The new tell-all Trump book


The new book by Donald Trump’s niece Mary Trump, a clinical psychologist, exposes him to the world. The unsuccessful attempts to block publication resulted in the Streisand effect kicking in big time and greatly increasing interest in the book. As a result, the publisher shifted up the release date to Tuesday, July 14 but they also sent copies to the media and you can read excerpts from it in many places, such as this one.

Mary Trump’s book, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man, paints her uncle the president in a horrifying light and reveals explosive details about his character and disparaging comments made by his sister, retired federal judge Maryanne Trump Barry.

“If he is afforded a second term, it would be the end of American democracy,” Mary bluntly declares in the book. “Donald, following the lead of my grandfather and with complicity, silence, and inaction from his siblings, destroyed my father. I can’t let him destroy my country.”

While the excerpts quoted in the article suggest that the book will make for entertaining reading, it also induces the sobering feeling of “How the hell could such a person end up president? What does it say about a country that would vote him in?”

In another article, Mary Trump’s lawyer Ted Boutrous is quoted as saying, “The more people see what he was like before, and really understand the kind of person he is and was, the more people will be horrified that he’s the president.”

I am not so sanguine that this statement applies to Trump’s supporters because they are a cult and cult members either refuse to believe anything negative about their Dear Leader or view what others see as his faults as actual virtues.

Comments

  1. sonofrojblake says

    “What does it say about a country that would vote him in?”

    Let’s see…
    “don’t live there”? “don’t even visit if you have a choice”? “avoid the people from that place, especially the ones who could leave but choose not to” ?

    I mean, I could go on,but it sounds like it might be a trick question.

  2. Some Old Programmer says

    (Mano, I think you mean that the publisher moved the release up to July 14th)

  3. says

    “How the hell could such a person end up president?”

    Plato had some things to say about that.
    “Democracy is a charming form of government, full of variety and disorder, and dispensing a sort of equality to equals and unequals alike.”

  4. Matt G says

    Mencken had some odious views, but he’s spot on here:

    “As democracy is perfected, the office of the president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day, the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”

  5. Marja Erwin says

    The majority of the voters picked either Clinton, Stein, or Johnson. It doesn’t make sense to attribute his election to “democracy”.

  6. Marja Erwin says

    … And of course that m-word was a classification in the forced sterilization of intellectually disabled and neurologically disabled people.

    That’s not early modern history. California had a forced sterilization program up to 2011, banning it in 2014, and I wouldn’t be surprised if other states had one longer or have one now.

    That’s relevant in a lot of our daily lives, too. Depending on our particular disabilities, or class, our ancestry, and so on, we’re considered acceptable collateral damage in safety planning, and may be considered acceptable collateral damage in the criminal system, in the capitalist system, and so on. I can never drive, can’t bike any more, can’t take the bus any more either, and sometimes get hit by cars. And I’m lucky-- was just reading about Matthew Rushin who got railroaded for an accident and may spend most of his life in prison for it.

  7. Holms says

    The cult can’t be shown anything it doesn’t want to see, so this will be yet another ‘fake news’ act of sabotage from the ‘deep state’ or whatever.

  8. says

    At this point, someone could reveal that Trump fucks dead pigs, and post the pictures, and his base would just ignore it. Because politicians are like that.

  9. jrkrideau says

    @ 9 Marcus Ranum
    Trump fucks dead pigs
    Quite possibly but effete UK tricks like that (See Piggate) could hurt him with the MAGA crowd.

  10. Who Cares says

    “How the hell could such a person end up president?”

    40 plus years of dog whistling until someone comes around and tells it openly. Combine with being a conman. The people having an even greater aversion to Hillary who came over as fake whereas Trump with his off the cuff rambling while boasting about how good he could run the country came over as honest (oh yes that is the first impression I got from both, Hillary was obviously faking it, Trump being open & honest). People not bothering to go deeper then that first impression (my remarks to friends was that Hillary would be the best choice for the US, while Trump would be the best choice internationally, that was before he dumped his diplomatic and political advisors in the first months of his presidency and went caveman with the biggest club on the world). Also the petty squabbling in the GOP allowed a peon revolt so that for a change not the person backed by the people financing the GOP was chosen as candidate, also the failing of a similar revolt in with the Democrats (they had to change the system that stopped the revolt though since it was a bit too obvious that the peons didn’t have a real voice in candidate selection).

  11. Who Cares says

    @Marcus Ranum(#9)

    At this point, someone could reveal that Trump fucks dead pigs, and post the pictures, and his base would just ignore it. Because politicians are like that.

    It depends a bit.
    Trump mishandled COVID-19 well enough that he didn’t get the usual 20+ approval bump for a president when the US goes into a crisis.
    Then he lost 5 to 10 points (depends on poll, etc.) of approval for being too much of a racist and/or a “law and order” guy after him demanding that the army or national guard be sicked on the protesters of BLM.

    So yes he can and did lose support. The ones left over at this point are probably as you said immune to anything but a video showing him has sex as the bottom with a Middle/South American or Asian looking guy.

  12. Allison says

    Does this book actually tell us anything we didn’t already know about him?

    I live in the NYC area, which is the place he infested before he got the presidential bug, and I’ve heard about him ever since I moved here in the 1980’s.

    He has always been a blowhard, a racist, a misogynist, and a bully, and has gotten most of his gains by lying, cheating, and conning people. He has demonstrated that you can get away with almost anything if you have enough chutzpah and can lie with a straight face. There is nothing he has done in the past 4-5 years that wasn’t pretty well predictable to anyone who bothered to look at his history. I’m reminded of that line from a song from my youth: “you knew durned well I was a snake before you brought me in.”

    I attribute his success to the fact that most of the US population is in their heart of hearts bigoted, greedy, and in love with violence (as long as it never blows back on them.) After all, would the police be acting the way they are if they couldn’t count on the support, tacit or otherwise, of a large part of the population? He appealed to that and was wildly successful. Our only hope is that the blowback that they suffer from his antics will be enough to get enough people to turn away from him. But I don’t expect it to turn them away from the hate and vicarious brutality that led them to vote for him in the first place.

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