Page 14 - Too Much and Never Enough - Mary L. Trump

more sympathetic, both of us were angry.
“He’s using your father’s memory for political purposes,” Maryanne
said, “and that’s a sin, especially since Freddy should have been the star of the family.”
We thought the blatant racism on display during Donald’s announcement speech would be a deal breaker, but we were disabused of that idea when Jerry Falwell, Jr., and other white evangelicals started endorsing him. Maryanne, a devout Catholic since her conversion five decades earlier, was incensed. “What the fuck is wrong with them?” she said. “The only time Donald went to church was when the cameras were there. It’s mind boggling. He has no principles. None!”
Nothing Donald said during the campaign—from his disparagement of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, arguably the most qualified presidential candidate in the history of the country, as a “nasty woman,” to his mocking of Serge Kovaleski, a disabled New York Times reporter—deviated from my expectation of him. In fact, I was reminded of every family meal I’d ever attended during which Donald had talked about all of the women he considered ugly fat slobs or the men, usually more accomplished or powerful, he called losers while my grandfather and Maryanne, Elizabeth, and Robert all laughed and joined in. That kind of casual dehumanization of people was commonplace at the Trump dinner table. What did surprise me was that he kept getting away with it.
Then he received the nomination. The things I had thought would disqualify him seemed only to strengthen his appeal to his base. I still wasn’t concerned—I was confident he could never be elected—but the idea that he had a shot at it was unnerving.
Late in the summer of 2016, I considered speaking out about the ways I knew Donald to be completely unqualified. By this time, he had emerged relatively unscathed from the Republican National Convention and his call for “Second Amendment people” to stop Hillary Clinton. Even his attack on Khizr and Ghazala Khan, Gold Star parents whose son Humayun, a US Army captain, had died in Iraq, seemed not to matter. When the majority of Republicans polled still supported him after the Access Hollywood tape was released, I knew I had made the right decision.
I began to feel as though I were watching my family history, and Donald’s central role in it, playing out on a grand scale. Donald’s competition in the race was being held to higher standards, just as my father