Author Dr. Mary Trump joins the Muckrake Podcast to discuss her book Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created The World's Most Dangerous Man, the dysfunctional beginnings of the authoritarian president, and the threat of rising fascism in the United States. To support the show, become a patron at http://www.patreon.com/muckrakepodcst Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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| Hey everybody, it's your host Jared Yates Sexton. | |
| Before we get to today's Muckrig podcast, I wanted to remind you that my new book, American Rule, How a Nation Conquered the World but Failed Its People, is available now. | |
| American Rule is a deep dive into how we have arrived at this moment of crisis. | |
| about how the myth of American exceptionalism helped empower aristocratic white supremacy, how we came to live in this bizarre world where reality seems to be splintering, and of course, how this current threat of fascism and the cult of Trumpism came to imperil us all, and what we can do to win the war for the future. | |
| The truth is, we have been held captive by lies about our past and exploited by the wealthy and powerful who rely on weaponized propaganda and appeals to a whitewashed history that never even existed. | |
| If we're going to find our way forward, we must understand this and disabuse ourselves of these illusions. | |
| Hopefully American Rule, how a nation conquered the world but failed its people, can help you, your friends, and your loved ones do just that. | |
| And now, to the show. | |
| Welcome everybody to the Muckrake Podcast. | |
| I'm your host Jared Yates Sexton, and my co-host Nick Halseman is enjoying some much deserved R&R before the upcoming election. | |
| But the show must go on. | |
| And boy, what a show we have today. | |
| My guest, and we're very lucky to have this guest, is Dr. Mary Trump, psychologist and author of Too Much and Never Enough, How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man. | |
| Dr. Trump is, of course, the niece of the President of the United States of America, Donald Trump, and her book is an exploration of his troubled upbringing and the dysfunctional family environment they were both raised in. | |
| It's more than familial gossip, though. | |
| It investigates the mindset we're all currently suffering through, a sociopathic pursuit of wealth and power coupled with dangerous and abusive overcompensation by a stilted, unwell man. | |
| Those of you who follow my work, listen to this podcast, and read my books know that I firmly believe that Donald Trump is only a symptom of a much, much, much larger disease. | |
| His ascent to power is an indictment of a broken, decaying, unfair system. | |
| And that this point of crisis we find ourselves in is a moment of truth. | |
| We either face these problems head on and find a healthier way forward, or like Donald Trump, we dive headfirst into a violent, delusional denial. | |
| Unfortunately, so much of the coverage of Donald Trump, with its emphasis on rumor, palace intrigue, and spectacle, Misses the more nuanced and integral matters, namely that we are subjects to the whims of a dangerous man and a movement riddled through with willful and violent delusion. | |
| It's a political matter, but it's also a mental health crisis, and Dr. Mary Trump's work navigates a topic that deserves and requires conversation and serious study. | |
| I have to tell you, I really enjoyed this talk, and I appreciate what Dr. Mary Trump has done. | |
| By exposing the dysfunction of Donald Trump's beginnings, she also shines a light on American culture and the corrosive, poisonous effects of unrestrained ambition and this type of abusive, poisonous, sociopathic behavior. | |
| They're all baseline elements of fascism. | |
| And as a psychologist and a survivor of Donald's behaviors and gaslighting tendencies, I also thought it was necessary in this interview to ask Mary Trump, her advice on behalf of all of us who are suffering through this, how we can best cut through the lies and wrestle with this constant stream of trauma. | |
| I'm really excited about this interview and I hope that you get something out of it. | |
| I think there is a lot that we can learn from Dr. Mary Trump. | |
| Not only her book, but her advice on how we navigate these times. | |
| So now, without further ado, Dr. Mary Trump. | |
| Before we get into the actual conversation, I just want to say, Dr. Trump, that I am very, very glad that you wrote the book that you have written. | |
| I felt like it was heroic to be able to talk about your own personal situation and to sort of elucidate what has happened in this country and where we've gotten to. | |
| And I just want to ask first and foremost, from your own experience, What was it like having your familial situation and all of the dysfunction that took place there? | |
| What was it like, first of all, watching it start to play out on a national scale in terms of like the 80s and the 90s in popular culture and now on the political scale? | |
