Page 13 - Too Much and Never Enough - Mary L. Trump

As soon as we finished dessert, everybody rose. Only two hours had elapsed since we’d entered the Oval Office, but the meal was over, and it was time to leave. From beginning to end we had spent about twice as much time at the White House as we ever had at my grandparents’ house for Thanksgiving or Christmas but still less time with Donald than Kid Rock, Sarah Palin, and Ted Nugent would two weeks later.
Somebody suggested that we all take individual pictures with Donald (though not with the guests of honor). When it was my turn, Donald smiled for the camera and gave a thumbs-up, but I could see the exhaustion behind the smile. It seemed that keeping up the cheerful facade was wearing on him.
“Don’t let them get you down,” I said to him as my brother took the picture. It wasn’t long after his first national security advisor had been fired in disgrace, and the cracks in his presidency were already beginning to show.
Donald jutted out his chin and clenched his teeth, looking for a moment like the ghost of my grandmother. “They’re not going to get me,” he said.
When Donald announced his run for the presidency on June 16, 2015, I didn’t take it seriously. I didn’t think Donald took it seriously. He simply wanted the free publicity for his brand. He’d done that sort of thing before. When his poll numbers started to rise and he may have received tacit assurances from Russian president Vladimir Putin that Russia would do everything it could to swing the election in his favor, the appeal of winning grew.
“He’s a clown,” my aunt Maryanne said during one of our regular lunches at the time. “This will never happen.”
I agreed.
We talked about how his reputation as a faded reality star and failed businessman would doom his run. “Does anybody even believe the bullshit that he’s a self-made man? What has he even accomplished on his own?” I asked.
“Well,” Maryanne said, as dry as the Sahara, “he has had five bankruptcies.”
When Donald started addressing the opioid crisis and using my father’s history with alcoholism to burnish his anti-addiction bona fides to seem