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Key points
- American history is trauma—native inhabitants forcibly moved, Africans enslaved, science held hostage, and a trusting populace duped.
- Mary Trump's new book, "The Reckoning," steps back to process poor behavior, mistakes, and what she calls Americans' collective trauma.
- It's time to heal incivility, microaggressions, and revisionist thinking so as not to do the same thing again, expecting a better result.
Donald Trump isn’t the only president to disappoint, given the lookback history affords. A wrecking ball swings to demolish whereas a reckoning provides an evaluation or appraisal. Both concepts describe the latest thought-provoking book by Trump’s niece Mary L. Trump, Ph.D. The Reckoning: Our Nation’s Trauma and Finding a Way to Heal isn’t what you may expect, but it delivers plenty.1
Trump’s Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man became an instant bestseller.2 It gave a no-holds-barred account of family dysfunction that answered why such a character could claim high office, amass such a following, and thrust the executive branch into tumult. I explained psychological concepts and how processing family functioning (or lack of it) could inspire a look into any gene pool.
Where We Landed
This book steps back to process poor behavior, mistakes, and what the author calls our collective trauma as a nation. She begins with her own. After election night 2016, she journaled “demeaned, diminished and debased,” to reflect her own and likely others’ disbelief. Only it hit her harder, knowing the president-elect capable and incapable of so much, and having witnessed how others enabled him to their own peril.
Uncle Donald was what mental health professionals deem “a presenting problem.” The Reckoning helps readers confront, not bury, the wounds from the golden escalator ride through years of self-absorbed confabulation to treasonous acts. As Dr. Trump reminds us, the United States of America, far from united, had been there before.
“Failing to hold accountable those in whom a great deal of trust and power has been placed turns on its head the whole notion that ‘with great power comes great responsibility,’” she writes. “In America, that is almost never true, and more consequentially, it is almost in diametric opposition to the truth of how things really work. The more power you have, the fewer consequences you face.”
Bitter Facts We Shouldn’t Forget
The book puts forth a concise, traumatic version of American history with events that textbooks often gloss over, diehard party-liners push from memory, and her uncle continually gaslit. To name a few:
- Seventeen out of the 55 delegates to the Constitutional Convention and 12 of the first 18 presidents enslaved others. Thomas Jefferson’s revered image completely elides what might help us to revise our assessment of him. “There is no sliding scale when it comes to the crime against humanity that is slavery,” she writes.
- Andrew Jackson’s Trail of Tears forcibly removed the Cherokee nation with hunger, disease, and an exhausting mandated march. Almost a third perished.
- Richard Nixon brought us Watergate but also tried to sabotage President Johnson’s peace talks during the Vietnam War.
- Robert E. Lee, Gerard Ford, and Jimmy Carter get called out for revisionist acts. Mary Trump labels Lee a traitor for crimes against humanity, perpetuating the Lost Cause (the myth that the South seceded due to federal government overreach, not slavery). Ford signed a House resolution to restore his citizenship, and Carter restored the same to Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy.
- During Donald Trump’s presidency, racism, misogyny, homophobia, ignorance of basic civics/governance metastasized. Add kidnapping children forced into camps and separated from their families. Dr. Trump likens Jeff Sessions, her uncle’s attorney general’s, comments to language that abusers use when exploring this.
- So too, Donald Trump manipulated, admitting it to Lesley Stahl, who asked about attacks on the press in 2018. “I do it to demean you and discredit you, so no one will believe you.” Reporters who refused to sugar-coat alternative facts got labeled “fake news,” “the enemy of the people.” We’d been down that path decades before.
- Mitch McConnell has earned his “Grim Reaper” moniker for his compulsive drive for power, betraying governance, and attempting “to take us down from within.” Simply put: We do pay them to work for us… and then they refuse. Where else would this be allowed?
“Failing to demand a reckoning for atrocities, even retrospectively, creates a situation in which we ensure such atrocities, or crimes, or transgressions will happen again. Failing to call them out is to condone them,” Mary Trump writes.
Takeaways to Learn
“Fragile systems bend toward the dysfunction of the most psychologically disordered member of the system, especially if that person is disproportionately powerful,” the book details. Failing to rein in the individual and enablers allows those controlling the resources to pervert an institution until it exemplifies the worst. As one reads The Reckoning, think Senate, Representatives, those blinded by “the base,” and cabinet secretaries, many of whom had not a shred of relevant experience regarding the agencies they were tapped to lead.
In my research of Overcoming Passive-Aggression: How to Stop Hidden Anger From Spoiling Your Relationships, Career, and Happiness, a takeaway crafted into that text is the mixed message.3 We pay more attention to actions than empty words. True character is built on a congruent message where language and deeds match—not the case in the Trump Administration, citizens saw firsthand, and despite the Goldwater Rule, experts have noted also.
A third takeaway—disbelief—should not need to be elucidated. “You can debate religion or economic policy,” Mary Trump writes. “But debating climate change and COVID-19 is tantamount to debating gravity or evolution.” Both continue ravaging our planet and population. Hence, if something sounds too convoluted, when indicators exist to the contrary, pay attention.
Uncle Donald told Chris Wallace in July 2020 his views on mask-wearing, which got co-opted to become a political affiliation. “No,” Dr. Trump says calling out only one of her uncle’s classic narcissistic traits, “because giving credit to a piece of cloth would somehow take something away from him.”
Beyond mixed and misguided messaging, take a close look at emotional intelligence and then motive.
“When your motive is not simply winning at all costs but grievance and revenge,” the author believes, “you’re more dangerous than a straight-up sociopath. Donald is much worse than that—he’s someone with a gaping wound where his soul should be.”
Dr. Trump has proven again her talent as she places words clearly on the page, calling upon her degrees in literature and psychology as well as her unparalleled experience as a family member. Some will no doubt discount the book based upon the author alone, but all can learn pivot points in our collective history that ought not be repeated. As they say, doing the same thing, expecting a better result is the definition of insanity.
Copyright @2021 by Loriann Oberlin, MS
Related Posts: Mary Trump's Tell-All on the Trump Family That Created Her Uncle and How Mary Trump's Family Journey May Inspire You to Look At Your Own
References
1. M.L. Trump, The Reckoning: Our Nation’s Trauma and Finding A Way To Heal (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2021). https://tinyurl.com/The-Reckoning-Book
2. M.L. Trump, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2020). https://tinyurl.com/Mary-Trump-Book
3. T. Murphy and L. Oberlin, Overcoming Passive-Aggression: How to Stop Hidden Anger from Spoiling Your Relationships, Career and Happiness (Boston: DaCapo Press, 2016). https://tinyurl.com/Overcoming-Passive-Aggression