| What's that been like for you? | |
| Early on, I didn't really pay much attention to it because You know, I'm, I'm so, I've always been so far outside my family in the sense of the things I'm interested in and what's important to me. | |
| So I never, it never interested me, you know, what Donald was doing. | |
| And, and, um, I ignored it as much as I possibly could. | |
| Uh, cause it, it was seemed so trivial and at times nonsensical. | |
| Now, however, or certainly since November 9th, 2016, it's been, I have not been able to ignore it as much as times as I would have liked to. | |
| And initially it was heartbreaking. | |
| And even though I shouldn't have, because nobody knew who I was, I took it really personally that so many people thought that this was okay. | |
| You know, I've kind of gotten over myself in terms of that, but it's still heartbreaking. | |
| Because it's getting worse all the time, and yet, this astonishingly high percentage of Americans still apparently think it's okay. | |
| Yeah, and before we started this conversation, and I wanted to hit the record button so quickly, because I think one of the things that you're talking about, and I was really glad that you used this term, is I talk a lot about how we're not just in a moment of political crisis, but that we're in a moment of a mental health crisis. | |
| And so much of what we're talking about, and of course you have a background in psychology, and you know to sort of watch people support Donald Trump and to be engaged in this Make America Great Again fantasy and this sort of rising authoritarianism, and it's all based in this like weaponized delusion both about the self and about the country and about society and race | |
| Not only the personal experience of seeing your family sort of being a part of this, but as being a person with this background in psychology, what do you see playing out? | |
| You talked about what you see is this burgeoning crisis. | |
| How do you see that sort of operating on a mass scale now? | |
| I want to start with the great irony that Donald and his enablers originally advocated for opening up the country and the economy. | |
| When every epidemiologist and scientist on the planet was saying, no, that's a very bad idea. | |
| In order to, in his words, protect people's mental health, which, by the way, he doesn't care about. | |
| You know, if we stay closed for too long, suicides will go up and substance abuse disorders will go up. | |
| That was really ironic. | |
| And here we are. | |
| How many months later? | |
| The virus is raging out of control. | |
| We will, at some point, as soon as a sane person is in charge, have to shut down again, totally. | |
| So all of those potential mental health crises are now going to be realized because of his ineptitude and his cruelty. | |
| You know, I think most people would have been totally cool with locking down for six weeks. | |
| We did it in New York. | |
| You know, um, we got through it. | |
| Uh, the reason though, that a lot of us aren't going to be able to maintain our sanity is because it was all for nothing. | |
| So, all of our agency was taken away from us. | |
| All of our hard work was. | |
| Squandered, um, because we are just as at risk now as we were. | |
| And in some places, people are more at risk. | |
| So. | |
| I truly believe that in the not too distant future, you know, six months to 18 months out, we are going to be hit with a mental health crisis in this country, the likes of which we've never seen, and that at the best of times, we're not prepared to deal with. | |
| It's sort of like, imagine if you will, A situation in which we were at war and our soldiers come back with PTSD and other anxiety disorders, depression, suicidality, etc. | |
| But every single person in the country was in a war zone. | |
| That's what we're looking at. | |
| Well, and it certainly feels like there is a there is a constant day-to-day not just trauma, but a dysfunctional reality that we're all existing in. | |
| And, you know, at the top of this, obviously, is this man, Donald Trump, who, I think you did the country a great service of talking about the background and the sort of situation that this originated from. | |
| And one of the things that you talk about this, and I actually wrote about this in my book, The Man They Want Me to Be, which was about sort of the abusive nature of the socialization of masculinity, And how you continue to see this cycle of one person who has these problems or has been socialized or has grown up in some sort of abusive situation, then becomes sort of socialized themselves and then passes it on to other people. then becomes sort of socialized themselves and then passes it | |
| And in a lot of cases, it's their children, their relatives. | |
| In this case, it feels like that behavior and that socialization and that trauma is now being acted upon an entire society, which is how you start going down the slippery slope towards things like authoritarianism and fascism. | |
