I should read the whole thing but from the excerpts I’ve been seeing I don’t think this is especially earth-shaking. The “revelations” all seem of a piece with the stuff that’s already out in public. The problem isn’t that people don’t know who and what he is. The problem is the ones who know and don’t care.
Also, it’s kind of hard to get behind the stuff about being cut out of the will and all that. As childhood traumas go, that one’s not so easy to identify with if you’re not from a trusfund family.
Most Americans have a fixed opinion and perception of the First President. For Trump (who is diligently working on being the Last President), I would like a fixed opinion and perception.
In addition to all of what Trump has wrought, Mary Trump is doing her part…and a lot of what she writes will sink in to Non-Trump-Cult Americans
I have been thinking about Trump and the modern Republican party. Both are responding to something going on in American society. I am not sure but it seems to me that modern media is focused on grievance. Commentary is more important than understanding. Snark is valued higher than problem solving. We no longer have a can do attitude. We have given up on doing and have become focused on complaining. We don’t value expertise. Instead we listen to the loudest voice.
I was watching MSNBC last night and one of the hosts brought on the dean of a medical school in Tampa. He was ask why the death rate is dropping. He gave a very complete answer including some things I knew and some things I didn’t. I think I learned something new.
The host felt compelled to ask the regular talking head her take. She gave the usual response she has been giving for months. Her advantage is she is a professional talking head. She was preaching the MSNBC party line. But her comments were the same old, same old. I wanted to hear more from the local expert who has been working the problem. The host was obligated to lay out the company line instead of explore the issue in detail.
The profile that Mary Trump paints of IMPOTUS is that he is NOT a strategic thinker. He doesn’t plan or scheme. He only reacts with a limited set of emotional billy clubs. He’s deathly afraid of confrontation and public exposure because it will reveal that he is a fraud and that everything he thinks about himself will be proven false, leaving him with nothing to believe in. The man will NOT debate someone who he doesn’t think he can dominate with bullshit and bluster. Biden is more than his match.
Because people write best-selling books on topics of considerable popular interest without any expectation of getting paid for them. Everyone knows that!
Just ask J.K. Rowling or Stephen King. Or the ghost writer of “Art of the Deal”
Here’s my book report - just started it yesterday and nothing new y’all don’t know yet. The best thing about the book = it’s readable. It’s reasonably well-written and not trash.
Am reading it now upon the recommendation of Josh. I am continually amazed at how humble and self effacing Grant was even as he reports on heroic deeds during the Mexico invasion that he actually opposed. Great read.
This is at the root of a lot of misinformation. The insistence on giving equal air time to flat-earthers and globalists. Elevates bogus arguments and works against facts.
I miss the days when the news actually reported news and didn’t just have talking heads shouting at each other, leaving the viewer to decide what was right.
George Washington, The Father of His Country and also an embedded icon on Mount Rushmore is not what we were taught he was and it had to do with owning about 100 slaves who lived on his plantation and whose work make him wealthy. The only saving grace, if there is one, is that he freed his slaves at the end of his life, the only slave owning Founding Father to do so.
If you were raised by or lived in a family with similar personalities, the dynamics will be very familiar. So regardless of her intent, she does have veracity on her side in the main. I have only just begun and it is too damn familiar. From playing siblings off one another to command performance family events, it is all there.
I found the depths of sociopathy that runs in that family both stunning and frightening. It reads like source material for one of Stephen King’s psychochillers.
Not much of one. He actively tracked down slaves who ran away, made sure he didn’t let them spend enough time with him in free states where they could earn their freedom after a period of time, and only freed them with I believe the death of both him and his wife, thus when they were of no more use to him.
Engraving the names of all of them around the base of the Washington Monument would be a good start to acknowledging their contribution.
Mary was the deep throat source for this revealing story. If people haven’t read it, that’s too bad, because everything you want to know about father and son’s crooked dealings are in it.
It begins with this and just gets uglier.
The Times’s investigation, based on a vast trove of confidential tax returns and financial records, reveals that Mr. Trump received the equivalent today of at least $413 million from his father’s real estate empire, starting when he was a toddler and continuing to this day.
Much of this money came to Mr. Trump because he helped his parents dodge taxes. He and his siblings set up a sham corporation to disguise millions of dollars in gifts from their parents, records and interviews show. Records indicate that Mr. Trump helped his father take improper tax deductions worth millions more. He also helped formulate a strategy to undervalue his parents’ real estate holdings by hundreds of millions of dollars on tax returns, sharply reducing the tax bill when those properties were transferred to him and his siblings.
With Ref to the editor’s blog on the main page…
How is it that Americans are in Paris? I had thought that France and Paris among the rest of Europe was closed off to Americans because of our poor handling of the pandemic. Is it because the family referenced in Looking Back from Abroad Part #2 are bi-national? That some in the family have two passports? This family flew to Paris 3-4 weeks ago. At that time Americans were banned from visiting France yet the family is still there. What gives?
I have just read up to the start of her talking about her dad as a child.
I hadn’t known that their mother was such a flake. But it reads just like every dysfunctional family I’ve read about. If Fred hadn’t been successful it could be The Glass Castle with all of them living in the car - same kind of parents.
You’re tempting me to re-read it. He was objectively one of the greatest generals in world history – not just in US history. He said civilians have no idea how difficult it is to run a campaign hundreds of miles from one’s base [I’m paraphrasing]. He had to think of a hundred things all day long – not just the next battle. His taking of Vicksburg and Richmond just brilliant. Alas, we were still using Napoleonic warfare, even in WW1, and troops went into a meat grinder. His physical bravery was extraordinary. He had 4 horses shot from beneath him.
George Washington’s teeth were not wooden but were rotten because among other things he’d had malaria and the remedies that were available led to most of them falling out. He pulled teeth out of his slave’s head when he need to to fill up the holes.
We need to revisit all the VA-based Founders esp. Jefferson and his 600 slaves many of whom were his children through Sally Hemings.
