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Donald Trump developed a penchant for employing hyperbole and lying after watching his “high-functioning sociopath” father demean members of the family who showed weakness, according to a new memoir by his niece.
In Too Much and Never Enough, Mary Trump, 55, describes her uncle as a bully and narcissist who learned to lie to ensure his father, Fred Trump, did not treat him with the scorn the New York builder laid on his eldest son, Freddie.
In the memoir, obtained by the Financial Times ahead of its publication later this month, Mr Trump’s niece says his long history of lying has become a more serious problem now that he is having to deal with crises, including the coronavirus pandemic, which she says he is not equipped to handle.
“His ability to control unfavourable situations by lying, spinning, and obfuscating has diminished to the point of impotence in the midst of the tragedies we are currently facing,” Ms Trump writes in the book.
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A psychologist by training, Ms Trump says that in addition to meeting the clinical definition for narcissism, the president may also suffer from antisocial personality disorder, dependent personality disorder and learning disabilities that make it hard for him to process information.
“Donald Trump’s pathologies are so complex and his behaviours 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,” she writes about the president, who has described himself as a “very stable genius”.
In the 225-page book, Ms Trump describes her uncle as a fraud who has “failed up” his whole life. She claims that he paid a friend to take the SAT college admission tests to help him get accepted to the University of Pennsylvania.
Ms Trump says the key to understanding her uncle lies in his relationship with his deceased father, a strict man who had few emotional connections with his children. She writes Fred Trump taught his son never to apologise because it would be seen as a sign of weakness.
She also takes aim at Mr Trump’s support among US evangelicals, saying her uncle has “no principles” and that “the only time Donald went to church was when the cameras were there”.
Ms Trump says her uncle launched his presidential campaign in 2015 as a marketing stunt. When she saw the result the morning after the election, she writes that “it felt as though 62,979,636 voters had chosen to turn this country into a macro version of my malignantly dysfunctional family”.
“100,000 Dead,” an ad from the anti-Trump super PAC known as The Lincoln Project, comes at you like a miniature horror film. It starts with a shot of seven white body bags, detailed enough that you can see the outline of limbs underneath, and the voice of President Donald Trump at a press briefing in February. The nation’s Covid-19 caseload will soon be “close to zero,” Trump says; his words repeat in an increasingly distorted voice, as the camera pulls back to reveal row upon row of body bags in the shape of an American flag. New words land on the screen with audible thumps: “100,000 dead Americans. One wrong president.” It ends with the faint sound of wind whistling, as if through a graveyard.
Down to the smallest detail, it’s a masterful nugget of compact filmmaking. And it helped draw attention to a renegade corps of Republican strategists, veterans of campaigns for George W. Bush, John McCain, and Mitt Romney, who are applying their attack-ad skills to their own party’s president—and going for the kill shot, every time. “Mourning in America,” their ad released in May, starts with a pointed reference to the Ronald Reagan slogan, then blames Trump for the full range of post-Covid despair, using images of hospital hallways, decrepit buildings and an upside-down flag. (Facebook slapped the ad with a “partly false” warning label, since it assigns Trump all of the blame for relief bills that were passed by the vast majority of Democrats in Congress.) “Debt,” released in late June, starts off like a History Channel documentary about the sacrifices made during World War II, and ends with an image of a Greatest Generation member, hooked up to a ventilator.
How has one renegade super PAC managed to trigger Trump and his allies so thoroughly? Part of it is surely frustration that a group of Republicans would issue a full-throated endorsement of Joe Biden. Part of it is skill: the Lincoln Project ads are slick, quick and filled with damning quotes and unflattering photos. But part of it might just be that Republicans are better at this than Democrats. Trump may sense that these ads are especially dangerous because they pack an emotional punch, using imagery designed to provoke anxiety, anger and fear—aimed at the very voters who were driven to him by those same feelings in 2016. And history, even science, suggests that might in fact be the case—that Republicans have a knack for scaring the hell out of people, and that makes for some potent ads.
The incident is the latest vivid illustration of a rising tide of racist abuse against Asian Americans during the coronavirus pandemic, a trend many critics tie to Republican leaders blaming China for the disease. President Trump has repeatedly used the racist term “kung flu” for the virus, and on Tuesday again called it the “China Virus” on Twitter.
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