohn gave Attorney General Ed Meese a call, and Maryanne was nominated" for a seat on the US District Court/New Jersey. (22)

Mary Trump writes well. 139 pages into the book, I got a confirming clue about that part of her background ... A year after she graduated from Tufts in 1988, Mary "entered the graduate program in English and comparative literature at Columbia University." (23)

The extended Trump family all depended to some extent on the family fortune, and they all felt insecure their place in the pecking order, or whether Fred, the patriarch, would cut them off. "Everyone in my family experienced a strange combination of privilege and neglect." (24)

Donald asked Mary to ghostwrite one of his memoirs, so she followed him around to get details. But all he did was either gossip on the phone calls or review his own press clippings. "After all of the time I had spent in his office, I still had no idea what he actually did." (25)

Fred Trump's Queens home was always referred to as "the House," and it was an oppressive place. Even Fred's wife Mary hated it. After a hospital stay, she chooses a rehab facility rather than having a therapist at home. "Anything to avoid going back to the House," she said. (26)

Trump's bragging NEVER stops, no matter the setting. For example:
All the Trump kids gave eulogies at their father's funeral service. "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." (27)

When Fred died, the share of the estate that would have gone to the children of the deceased son Freddy was instead divided among the other Trump siblings. "As far as your grandfather was concerned, dead is dead. He only cared about his living children," an uncle tells Mary. (28)

When Mary and her brother hire a lawyer to fight the terms of the will, her grandmother (Maryanne Trump) confronts her. "Do you know what your father was worth when he died? A whole lot of nothing," she tells Mary over the phone. It was the last time they spoke. (29)

During the family legal dispute, the Trump business took Mary and her brother and their families off the health insurance that all the Trumps had in perpetuity. They did so despite knowing that the child of Mary's brother had serious health troubles requiring constant care. (30)

Nearly a decade passed before Mary saw the extended Trump family -- at Ivanka/Jared's wedding. They didn't even know that Mary Trump had an eight year-old daughter. (31)

NYT's Susanne Craig came to Mary's house and asked her to be a source for investigation on Trump family taxes. Mary first declined, but she eventually shared 19 boxes of legal documents w/NYT. She only had access to them b/c of the prior legal dispute with the family. Irony! (32)

This is a parallel Mary draws that sticks in my head: "Donald was to my grandfather what the border wall has been for Donald: a vanity project funded at the expense of more worthy pursuits." (33)

Trump hated that Russia probes made him seem illegitimate. Mary makes a bigger point: "Over Donald's lifetime, his failures...his struggle for legitimacy, which could never be won, turned into a scheme to make sure nobody found out that he's never been legitimate at all." (34)

Mary is adamant about undercutting notion of Trump's strategic skills: "We must dispense with the idea of Donald's strategic brilliance in understanding the intersection of media and politics. He doesn't have a strategy; he never has." (35)

Reading this Mary Trump line in the context of Trump's response to the coronavirus pandemic is telling: "For Donald there is no value in empathy, no tangible upside to caring for other people." (36)

Conclusion: It's a good, quick read. Mary combines her psychology training with close observations of her family. At times you wonder how she reaches certain insights or how she knows what she claims to know. But she's open about her grudges. A sad book about a sad family. (end)