Lack of Accountability As Core of a Toxic Family System

As I noted in Part 1 of this extended review, I prefer a case formulation for Donald Trump and those like him, focusing on his Other-Blamer behaviors as evidence of deep feelings of unworthiness and resulting shame intolerance. 

One of the giveaways to Other-Blamer personalities, also called narcissists or sociopaths, is their language. Specifically, the vagueness of their language. (Pun intended!) Use of passive, unclear or indirect communication can be a tool to avoid accountability, as in “mistakes were made.” 

Mary Trump shows signs that she learned some Other-Blamer behavior, having grown up in a family loaded with Other-Blamers of various shades. I found repeated examples of vagueness in her writing where she fails to hold herself or others accountable for bad behavior. This kind of language can be very hard to spot, but I often look for vague language in therapy sessions  to identify lack of accountability in people. 

In the prologue she writes: “Late in the summer of 2016 I considered speaking out about the ways I knew Donald to be completely unqualified. By this time he had emerged relatively unscathed from the GOP Convention and his call for ‘Second Amendment people’ to stop Hillary Clinton. Even his attack on Khizr and Ghazala Kahn, Gold Star parents whose son Humayun, a US Army captain, had died in Iraq, seemed not to matter. When the majority of Republicans polled still supported him after the Access Hollywood tape was released, I knew I had made the right decision.” (p. 10) What decision? She never said what her decision was. This lie of omission seems to match the pattern of family behavior — lack of accountability. No one in the family seems to hold themselves or other family members accountable for bad behavior. She can’t even clearly state a position about speaking out for or against Donald. Her silence was, of course, an important lie of omission, but she cannot hold herself responsible for that silence and instead spews out a string of details, with no conclusion — not unlike how Donald talks when his rambling word salads may include actual words, but do not include any real content. 

Later she writes, “In the end, I concluded that if I spoke publicly about my uncle, I would be painted as a disgruntled, disinherited niece looking to cash in or settle a score.” (p. 11) But she actually won a lawsuit and got money from her grandfather’s estate, even though she was written out of the will, so she had already settled that score and cashed in. She was disgruntled by being written out of the will by her grandfather, but he had every right to do that. Now, speaking out four years later, she, indeed, looks and sounds like exactly like someone looking to cash in some more. Her rationale for speaking out NOW is never clearly explained. 

Mary regularly defends her father, Freddy, despite his many failures, which can be expected for a child who is loyal to a parent.  But her defenses also exemplify the behaviors of dysfunctional “Other-Blamer” family dynamics. She writes at length about her father’s alcoholism, which caused him to lose several jobs in his career as an airline pilot that lasted less than a year, yet she does not hold him accountable for his own choices. Instead she writes that, “Freddy was being slowly, inexorably dismantled.” (p. 67) By whom? She could have more accurately written that Freddy was dismantling his own career, but she cannot hold her father accountable. Later on she writes that Freddy had “no other options,” but go back and beg for a job from his father. Of course he had other options, but again this is the excuse-filled language learned in a family of enablers. 

In another example of Mary’s own blame-shifting thinking, she says her father’s dream of flying “had been taken away from him” (p. 91). This is false. He was an alcoholic who drank himself out of several jobs. Also she writes: “He did know that the only way for him to retain any self-respect was to walk away from Trump Management, this time for good.” (p. 91) No, her father gave away his self-respect by not functioning as a responsible adult or parent. He had many opportunities to regain his self-respect and walking away from a job at the family business had nothing to do with anything. 

Mary’s language is also often that of the victim, a common behavior of Other-Blamers. Describing her father’s low functioning and repetitive failures in life: “Thwarted one way or the other, he was at his father’s mercy.” No, he was thwarting himself by being an alcoholic. His father did not force the alcohol into his mouth. Freddy drank and smoked cigarettes and refused to work by his own volition. He was at no one’s mercy but his own lack of accountability.  

Mary also regularly plays the victim, whining that while at Tufts University and later in graduate school at Columbia University she was blowing through the financial payouts from her trust fund, forcing her to ask her grandmother for a handout. How many people get free rides through their college education, much less at an Ivy League school — plus health insurance, rent at a Manhattan apartment and spending money of untold thousands of dollars? She never makes mention of any jobs she had while a privileged, rich young adult — no fast food slinging or floor mopping put her through college, unlike many of us. 

