The past months have seen a surge of 'tell-all' books related to US President Donald Trump and his stormy tenure (thus far) at the White House. The first, most high-profile, book was published by former US National Security Advisor John Bolton. The White House had initially sought a restraining order on The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir, claiming the book is "full of classified information". However, a court had struck the request down.
The second book, Too Much and Never Enough, How My Family Created The World’s Most Dangerous Man, was published by Mary Trump, the daughter of Trump's elder brother Fred Jr who died after a struggle with alcoholism in 1981 at 42. In the book, Mary, a psychologist, outlines Trump's "narcissistic character" shaped by a "dysfunctional family", and calls him a "threat to the public". Robert Trump, the president's younger brother, had sued Mary, arguing in legal papers that she was subject to a 20-year-old agreement between family members that no one would publish accounts involving core family members without their approval. However, after a court ruling, the book will be published by Simon and Schuster on July 14.
The two books paint an unflattering picture of the most powerful man on earth.
What Mary Trump claims
Mary, the president's niece, offers a scathing portrayal of her uncle, blaming "a toxic family for raising a narcissistic, damaged man who poses an immediate danger to the public". The excerpts of the book were published by both AP and Reuters. She writes that Trump's re-election (polls will be held in November) would be catastrophic, and that lying, playing to the lowest common denominator, cheating, and sowing division are all he knows. "By the time this book is published, hundreds of thousands of American lives will have been sacrificed on the altar of Donald's hubris and willful ignorance. If he is afforded a second term, it would be the end of American democracy," she writes.
The book goes on to make numerous claims. Mary describes the US president as a "bullying personality who demanded constant adulation even from his family and had little regard for family members' feelings".
In the book, Mary traces much of Trump's personality to the "dominating patriarch", Fred Trump, who showed little interest in his five children other than grooming an heir for his real-estate business. "Ultimately, he settled on Donald," according to the book, "deciding that his second son's arrogance and bullying would come in handy at the office, and encouraged it. He short-circuited Donald's ability to develop and experience the entire spectrum of human emotion." According to the book, "Donald requires division. It is the only way he knows how to survive—my grandfather ensured that decades ago when he turned his children against each other."
According to Mary Trump, the traits of her uncle that critics despise are a natural progression of behaviours developed at the knees of a demanding father. "For Donald Trump," she writes, "lying was defensive, not simply a way to circumvent his father's disapproval or to avoid punishment, but a way to survive."
The author traces much of her pain to the death of her father when she was 16. The president told The Washington Post last year that he regretted the pressure he and his father had put on Fred Jr to join the family business when his brother wanted to be a pilot instead. "It was just not his thing. ... I think the mistake that we made was we assumed that everybody would like it. That would be the biggest mistake. ... There was sort of a double pressure put on him," Trump told the paper. However, Mary claimed that in her father's final days, as he lay dying alone, Trump went to the movies.
She writes that Trump, who, according to the book, was academically mediocre, cheated on the SAT college admission tests by making a friend write the exam for him. She writes that his sister Maryanne Trump did his homework for him, but couldn't take his tests, and he worried his grade point average, which put him far from the top of the class, would scuttle his efforts to get accepted into the Wharton School of Business. "To hedge his bets, he enlisted Joe Shapiro, a smart kid with a reputation for being a good test-taker, to take his SATs for him," she writes, adding, Donald, who never lacked for funds, paid his buddy well.
Trump's crude rhetoric on the campaign trail, she said, was nothing new, reminding her of "every family meal I had 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".
What John Bolton's book claims
John Bolton's book, on the other hand, focused more on the foreign policy of the US president, raising what he called "incoherence in policy and the confluence in Trump's mind of his own political interests and the US national interests".
A US president has a fixed two-term constitutional limit to serve; however, the book says, in conversation with Chinese president Xi Jinping, Trump wanted the two-term limit withdrawn for him. "People were saying that the two-term constitutional limit on presidents should be repealed for him," said Trump, according to Bolton.
There were other bombshells too: According to the book, Trump was close to walking out of NATO in 2018; the president had often picked fights with other members of one of the most powerful military alliances in the world over "not paying the fair share". According to the book, Trump said it would be "cool" to invade Venezuela, headed by staunch rival Nicolas Maduro, and that the South American nation was "really part of the United States".
Bolton claims that Trump virtually pleaded with Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping at a G-20 summit for help in his re-election. Bolton claims that Trump sought the Chinese president's help in his re-election during a meeting in Osaka on June 29, 2019 on the sidelines of a G-20 summit.
"In their meeting in Osaka on June 29, Trump alluded to China's economic capability and pleaded with Xi to ensure he would win. He stressed the importance of farmers and increased Chinese purchases of soybeans and wheat in the electoral outcome. I would print Trump's exact words, but the government's pre-publication review process has decided otherwise," he said, according to the excerpts of the book.
Bolton also claims that, apart from Xi, Trump was prone to "giving personal favours to dictators he liked"; According to the book, the US president offered Turkey's Recep Tayyip Erdogan help with US investigation into a Turkish company over potential violations of Iranian sanctions. According to the book, he also did not know that UK was a nuclear power and that Finland was not a part of Russia.
-Inputs from Reuters, AP via PTI
