Tag Archives: Mary Trump

national news

Unwillingness vs. inability?

I keep struggling with how to describe Donald J. Trump’s lack of empathy in time of crisis.

Two words keep tugging at me. One of them is “inability.” The other is “unwillingness.” My struggle occurs as I ponder how to define what we witness in Trump’s demeanor while he speaks publicly about any number of issues that pull and pound our hearts.

Whether it’s race relations, or natural disaster, or medical crises I find myself torn between defining Trump’s lack of empathy and compassion as his “inability” to exhibit it or his “unwillingness” to show it.

The nation has heard in recent days from one of Trump’s nieces, Mary Trump, who writes in a new tell-all about Uncle Donald that he was brought up in a sociopathic household led by a domineering father, Fred Trump Sr.

Grandpa Fred instilled in his children an ethic that required them to be always tough and to not let the world see a softer side of them. Apologizing for mistakes is a sign of weakness, Mary Trump writes.

Did this upbringing create, as Mary Trump’s book title suggests, “the most dangerous man in the world”? I am left to wonder whether Trump is who he is because he just cannot find the empathy and compassion that he lacks or is it because he is unwilling to search for it, to apply it to the job he inherited when he became president of the United States in January 2017.

I’ve known many men and women who have been brought up in trying circumstances. Yet they power through it. They become better human beings because they are able to search for — and eventually find — the trait that instills some sense of kindness in them.

Thus, I am left to rely on the belief that Trump is merely “unwilling” to show us compassion, to demonstrate a semblance of empathy toward those who are hurting. He says the words, as he did Tuesday when he spoke to us about the COVID-19 pandemic. He speaks to us as though he is reading from a statement written under duress. I hear him speak those words as if he is being punished by a schoolteacher who caught him cheating on an exam.

Could this guy ever find a way to exhibit genuine, authentic compassion or empathy? I do not believe he is willing to look deeply enough for it within himself.

Donald Trump

Those closest to Trump think so little of him?

One of the astonishing takeaways I am gleaning from Mary Trump’s book about Uncle Donald — the current president of the United States — has to do with how those closest to him think of his ability, his credibility, his qualifications.

They think very little of any of it, according to Mary Trump, author of “Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man,”

She recounts, or so I understand, how his sister thought so little of him when he announced his presidential campaign in June 2015 that she thought he was joking. She presumed he was pulling off a publicity stunt to call attention to his “brand.”

Others in his family — sis, a brother and several other nieces and nephews — dismissed his boasting for what it was, empty rhetoric. He wasn’t self-made, as he claimed; he didn’t attend church, yet evangelicals flocked to his side; he is a man of zero principle.

Trump doesn’t apologize for anything. He never admits he is wrong. He tramples over everyone he meets. Trump is callous, callow and without any redeeming personal quality, or so Trump is reporting.

I happen to believe what she has written. What astounds me, though, is how those close to Donald Trump think so much less of him than those who have glommed onto his cult of personality.

Donald Trump

Yes, I believe Mary Trump

I am trying to decide if I want to purchase Mary Trump’s bombshell book about her uncle, the current president of the United States.

She doesn’t need my money to make the fortune she already has earned by early sales of “Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man.” I hear she’s sold nearly a million copies of her book.

But there’s another reason why I might not read the book from cover to cover. From what she has said so far in TV interviews, there’s nothing she has revealed about Uncle Donald that I don’t already believe.

I believe he is the “virulent racist” Mary Trump says he is. I believe the assertions she has made about his use of the N-word and the anti-Semitic slurs he has uttered. I also actually believe that young Donald got someone else to take the Scholastic Aptitude Test he needed to enroll at the University of Pennsylvania.

I believe Donald Trump is as vile, venal and vengeful as Mary Trump reportedly portrays.

She won’t change my mind one little bit about this individual.

So, it falls on me to decide whether I want to spend money on a book that likely won’t tell me anything I don’t already believe.

Mary Trump is no interloper. Her father, Donald Trump’s brother, died of alcohol abuse. She has no relationship with Uncle Donald. Still, she is highly educated, earning multiple degrees and carving out a career as a clinical psychologist.

She seems credible to me.

I am left to wonder whether it also will ring true to those who keep giving Uncle Donald a pass on the conduct in which he engaged for his entire adult life.