Page 175 - Too Much and Never Enough - Mary L. Trump

From his childhood in the House to his early forays into the New York real estate world and high society until today, Donald’s aberrant behavior has been consistently normalized by others. When he hit the New York real estate scene, he was touted as a brash, self-made dealmaker. “Brash” was applied to him as a compliment (used to imply self-assertiveness more than rudeness or arrogance), and he was neither self-made nor a good dealmaker. But that was how it started—with his misuse of language and the media’s failure to ask pointed questions.
His real skills (self-aggrandizement, lying, and sleight of hand) were interpreted as strengths unique to his brand of success. By perpetuating his version of the story he wanted told about his wealth and his subsequent “successes,” our family and then many others started the process of normalizing Donald. His hiring (and treatment) of undocumented workers and his refusal to pay contractors for completed work were assumed to be the cost of doing business. Treating people with disrespect and nickel-and- diming them made him look tough.
Those misrepresentations must have seemed harmless at the time—a way to sell more copies of the New York Post or increase the viewership of Inside Edition—but each transgression inevitably led to another, more serious one. The idea that his tactics were legitimate calculations instead of unethical cons was yet another aspect of the myth that he and my grandfather had been constructing for decades.
Though Donald’s fundamental nature hasn’t changed, since his inauguration the amount of stress he’s under has changed dramatically. It’s not the stress of the job, because he isn’t doing the job—unless watching TV and tweeting insults count. It’s the effort to keep the rest of us distracted from the fact that he knows nothing—about politics, civics, or simple human decency—that requires an enormous amount of work. For decades, he has gotten publicity, good and bad, but he’s rarely been subjected to close scrutiny, and he’s never had to face significant opposition. His entire sense of himself and the world is being questioned.
Donald’s problems are accumulating because the maneuvering required to solve them, or to pretend they don’t exist, has become more complicated, requiring many more people to execute the cover-ups. Donald is completely