| I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about that cycle and what you've seen in your family and how that's gotten us to the point where we're at. | |
| Yeah, you're exactly right about how these things replicate themselves and how, you know, somebody like Donald, who did suffer mightily as a child, don't get me wrong, you know, he had a horrible childhood. | |
| Go ahead and have compassion for the child, but that doesn't let him off the hook because unlike other people who are abused as children, he has become Somebody who is disseminating the same kinds of cruelty that he experienced. | |
| So we now find ourselves in a situation where we're at the mercy of somebody who not only doesn't care about other people, who doesn't have empathy, who not only doesn't know anything, but is sort of proud of his ignorance, who is keeping us Under a situation in which we are on a day-to-day basis, as you said, experiencing trauma. | |
| But at the same time, and by the way, trauma across the board, trauma, we're afraid of getting sick. | |
| We are living under, you know, with economic uncertainty. | |
| We are living with the uncertainty of when things are ever going to get back to normal. | |
| But we're also dealing with the burden Of not being able to trust people historically we should be able to trust. | |
| We are living under the additional burden of not knowing what reality is because we're getting lied to by so many people in so many different ways. | |
| And that's exactly what Donald has had to do his entire life to, first of all, Prevent other people from seeing the reality of who he is, which is a terrified little boy, but also protecting himself from that very knowledge. | |
| Here we are. | |
| Right, and that delusion versus protection I think is a really important factor that you're talking about. | |
| Because, so when I've been doing my research on fascism and authoritarianism, what I keep finding is to the world it seems as if you're dealing with a quote-unquote strong man, right? | |
| You're dealing with somebody who has the will and the power in order to enact their will and power on society and to make other people bend to their will. | |
| But what I keep finding is that these things are actually born out of weakness. | |
| They're born out of people who need to overcompensate. | |
| They're born out of people who take on this philosophy. | |
| And you mentioned this from Fred Trump Sr., the idea that, you know, the old saying, might makes right, or that anything that helps you maintain power was by definition right. | |
| And what strikes me about that is that is a personal definition of sort of an ideology of how the world works, but that's also a larger political and societal definition of authoritarianism and fascism. | |
| It's the idea that. | |
| Even if you are weak, if you somehow or another impose your will on the world and give them a version of yourself that doesn't even exist to you, that you might be able to fool other people into believing it, which is, weirdly enough, sort of the trap of masculinity itself. | |
| Can you talk a little bit about those cycles, about that sort of overcompensation and that sort of delusion that seeps in in this sort of a situation? | |
| Yeah, I mean, that's an excellent Explication of this situation we find ourselves in and I I too have also wondered why the term strong man has been used because you strong men are Incredibly weak people, you know a strong person would not need to be a quote-unquote strong man, right? | |
| so this Was something That applied to my grandfather as well. | |
| Um, he was very much in charge of his business and his family, but his success was really parochial. | |
| Um, and I think, and also his success was enabled by other people who were more powerful and more successful. | |
| Um, and it was also enabled by the funds from the federal government, but that's a different issue entirely. | |
| Um, but on some level, he must have understood that he could not be successful outside this very narrow scope of his family and Brooklyn and Queens. | |
| So he used Donald to kind of extend his ability to succeed in the world. | |
| But the problem is. | |
| You know, as you pointed out, that was also based on a myth that Donald was good at anything, right? | |
| That he was superior in some way. | |
| I mean, he's an abject failure. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Abject failure on every level. | |
| But my grandfather desperately needed to perpetuate that myth for many, many reasons. | |
| But what we end up with is somebody who himself needs to perpetuate that myth. | |
| along the way picks up other people, you know, some of whom are just hangers on and who are shockingly weaker than Donald is, but who understand that one of the most extraordinary things my grandfather did was make Donald's turn Donald into somebody who was eminently useful but who understand that one of the most extraordinary things my grandfather did was make Donald's | |
