She always wanted to be a writer. Anything else, you sense, would have been a disappointment.
Her first book sold a million copies on its first day. It was non-fiction, and it made her ubiquitous, and, in one half of a divided country, celebrated.
Mary Trump’s book about her uncle Donald was not the one she dreamed of writing when she studied English literature at Tufts, or earned a master’s in the same subject at Columbia. Whatever novel she dreamed of writing — and surely there was one — never went further than the waste paper basket. She became a psychologist.
Her uncle became the President. Then she became an author. Here was a story even a mollusk could have sold. Finally.
This week it was announced that Mary would be releasing another book. She put her family on the couch, now it was time for the nation. The Reckoning will be published next March. According to the publisher, it ‘will examine America’s national trauma…dramatically exacerbated by the impact of current events and the Trump administration’s corrupt and immoral policies.’
Cockburn can’t help but feel that Mary is projecting, in the most Trumpian-style there is. ‘I am your voice,’ Uncle Don once told supporters, melding his person with them. Now Mary makes the same mistake, conflating her (messed-up) family with her (admittedly, messed-up) country. Either way, it’s basically a case of: L’état, c’est moi.
Mary has made a name airing her clan’s dirty laundry — the time her uncle complemented her rack; the time her grandmother called Elton John a ‘faggot’. No embarrassment was too small to find a place in the pages of Too Much and Never Enough.
She became a #Resistance hero, again, in the most Trumpian way possible. She sold what her uncle sells: a last name.
This is a family with an unerring instinct for giving people what they want. For what people aspire to.
Her grandfather, Fred, built homes for working class people who wanted to be middle class. He gave the homes brick-veneers and Tudor facades. English names that were so far away from England they could be classy. Edgerton. Sussex Hall. Wexford Hall.
Donald took it up. He furnished skyscraper apartments with pink marble for rich people who wondered if they might feel richer.
And Mary? In an era when so many aspire to know, authentically, that it is really as bad as they think — that guy is a psychopath, is a world historical monster — she tells them it’s all true.
Uncle Don certainly is a narcissist, as she claims. We don’t need to page Dr Freud to diagnose that one. But Mary’s claim that Donald suffers a ‘long undiagnosed learning disability’ — without any evidence at all — was gratuitous, and a give-away.
Like a true Trump, she gives her audience what they want, rather than what is true.
The big reveal of Too Much was: Donald had Daddy Issues. Fred Trump was the great villain of the piece, the man who stitched the Frankenstein Prez together in a Queens mansion. But it wasn’t a real reveal. Donald talked about it all the time. ‘That’s why I’m so screwed up,’ he wrote in Think Big (2007), ‘because I had a father that pushed me pretty hard.’
Mary acts like she isn’t part of her family, the better to distance itself from them. It’s a self-presentation as quietly false as anything they do. She was an ingénue; naive, even when she agreed, as a 29-year-old, to ghost write Don’s third book. That was in 1994. She must have been the only person in America not to know what her uncle was like.
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In Too Much, she loses a chunk of inheritance money after Fred Trump dies, and writes ‘I’d thought I was part of the family. I’d gotten it all wrong.’ She obtained ‘nothing’ after the legal dust cleared.
(Mary received $200,000 from the settlement. Four times the median US household wealth that year.)
No, no, no. Of course Mary was part of the family. And how much has she made in the last year, and how much will she make next year, from her next book? Too much won’t be enough for her, that’s Cockburn’s guess. She did always want to be a writer, after all.
Mary Trump isn’t a chip off the old block. She’s the old block itself.
