Too Much and Never Enough by Mary Trump – first look review: a fascinating, if dubious, family portrait

The intriguing thing about the tell-all new book by Donald Trump’s niece is not the revelations. There are few genuinely jaw-dropping moments of mega-news.

Nor should it be read as gospel. Whole chunks of dialogue are quoted by Mary Trump verbatim despite playing out many years ago.

Many of the scenes painted, such as from Mr Trump’s early childhood, Ms Trump is describing second hand given she was not alive at the time of the events.

Plus her past disagreements with Mr Trump are on record. She and her brother clashed with the family over the inheritance they felt they were owed, leading to an out of court settlement.

Instead, the fascination comes from the picture of family feuding that the book conjures and the insights about how it helped shape the man now the most powerful politician in the world.

Having read the book, called Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man, there are a couple of scenes described by Ms Trump which jumped out.

A full breakdown can be found over here on The Telegraph website where we unpacked all the best bits, but here are a few.

There is one when Mr Trump is throwing a baseball with relatives, some just six and nine years old, and is allegedly flinging the ball as hard as he would with any adult.

Mr Trump “saw no reason to throw the ball any more gently”, his niece writes, recalling when once catching the ball the smack of the leather glove rang out so loudly it was “like a shot”.

Another scene describes how the future president would, it is claimed, hide the toy truck his younger brother Robert had been given for Christmas, once triggering tears.

Other family dynamics are laid bare. Mr Trump, Fred Trump Snr, the man who built the New York property empire his son would later take on, is painted as domineering.

He is driven by business success, working 12-hour days, six days a week. He prides strength, telling his children to show the “killer” instinct – a phrase Mr Trump often uses to this day.

Mr Trump’s mother was struck by illness when he was two-and-a-half years old, a development which, the author suggests, made her less available to her son in his early life.

Mr Trump was the fourth of five children and is described pushing to live up to the fatherly ambitions which his older brother Robert, who left the family firm to become a pilot, did not meet.

The book is filled with psychoanalysis. Who knows how a person’s family interactions, written down on paper decades later, really shaped a childhood.

Even though Ms Trump is a clinical psychologist, can we really believe her conclusions? Is it really out of the ordinary that an older brother once hid the toys of a younger brother?

Certainly the White House has slammed the book, the press secretary calling it packed with “falsehoods” and “absurd allegations”, while the Trump family continues to try to stop its publication next Tuesday, arguing Ms Trump broke a non-disclosure agreement.

But Ms Trump is better placed than most to reflect on the issue. She is the first member of the Trump clan to break cover and write about the president since he took office.

“Every time you hear Donald talking about how something is the greatest, the best, the biggest, the most tremendous, (the implication being that he made them so), you have to remember the man speaking is still, in essential ways, the same little boy,” she writes at one point.

"At a very deep level, his bragging and false bravado are not directed at the audience in front of him but at this audience of one: his long-dead father”.

At the heart of the November election is the question of whether Mr Trump has the mentality and competence to lead America through the crisis it now faces.

By pulling back the curtain on the president’s upbringing, the book offers a little more light about the nature of the man making the calls in the Oval Office.

This article was first published in our US 2020 election newsletter, which is written weekly by our Washington team. To sign up for next week's exclusive newsletter for free, please click here