| And that's how you get somebody like him in the position he's in. | |
| It certainly wasn't by virtue of his own personal characteristics. | |
| Sure. | |
| And I think that's the interesting thing here is that that overcompensation and sort of the peccadilloes that go with it, because, you know, people say, and I really hate these articles that talk about Donald Trump is like a counter puncher or that he's a, you know, this idea of bullying is sort of a political strategy. | |
| It's a survival strategy. | |
| It's a matter of a person who is outmatched in every possible way, is not nearly as talented as he has been made out to be or that he believes himself to be, but the aggression has to take over. | |
| And as a result, he's made an incredible political battering ram for people who have ideologies that he doesn't have, but he's more than willing to play along as long as they treat him as if he is strong and capable. | |
| That's precisely right. | |
| And it is infuriating when anybody attributes A strategy to him or an ideology to him. | |
| He doesn't have strategies. | |
| He doesn't have an ideology. | |
| He just does what he does out of an instinct for self-preservation. | |
| The problem we face now is that he never has to, I mean, not that he's capable of it, but he's never put in a position where he sees the limits of his behavior Because he's always getting away with it. | |
| Have you ever seen him pivot? | |
| Ever. | |
| Even when he does get caught, does he pivot? | |
| No. | |
| Because he can't. | |
| But then there's always been somebody there to save him from himself. | |
| Whether it was my grandfather throwing more money at him to help him out of his bankruptcies or his failed businesses or the banks doing the same thing or the media covering the wrong aspects of the story and propping him up in that way. | |
| And now it's it's the Republican Party. | |
| You know, what is the message to somebody like Donald when he was caught? | |
| He was caught betraying his country and The Republican Senate won't even hold, won't even do any due diligence. | |
| And they will, without even knowing the facts, well, they probably did know the facts, but without even digging deeper, they just vote to acquit. | |
| What is the message to somebody like him? | |
| And we're seeing the same thing happening with the Supreme Court. | |
| With their, sorry, with their, you know, jamming through this totally corrupt Supreme Court nomination. | |
| If there are never any consequences, somebody like Donald is going to double down, or quadruple down, because in the end, he knows, and this is historically accurate, and this is one of the few cases in which he's right, he will always get his way. | |
| And I look at him as a real indictment of the American system, as it works, because this is somebody who is not only, you know, obviously was born into privilege and has failed consistently, but the system has always saw it as important to keep him afloat, right? | |
| I mean, he functioned for years as a mascot, basically, for the wealthy and powerful as this sort of fraudulent front for the idea of the meritocracy. | |
| And the fact that he's gotten to the point that he is, and a lot of it I feel like is about enabling, right? | |
| It's about people who make excuses for people's bad behavior. | |
| And we have somebody who, as president, has not only been out of their league, but has been completely over their head and has had to continually engage in this abusive behavior. | |
| And meanwhile, you have the media, you have politicians, you have just American citizens who don't want to believe that the system is problematic to begin with. | |
| Exactly. | |
| all of these different excuses for him, that he's playing five-dimensional chess, that he's, you know, a step ahead, he's engaged in this or that. | |
| And in fact, you have a figure here who has benefited one time after another from people enabling him for their own uses. | |
| Exactly. | |
| And it's an indictment of the system that we've put in place that enables and exacerbates wealth inequality in this country. | |
| It's an indictment of our political system and particularly our primary system. | |
| I mean, he should never have been allowed to be a candidate in the Republican primary, let alone a candidate in the presidential election. | |
| So I think the larger problem here is, is the message it sends to people. | |
| Who are inclined to support whomever it is in that position. | |
| Because for various reasons, not everybody can pay that much attention to what's going on with politics in this country. | |
| People have asked me what I think of his so-called followers Who don't wear masks and keep putting themselves and their families and other people at risk. | |
| And, you know, aren't they horrible? | |
| And my response to that is, how can you blame them? | |
| They're doing what they thought they were supposed to be doing. | |
| They're listening to their leaders. | |
| Right. | |
