Mary L. Trump on Donald Trump

“In order to understand what brought Donald- and all of us- to this point, we need to start with my grandfather and his own need for recognition, a need that propelled him to encourage Donald's reckless hyperbole and unearned confidence that hid Donald's pathological weaknesses and insecurities. As Donald grew up, he was forced to become his own cheerleader, first, because he needed his father to believe he was a better and more confident son than Freddy was; then because Fred required it of him; and finally because he began to believe his own hype, even as he paradoxically suspected on a very deep level that nobody else did. By the time of the election, Donald met any challenges to his sense of superiority with anger, his fear and vulnerabilities so effectively buried that he didn't even have to acknowledge they existed. And he never would.”

“In the 1970s, after my grandfather had already been preferring and promoting Donald for years, the New York media picked up the baton and began disseminating Donald's unsubstantiated hype. In the 1980s, the banks joined in when they began to fund his ventures. Their willingness (and then their need) to foster his increasingly unfounded claims to success hung on the hopes of recouping their losses. After a decade during which Donald floundered, dragged down by bankruptcies and reduced to fronting for a series of failed products from steaks to vodka, the television producer Mark Burnett gave him yet another chance. The Apprentice traded on Donald's image as the brash, self-made dealmaker, a myth that had been the creation of my grandfather five decades earlier and astonishingly, considering the vast trove of evidence disproving it, had survived into the new millennium almost entirely unaltered. By the time Donald announced his run for the Republican Party nomination in 2015, a significant percentage of the American population had been primed to believe that myth.”

“To this day, the lies, misrepresentations, and fabrications that are the sum total of who my uncle is are perpetuated by the Republican Party and white evangelical Christians. People who know better, such as Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell; true believers, such as Representative Kevin McCarthy, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and Attorney General William Barr; and others too numerous to name, have become, unwittingly or not, complicit in their perpetuation.”

“The fact is, Donald's pathologies are so complex and his behaviors so often inexplicable that coming up with an accurate and comprehensive diagnosis would require a full battery of psychological and neuropsychological tests that he'll never sit for. At this point, we can't evaluate his day-to-day functioning because he is, in the West Wing, essentially institutionalized. Donald has been institutionalized for most of his adult life, so there is no way to know how he would thrive, or even survive, on his own in the real world. At the end of my aunt's birthday party in 2017, as we lined up for our pictures, I could see that Donald was already under a kind of stress he'd never experienced before. As the pressures upon him have continued to mount over the course of the last three years, the disparity between the level of competence required for running a country and his incompetence has widened, revealing his delusions more starkly than ever before. Many, but by no means all of us, have been shielded until now from the worst effects of his pathologies by a stable economy and a lack of serious crises. But the out-of-control COVID-19 pandemic, the possibility of an economic depression, deepening social divides along political lines thanks to Donald's penchant for division, and devastating uncertainty about our country's future have created a perfect storm of catastrophes that no one is less equipped than my uncle to manage. Doing so would require courage, strength of character, deference to experts, and the confidence to take responsibility and to course correct after admitting mistakes. His ability to control unfavorable situations by lying, spinning, and obfuscating has diminished to the point of impotence in the midst of the tragedies we are currently facing. His egregious and arguably intentional mishandling of the current catastrophe has led to a level of scrutiny and pushback that he's never experienced before, increasing his belligerence and need for petty revenge as he withholds vital funding, personal protective equipment, and ventilators that your tax dollars have paid for from states whose governors don't kiss his ass sufficiently.”

“After the election, Donald called his big sister, ostensibly to find out how he was doing. Of course, he thought he already knew the answer; otherwise he wouldn't have made the call in the first place. He merely wanted her to confirm very strongly that he was doing a fantastic job. When she said, "Not that good," Donald immediately went on offense. "That's nasty," he said. She could see the sneer on his face. Then, seemingly apropos of nothing, he asked her, "Maryanne, where would you be without me?" It was a smug reference to the fact that Maryanne owed her first federal judgeship to Donald because Roy Cohn had done him (and her) a favor all those years ago. My aunt has always insisted that she earned her position on the bench entirely on her own merits, and she shot back at him, "If you say that one more time, I will level you." But it was an empty threat. Although Maryanne had prided herself on being the only person on the planet Donald ever listened to, those days were long past, which was illustrated not long after, in June 2018. On the eve of Donald's first summit with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, Maryanne called the White House and left a message with his secretary: "Tell him his older sister called with a little sisterly advice. Prepare. Learn from those who know what they are doing. Stay away from Dennis Rodman. And leave his Twitter alone." He ignored all of it. The Politico headline the following day read "Trump Says Kim Meeting Will Be About 'Attitude,' Not Prep Work." If Maryanne had ever had any sway over her little brother, it was gone now. Aside from the requisite birthday call, they didn't speak much after that.”

“Donald was to my grandfather what the border wall as been for Donald: a vanity project funded at the expense of more worthy pursuits.”