But then she doesn’t hesitate to point out Donald’s own sense of grievance and victimology, as he blamed the economy, the media and banks for his bankruptcies and financial difficulties in the 1990s. “Nothing was ever fair to him. That struck a chord in Fred, who nursed his own grievances, and also never took responsibility for anything other than his successes. Donald’s talent for deflecting responsibility while projecting blame onto others came straight from his father’s playbook.” (p. 140)

In the next paragraph she laments that Donald was getting away with “crass, irresponsible, and despicable behavior”, but her passivity in this statement is obvious. She was actively engaged in allowing him to get away with it by her choice to remain silent prior to his election. She is not being accountable and owning her role in Donald’s rise to power. How convenient. 

Narcissistic family language patterns continue in the book:  “After my grandfather died in 1999, I learned that my father’s line had been erased from the will as if Fred Trump’s oldest son had never existed, and a lawsuit followed.” (p. 10) Correction: Mary and her brother chose to sue. “We sued the family because we were mad at being cut out of the will” would be more accurate. 

The next paragraph continues from passivity to blame shifting, a key Other-Blamer tactic. None of the family spoke out publicly against Donald in 2016, although Mary describes a conversation that she had with her aunt Maryanne before the election agreeing that Donald was not qualified. Maryanne supposedly became incensed at Donald’s racism and lies, but never spoke out. This time the family wasn’t at fault for Trump’s political rise, it was the media. “The media failed to notice that not one member of Donald’s family, apart from his children, his son-in-law and his current wife said a word in support of him during the entire campaign.” Maryanne used her judgeship as a shield of neutrality to avoid speaking up. But Maryanne voted for Donald and would later be caught up in the family’s multi-million dollar tax fraud scheme and would resign her federal judgeship to avoid prosecution. 

“Nothing Donald said during the campaign — from his disparagement of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, arguably the most qualified presidential candidate in the history of the country, as a ‘nasty woman’ to his mocking of Serge Kovalewski, a disabled New York Time reporter — deviated from my expectation of him. In fact, I was reminded of every family meal I’d every attended during which Donald had talked about all of the women he considered ugly, fat slobs or the men, usually more accomplished or powerful, he called losers, while my grandfather and Maryanne, Elizabeth, and Robert all laughed and joined in. That kind of casual dehumanization of people was commonplace at the Trump dinner table. Why did it surprise me was that he kept getting away with it?” (p. 9)

Why should it have surprised her?  Donald’s family enabled him from childhood on and never spoke out against him in private or in public! Why should others be any different? For a psychologist, she lacks awareness of human behavior and sees no parallels in her family’s behavior and in the behavior of the GOP and press who have enabled Donald for years. He had early and regular experience at saying abusive things about others and being enabled in this dehumanizing behavior.  Why should he stop it when he got all the benefits and none of the repercussions?

Lack of Accountability As Core of a Toxic Family System

As I noted in Part 1 of this extended review, I prefer a case formulation for Donald Trump and those like him, focusing on his Other-Blamer behaviors as evidence of deep feelings of unworthiness and resulting shame intolerance. 

One of the giveaways to Other-Blamer personalities, also called narcissists or sociopaths, is their language. Specifically, the vagueness of their language. (Pun intended!) Use of passive, unclear or indirect communication can be a tool to avoid accountability, as in “mistakes were made.” 

Mary Trump shows signs that she learned some Other-Blamer behavior, having grown up in a family loaded with Other-Blamers of various shades. I found repeated examples of vagueness in her writing where she fails to hold herself or others accountable for bad behavior. This kind of language can be very hard to spot, but I often look for vague language in therapy sessions  to identify lack of accountability in people. 

