Mary Trump's book on Donald Trump and his family—TOO MUCH AND NEVER ENOUGH, a phrase related to child abuse—underscores why we don't often read bracing psychological portraits of presidents while they're in office. Such books (this one no exception) can eviscerate their subjects.
TOO MUCH AND NEVER ENOUGH reveals Trump as a broken man who's been psychologically dysfunctional—in a way that endangers those around him and renders him both spiritually starving and essentially unlovable—for 60+ years. It makes clear he should *never* be in a position of power.
One wants to empathize with Donald Trump while reading TOO MUCH AND NEVER ENOUGH—as it's clear Mary Trump, a clinical psychologist and Trump's niece, does—but it's very hard. Not just because of what we know about Trump now, but because of how quickly his character was deranged.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but Donald Trump was a little monster almost from the jump—which you could say was a tragedy, if not for the fact that there's so little indication he ever fought back against influences really almost anyone would have identified as pernicious.
I understand, in many ways and for many reasons, just how long it takes to identify—let alone respond generatively to—early traumas. But it's rare to read of a child or young adult or full adult leaning so hard into tendencies and forces any non-sociopath would read as dangerous.
It's clear Trump's father Fred was a sociopath, but though Mary tries to avoid the diagnosis it's clear Donald exhibited similar traits early on, molding himself not into a reflective person or a sociable person-in-the-world, but a tool for a father he *had* to see was malignant.
This is why I say Trump isn't just a broken man but also profoundly dangerous beyond what we've seen of him already: he appears to be wholly the product of trauma, and to lack any *generative* resilience whatsoever, meaning his actions and reactions are fundamentally destructive.
We are all the product, in part, of our early environments, but Donald Trump is best seen, we learn in TOO MUCH AND NEVER ENOUGH, as a *creature*—an "creation" of his early traumas, who has not adapted beyond his traumas whatsoever across (think of it) over seven decades of life.
TOO MUCH AND NEVER ENOUGH also helps us understand why so many Americans were snookered by Trump, and that includes not just those on the "movement" right but also—for decades—people in media, entertainment and politics. Some people are drawn to sociopaths. It's just that simple.
I don't say this arrogantly. When I was in elementary school, I was very susceptible to powerful personalities, particularly male ones. I came under the sway of a profoundly damaged child who was a pathological liar. I bear the scars of that still. But what if it hadn't happened?
Had I not learned at an early age how deeply dangerous sociopaths are, I might have continued to be drawn to them—particularly, as I said, male ones, in the same way Trump is particularly popular among white men—so I can empathize with those who got drawn into Trump's sociopathy.
I learned years ago that we must distinguish between those are psychologically wounded and whose wounds only harm *them*, and those whose wounds harm *others*. Every adult owes a duty to themselves, their family and their country to see that Trump is the latter type of sociopath.
