Page 124 - Too Much and Never Enough - Mary L. Trump

longer needed to talk himself up; his exaggerated assessment of himself was simultaneously fueled and validated by banks that were throwing hundreds of millions of dollars at him and a media that lavished him with attention and unwarranted praise. The two combined rendered him blind to how dire his situation was. My grandfather’s myths about Donald were now being reinforced by the world at large.
Regardless of who was disseminating them, however, they were still myths. Donald was, in essence, still Fred’s construct. Now he belonged to the banks and the media. He was both enabled by and dependent upon them, just as he had been upon Fred. He had a streak of superficial charm, even charisma, that sucked certain people in. When his ability to charm hit a wall, he deployed another “business strategy”: throwing tantrums during which he threatened to bankrupt or otherwise ruin anybody who failed to let him have what he wanted. Either way, he won.
Donald was successful because he was a success. That was a premise that ignored one fundamental reality: he had not achieved and could not achieve what he was being credited with. Despite that, his ego, now unleashed, had to be fed continually, not just by his family but by all who encountered it.
New York’s elite would never accept him as anything but the court jester from Queens, but they also validated his pretensions and grandiose self- image by inviting him to their parties and allowing him to frequent their haunts (such as Le Club). The more New Yorkers wanted spectacle, the more willing the media were to provide it—even at the expense of more important and substantive stories. Why bore them with hard-to-follow articles about his convoluted bank transactions? The distractions and sleights of hand benefited Donald enormously while giving him exactly what he wanted: the ongoing adulation of media that focused on his salacious divorce and alleged sexual prowess. If the media could deny reality, so could he.
By some miracle, I had gotten into Tufts University after boarding school, and despite dropping out the second semester of my freshman year, I graduated in 1989. A year later, just before my grandfather’s modest purchase of $3.15 million worth of casino chips, I entered the graduate program in English and comparative literature at Columbia University.