Page 126 - Too Much and Never Enough - Mary L. Trump

My grandfather hadn’t yet been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, but he’d been struggling with dementia for a while by then, so I didn’t take the threats too seriously. I did, however, change my signature.
Everyone in my family experienced a strange combination of privilege and neglect. Although I had all of the material things I needed—and luxuries such as private schools and summer camp—there was a purposely built-in idea of uncertainty that any of it would last. By the same token, there was the sometimes dispiriting and sometimes devastating sense that nothing any of us did really mattered or, worse, that we didn’t matter—only Donald did.
Trump Management, which Donald often referred to as a “two-bit operation,” was doing fairly well. Fred paid himself more than $109 million between 1988 and 1993 and had tens of millions more in the bank. The Trump Organization, the company Donald ostensibly ran, was, however, in increasingly serious trouble.
Reduced to a monthly allowance—that a family of four could have lived on comfortably for ten years but still an allowance—and shut out by the banks, which finally refused to lend him more money, Donald fully believed that whatever was happening to him was the result of the economy, the poor treatment he received from the banks, and bad luck.
Nothing was ever fair to him. That struck a chord in Fred, who nursed his own grievances and also never took responsibility for anything other than his successes. Donald’s talent for deflecting responsibility while projecting blame onto others came straight from his father’s playbook. Even with the untold millions of dollars Fred spent, he couldn’t prevent Donald’s failures, but he could certainly find a scapegoat, just as he had always done when his missteps and poor judgment caught up with him, as when he blamed Freddy for the failure of Steeplechase. Donald knew that taking responsibility for your failures, which obviously meant acknowledging failure, was not something Fred admired; he’d seen where it had gotten Freddy.
It’s very possible that back in the late 1960s and early ’70s, Fred didn’t know just how deep Donald’s ineptitude ran. Acknowledging weakness of any kind in the son on whom he had staked the future of his empire and for whom he had sacrificed Freddy would have been nearly impossible. It was