| They don't know they're being misled. | |
| You know, they voted for these people. | |
| They put their trust in these people. | |
| Why would their representatives, their senators, their governors or the person in the Oval Office So lead them astray. | |
| Uh, as to bring harm upon them. | |
| It's unthinkable, right? | |
| It's absolutely unthinkable. | |
| If you're, if you continue to have faith in a system that, uh, without your knowing, it is betraying you on a daily basis. | |
| So that to me is, is a bigger problem. | |
| Um, because on the one hand you have people demoralized and. | |
| Uh, not knowing where to turn because they can't trust anything. | |
| And on the other hand, you have people continuing to trust the system of which they should be absolutely suspect. | |
| Exactly, and I would be remiss if I didn't ask this to build off of that. | |
| We were talking before we started recording about how we're not really prepared for any of this. | |
| I mean, it's not like in social studies classes or government. | |
| We're taught about what happens if a government goes rogue and is taken over by a complete failure and abuser as a president, and what to do when reality starts being twisted for propaganda purposes and manipulative purposes. | |
| You have had the unfortunate Background and experience of having to deal with not just Donald Trump, but that sort of reality bending over compensation and the abusive behaviors. | |
| And on top of that, you have the background in psychology. | |
| For you, how do we deal with the fact that we are going through this trauma, manipulation, constant gaslighting? | |
| What can a person do to make sure that that doesn't socialize us into growing apathetic or demoralized? | |
| What can we do to sort of maintain our own health and our own vigor? | |
| and our own realities as they're being attacked every single day, particularly by this really virulent, problematic person. | |
| I think this is different for the present and for what happens next, which, as I said earlier, I can't quite imagine right now. | |
| So that makes it even harder to answer the question. | |
| But I want to preface my answer by saying Donald is not the problem. | |
| Right. | |
| Or he's a symptom of a larger problem. | |
| He's not the disease. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Right. | |
| Exactly. | |
| The problem is that we have an entire party, political party, in this country that seems completely willing, like to a person, to overthrow our democracy. | |
| Uh, you know, with, with somebody like Donald, uh, at the head of the guy, I mean, it's, it's quite mind blowing and that does make it harder, uh, to deal with. | |
| So what I, what I would suggest in the meantime is. | |
| Um, as sappy as it sounds, people need to stay connected, uh, which of course is harder during the life during COVID. | |
| Um, but it's, it's utterly necessary. | |
| Um, because. | |
| Isolation is the best way to disconnect, and we can't afford it. | |
| We need everybody. | |
| And we need to understand, too, that I know the election is close, and I can't really say anymore that it's a marathon, not a sprint, but let's call it... Actually, Jane Fonda interviewed me, and she said this thing that makes so much more sense than either of those things. | |
| It's a relay race. | |
| Right. | |
| And, you know, you can only have a relay race if you have other people you can count on. | |
| And sometimes we need to tap out and take care of ourselves and trust that there are other people carrying the baton down the field or whatever it's called. | |
| Sorry about the mangled sports metaphor. | |
| But, you know, so we can't forget that there are other like-minded people. | |
| And it's very easy to do that when there's such an onslaught of misinformation and insanity swirling around us. | |
| Uh, the other thing I'd say is, um, you know, we need, we need to take care of ourselves, which is also incredibly difficult during COVID and, you know, stress is, is through the roof. | |
| Uh, but you know, it's, it's again, might sound sappy, but it's, it's really important because this fight is not going to be over on November 3rd. | |
| And I don't say that to demoralize people, because if we all show up, then Joe Biden is going to win this election. | |
| But there's a 79-day period in between the election and the inauguration in which Donald is, you know, unless it's such a blowout that it would be embarrassing for him to put up a fight. | |
| He's going to, you know, get away with whatever he can get away with during that 79 days. | |
| But also beyond that, we need to, people say rebuild. | |
| No, we don't need to rebuild this country. | |
| We need to reimagine this country. | |
| Exactly. | |
| And that should actually give people hope because it's an opportunity that we may not have had if it had continued to be business as usual. | |
| Because by chipping away at the foundations of what makes this country worth living in, At least, you know, aspirationally, the Republicans were making it really easy not to see what was going on. | |
