This month’s best paperbacks: Emmanuel Carrère, Mary Trump and more | Books
Who Could Ever Love You Mary Trump
Family burn book dishes on Donald
Once again, Mary Trump strafes her family, with her third book in four years. Who Could Ever Love You presents the Trump name as both cocoon and nightmare. Dysfunction reigns. Think of it as a burn book. All get singed.
At times, Trump wishes Trump was not her surname. But she won’t abandon the legacy. She has delivered two bestsellers – Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man and The Reckoning: America’s Trauma and Finding a Way to Heal. Her third book also follows All in the Family: The Trumps and How We Got This Way, a memoir by Fred C Trump III, Mary’s older brother, now estranged.
Their home life sounds brutal – Linda Clapp, their mother, straight out of Mommy Dearest. Mary portrays her as cruelly oblivious. She repeatedly refused to bring young Mary to the hospital during late-night asthma attacks. Instead, she plunked Mary into her own bed.
Mary’s father, Fred Trump Jr, neglected his kids. When he was around, he wasn’t present. He hit the bottle, divorced Clapp and died young. Mary loved him anyway. But his own father, Fred Trump Sr, repeatedly trampled his son, despising him for who he was and what he wasn’t. The elder Trump came to disinherit Fred Jr and his “issue”, at the urging of his surviving children, the next oldest boy, Donald Trump, among them. Think The Apprentice or Family Feud, crossed with Lord of the Flies.
Predictably, Mary dishes on Uncle Donald. Her animus runs long and deep, back to grade school days. He bullied her, equating cruelty with attention. Little has changed.
Mary writes: “It didn’t take me long to realize that Donald couldn’t do much more than throw a baseball, which he did, as hard as he could at his nieces and nephews, who were all under ten.”
Trump pitched hard and wild, she writes, rarely meeting the strike zone. On the rare occasions when he connected with her mitt, her eight-year-old hand shuddered.
The epilogue is more upbeat. Mary describes a winter evening in New York. “The lights of the city – my city – shone behind me. There is no way to know if a chance for redemption or even forgiveness exists anymore, but in that moment, I felt the world opening up again.”
