If the Trump family had never existed, someone would have invented them.
Indeed, they’d have been right at home in some over-the-top TV soap produced by Aaron Spelling. As depicted in “Too Much and Never Enough,” Mary L. Trump’s lacerating new portrait of her uncle Donald and the loveless clan that produced him, they are nearly operatic in their villainy.
Many stories from the book might suffice to paint the picture. There is, for instance, the Thanksgiving meal where grandma was choking and the Trumps glanced up, then kept eating. There’s the part where they canceled health insurance on a great-grandson who suffered from seizures and required 24-hour nursing care. There’s the time grandma justified Mary’s exclusion from her grandfather’s will by telling her that her late father was worth “a whole lot of nothing.”
And then there’s the day her father died. Frederick “Freddy” Trump Jr. was the oldest son, the heir apparent to the Trump real estate empire until his failure to prove himself a “killer” in business, his love for deep-sea fishing, his work as an airline pilot — a “bus driver in the sky,” sneered his old man — and his descent into alcohol and despair caused the father to move on to his second son, Donald.
Freddy’s downward spiral ended on Sept. 26, 1981, when an ambulance took him to the hospital. “The doctors think Freddy probably won’t make it,” Donald is said to have told Freddy’s ex-wife. She rushed to the family home to wait by the phone. Mary says Donald and his sister Elizabeth weren’t there. They had gone to the movies.