| So, in that regard, Donald has maybe done us a favor by exposing so bluntly. | |
| I completely agree. | |
| I call him a Rosetta Stone. | |
| Yes, precisely. | |
| Yeah, exactly. | |
| And that should That should really motivate people, because this is an opportunity I don't think we would have had otherwise. | |
| And we would have just woken up one day with, you know, President... What's his name? | |
| That horrible, horrible man. | |
| The Senator... Tom Cotton. | |
| Thank you. | |
| See? | |
| I love how everybody goes right to Tom Cotton. | |
| They're like, that is the future if we're not lucky. | |
| Right, because, you know, he's Donald... He's a competent, soft-spoken, Equally evil version of Donald. | |
| But he's disciplined. | |
| Right. | |
| No, that's right. | |
| I guess I mean, he's not like Donald at all in that regard. | |
| What I mean is he's willing to push the envelope in the same way. | |
| And he would not have been able to do it before Donald. | |
| But he certainly would after Donald. | |
| Well, what what frightens me on that note is the idea that I feel like Donald Trump has through his own Overcompensation and self-protection has sort of fumbled his way into finding all the weak spots of democracy and all the weak spots in culture. | |
| And so the fear that somebody will reverse engineer what he has done through his own raging and flailing and somehow or another marry that with an ideology or a disciplined political sort of plan is like one of the most frightening things possible is the idea that he is sort of Lead through his own flailing to the possibility of other people, not just tearing down democratic institutions, but effectively atomizing society. | |
| What you were talking about with people feeling alone and demoralized and as if they can't trust each other. | |
| And this ideology that came from, in part, your family and the environment that they were in. | |
| The idea that we can't trust one another because we're all competing over the same things. | |
| That somebody who could use that but be more disciplined and base it off of what he's done is one of the more terrifying possibilities for the future, I think. | |
| OK, I again don't want to be freaking everybody out, but I think it's even more terrifying than that because. | |
| It doesn't require reverse engineering anything, it just requires stepping in to the role. | |
| Sure, because the Republican Party. | |
| Has proven itself to be a party of Fascists. | |
| Yes. | |
| So, I mean, let's not mince words. | |
| Nobody has to think it through or manipulate anything. | |
| The ground has been laid bare. | |
| Right. | |
| So, I mean, you think anybody, well, obviously it would require their maintaining the Senate. | |
| But, you know, I mean, if this country is willing to go for President Tom Cotton, then this country is going to keep Mitch McConnell is the Senate Majority Leader, and at which point, I don't know. | |
| Um, I'm not I that that's where I kind of lose the thread. | |
| Um, how does how will we maintain. | |
| Not just our sanity, but our ability to have hope at all. | |
| If Joe Biden and Kamala Harris don't win and the Democrats and particularly. | |
| The Democrats don't take over the Senate. | |
| That's going to be a trick and a half. | |
| Well, I just want to say thank you because I feel like you have not just provided a service, but if some kind of major realignment and a necessary realignment for survival of democracy in this country is to take place, I think you've played a major role. | |
| Again, we've been lucky to speak with Trump, the author of Too Much and Never Enough, How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man. | |
| Thank you for what you've done and thank you for your time. | |
| Thank you, Jared, so much. | |
| This was a great interview. | |
| I really appreciate it. | |
| Again, that was my conversation with Dr. Mary Trump, author of Too Much and Never Enough, How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man. | |
| I want to thank Dr. Trump again for not just coming on the show, but for the absolutely crucial work that she is doing in exposing Donald Trump for who he is, where he comes from, and for the constant trauma that he is inflicting on this country and the world at large. | |
| In the meantime, thank you for coming on over to the Muckrake podcast, for continually sharing our work, telling people about our work, growing this community. | |
| If you want to support my work or the podcast, you can go over to patreon.com slash muckrake podcast. | |
| To unlock exclusive content only available for patrons including chats, watch-alongs, bonus episodes, and of course on election night we're all going to be gathered together because I have to tell you it's going to be incredibly traumatic and we need to rely on each other and rely on our community to get through it. | |
| In the meantime if you need me you can find me over at J.Y. |