A thread for Democrats Only
POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 15:36
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Mary Trump’s Book Shows How Donald Trump Gets Away With It
The gossip is a sideshow. The real virtue of this book is its psychoanalysis of the enablers. As she writes in her prologue, “there’s been very little effort to understand not only why he became what he is but how he’s consistently failed up despite his glaring lack of fitness.” What Mary Trump describes here is not just her uncle’s addiction to adulation, fame, money, and success, but a nation’s — or some part of a nation’s — unfathomable addiction to him.
Mary is perfectly positioned to explain and translate what happens to otherwise high-functioning adults — her aunt Maryanne, a competent federal judge; the lawyers and accountants tasked with fulfilling Donald’s whims and hiding his failings; the sycophants and Republicans and evangelical Christians who support his campaign unquestioningly; and the officials who now populate the Senate, the Cabinet, and the Oval Office. All of them appear to be reasonably mentally sound. Yet they all cover for Donald.
New York’s bankers and powerful elites, Bill Barr, Mike Pompeo, and Jared Kushner all knew and know that the emperor has no clothes, even as they devote their last shreds of dignity to effusive praise of his ermine trim and jaunty crown.
Mary Trump seems to answer the question of why they do this in a section late in the book about Donald Trump’s father, Fred Trump. In describing Fred’s growing realizing that his fair-haired boy, Donald, was a fraud, Mary explains that, yes, Fred himself was a master at fattening his wallet with taxpayer funds, committing tax fraud to benefit his children. (Mary admits she was the one who leaked the family tax information to the New York Times in 2018 for its blockbuster story.) But as it became clear that Donald had no real business acumen—as his Atlantic City casinos cratered and his father unlawfully poured secret funds into saving them—Mary realized that Fred also depended on the glittery tabloid success at which Donald excelled. Fred continued to prop up his son’s smoke-and-mirrors empire because, as Mary writes, “Fred had become so invested in the fantasy of Donald’s success that he and Donald were inextricably linked. Facing reality would have required acknowledging his own responsibility, which he would never do. He had gone all in, and although any rational person would have folded, Fred was determined to double down.”
Mary Trump’s words there could just as easily be true for John Kelly, Kellyanne Conway, John Bolton, Mitch McConnell, Susan Collins, or Melania Trump. And as Mary Trump is quick to observe, the sheer stuck-ness of his enablers means that Trump never, ever learns his lesson. Being cosseted, lied to, defended, and puffed up means that Donald Trump knows that, “no matter what happens, no matter how much damage he leaves in his wake, he will be OK.” He fails up, in other words, because everyone around him, psychologically normal beings all, ends up so enmeshed with his delusions that they must do anything necessary to protect them. Trump’s superpower isn’t great vision or great leadership but rather that he is so tiny. Taking him on for transactional purposes may seem like not that big a deal at first, but the moment you put him in your pocket, you become his slave. It is impossible to escape his orbit without having to admit a spectacular failure in moral and strategic judgment, which almost no one can stomach. Donald Trump’s emptiness is simply a mirror of the emptiness of everyone who propped him up. It’s that reflection that becomes unendurable. This pattern, as Mary writes, “guaranteed a cascade of increasingly consequential failures that would ultimately render all of us collateral damage.” Nobody, not even Mary, who signed on briefly to ghostwrite one of his books, ends up just a little bit beholden to Donald Trump and that includes his rapturous supporters who still queue up, maskless, to look upon his greatness. As she concludes, his sociopathy “reminds me that Donald isn’t really the problem at all.”
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Nobody cares.
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Quote:Trump tweeted about Mary Trump, his niece with a PhD in psychology, that he is not the crazy one. It's her! It's her!
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Nobody cares.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
https://people.com/politics/judge-rules-for-mary-trump-in-memoir-lawsu
it/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:Trump also tweeted that he is perfectly sane for cancelling all nuclear weapons treaties because nobody cares.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Nobody cares.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
https://web.archive.org/web/20200709003404/https://www.theguardian.com
/world/2020/may/24/nuclear-weapons-donald-trump-arms-control-chaos
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:Trump promised to eliminate the national debt in eight years, but now he will add $8.3 trillion because nobody cares.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Nobody cares.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
www.thebalance.com/trump-plans-to-reduce-national-debt-4114401
Once a Democrat is President, Republican voters will care a great deal about the national debt, but right now nobody cares.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Got shit to do today. No more time to waste on you this morning, I'm afraid.
Have fun jerking yourself off with your Reaverfan sockpuppet.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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