Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man QUOTES

1 " He rants about the weakness of others even as he demonstrates his own, but he can never escape the fact that he is and always will be a terrified little boy. "

― Mary L. Trump, , Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man

2 " Donald could no more advocate for the sick and dying than he could put himself between his father and Freddy. Perhaps most crucially for Donald, there’s no value in empathy, no tangible upside for caring for other people. "

― Mary L. Trump, , Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man

3 " He rants about the weakness of others even as he demonstrates his own. "

― Mary L. Trump, , Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man

4 " Donald today is much as he was at three years old: incapable of growing, learning, or evolving, unable to regulate his emotions, moderate his responses, or take in and synthesize information. "

― , Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man

5 " Donald was to my grandfather what the border wall has been for Donald: a vanity project funded at the expense of more worthy pursuits. "

― , Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man

6 " 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. "

― , Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man

7 " I hope this book will end the practice of referring to Donald’s “strategies” or “agendas,” as if he operates according to any organizing principles. He doesn’t. Donald’s ego has been and is a fragile and inadequate barrier between him and the real world, which, thanks to his father’s money and power, he never had to negotiate by himself. Donald has always needed to perpetuate the fiction my grandfather started that he is strong, smart, and otherwise extraordinary, because facing the truth—that he is none of those things—is too terrifying for him to contemplate. "

― , Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man

8 " Donald’s need for affirmation is so great that he doesn’t seem to notice that the largest group of his supporters are people he wouldn’t condescend to be seen with outside of a rally. His deep-seated insecurities have created in him a black hole of need that constantly requires the light of compliments that disappears as soon as he’s soaked it in. Nothing is ever enough. "

― , Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man

9 " A large minority of people still confuse his arrogance for strength, his false bravado for accomplishment, and his superficial interest in them for charisma. "

― , Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man

10 " He had all the confidence of a bully who knows he’s always going to get what he wants and never has to fight for it. "

― , Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man

11 " The simple fact is that Donald is fundamentally incapable of acknowledging the suffering of others. Telling the stories of those we’ve lost would bore him. Acknowledging the victims of COVID-19 would be to associate himself with their weakness, a trait his father taught him to despise. Donald can no more advocate for the sick and dying than he could put himself between his father and Freddy. Perhaps most crucially, for Donald there is no value in empathy, no tangible upside to caring for other people. David Corn wrote, “Everything is transactional for this poor broken human being. Everything.” It is an epic tragedy of parental failure that my uncle does not understand that he or anybody else has intrinsic worth. "

― , Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man

12 " 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. "

― , Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man

13 " That’s what sociopaths do: they co-opt others and use them toward their own ends—ruthlessly and efficiently, with no tolerance for dissent or resistance. Fred destroyed Donald, too, but not by snuffing him out as he did Freddy; instead, he short-circuited Donald’s ability to develop and experience the entire spectrum of human emotion. By limiting Donald’s access to his own feelings and rendering many of them unacceptable, Fred perverted his son’s perception of the world and damaged his ability to live in it. His capacity to be his own person, rather than an extension of his father’s ambitions, became severely limited. "

― , Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man

14 " Though nothing Donald did surprised me, the speed and volume with which he started inflicting his worst impulses on the country—from lying about the crowd size at the inauguration and whining about how poorly he was treated to rolling back environmental protections, targeting the Affordable Care Act in order to take affordable health care away from millions of people, and enacting his racist Muslim ban—overwhelmed me. "

― , Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man

15 " Donald’s ego has been and is a fragile and inadequate barrier between him and the real world, which, thanks to his father’s money and power, he never had to negotiate by himself. "

― , Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man

16 " Many, but by no means all of us, have been shielded until now from the worst effects of his pathologies by a stable economy and a lack of serious crises. But the out-of-control COVID-19 pandemic, the possibility of an economic depression, deepening social divides along political lines thanks to Donald’s penchant for division, and devastating uncertainty about our country’s future have created a perfect storm of catastrophes that no one is less equipped than my uncle to manage. Doing "

― , Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man

17 " for Donald there is no value in empathy, no tangible upside to caring for other people. "

― , Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man

18 " Donald set his sights on the University of Pennsylvania. Unfortunately, even though Maryanne had been doing his homework for him, she couldn’t take his tests, and Donald worried that his grade point average, which put him far from the top of his class, would scuttle his efforts to get accepted. 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. "

― , Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man

19 " the out-of-control COVID-19 pandemic, the possibility of an economic depression, deepening social divides along political lines thanks to Donald’s penchant for division, and devastating uncertainty about our country’s future have created a perfect storm of catastrophes that no one is less equipped than my uncle to manage. "

― , Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man

20 " Donald has always needed to perpetuate the fiction my grandfather started that he is strong, smart, and otherwise extraordinary, because facing the truth—that he is none of those things—is too terrifying for him to contemplate. "

― , Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man