In the prologue she writes: “Late in the summer of 2016 I considered speaking out about the ways I knew Donald to be completely unqualified. By this time he had emerged relatively unscathed from the GOP Convention and his call for ‘Second Amendment people’ to stop Hillary Clinton. Even his attack on Khizr and Ghazala Kahn, Gold Star parents whose son Humayun, a US Army captain, had died in Iraq, seemed not to matter. When the majority of Republicans polled still supported him after the Access Hollywood tape was released, I knew I had made the right decision.” (p. 10) What decision? She never said what her decision was. This lie of omission seems to match the pattern of family behavior — lack of accountability. No one in the family seems to hold themselves or other family members accountable for bad behavior. She can’t even clearly state a position about speaking out for or against Donald. Her silence was, of course, an important lie of omission, but she cannot hold herself responsible for that silence and instead spews out a string of details, with no conclusion — not unlike how Donald talks when his rambling word salads may include actual words, but do not include any real content. 

Later she writes, “In the end, I concluded that if I spoke publicly about my uncle, I would be painted as a disgruntled, disinherited niece looking to cash in or settle a score.” (p. 11) But she actually won a lawsuit and got money from her grandfather’s estate, even though she was written out of the will, so she had already settled that score and cashed in. She was disgruntled by being written out of the will by her grandfather, but he had every right to do that. Now, speaking out four years later, she, indeed, looks and sounds like exactly like someone looking to cash in some more. Her rationale for speaking out NOW is never clearly explained. 

Mary regularly defends her father, Freddy, despite his many failures, which can be expected for a child who is loyal to a parent.  But her defenses also exemplify the behaviors of dysfunctional “Other-Blamer” family dynamics. She writes at length about her father’s alcoholism, which caused him to lose several jobs in his career as an airline pilot that lasted less than a year, yet she does not hold him accountable for his own choices. Instead she writes that, “Freddy was being slowly, inexorably dismantled.” (p. 67) By whom? She could have more accurately written that Freddy was dismantling his own career, but she cannot hold her father accountable. Later on she writes that Freddy had “no other options,” but go back and beg for a job from his father. Of course he had other options, but again this is the excuse-filled language learned in a family of enablers. 

In another example of Mary’s own blame-shifting thinking, she says her father’s dream of flying “had been taken away from him” (p. 91). This is false. He was an alcoholic who drank himself out of several jobs. Also she writes: “He did know that the only way for him to retain any self-respect was to walk away from Trump Management, this time for good.” (p. 91) No, her father gave away his self-respect by not functioning as a responsible adult or parent. He had many opportunities to regain his self-respect and walking away from a job at the family business had nothing to do with anything. 

Mary’s language is also often that of the victim, a common behavior of Other-Blamers. Describing her father’s low functioning and repetitive failures in life: “Thwarted one way or the other, he was at his father’s mercy.” No, he was thwarting himself by being an alcoholic. His father did not force the alcohol into his mouth. Freddy drank and smoked cigarettes and refused to work by his own volition. He was at no one’s mercy but his own lack of accountability.  

Mary also regularly plays the victim, whining that while at Tufts University and later in graduate school at Columbia University she was blowing through the financial payouts from her trust fund, forcing her to ask her grandmother for a handout. How many people get free rides through their college education, much less at an Ivy League school — plus health insurance, rent at a Manhattan apartment and spending money of untold thousands of dollars? She never makes mention of any jobs she had while a privileged, rich young adult — no fast food slinging or floor mopping put her through college, unlike many of us. 

But then she doesn’t hesitate to point out Donald’s own sense of grievance and victimology, as he blamed the economy, the media and banks for his bankruptcies and financial difficulties in the 1990s. “Nothing was ever fair to him. That struck a chord in Fred, who nursed his own grievances, and also never took responsibility for anything other than his successes. Donald’s talent for deflecting responsibility while projecting blame onto others came straight from his father’s playbook.” (p. 140)

In the next paragraph she laments that Donald was getting away with “crass, irresponsible, and despicable behavior”, but her passivity in this statement is obvious. She was actively engaged in allowing him to get away with it by her choice to remain silent prior to his election. She is not being accountable and owning her role in Donald’s rise to power. How convenient. 

Narcissistic family language patterns continue in the book:  “After my grandfather died in 1999, I learned that my father’s line had been erased from the will as if Fred Trump’s oldest son had never existed, and a lawsuit followed.” (p. 10) Correction: Mary and her brother chose to sue. “We sued the family because we were mad at being cut out of the will” would be more accurate. 

The next paragraph continues from passivity to blame shifting, a key Other-Blamer tactic. None of the family spoke out publicly against Donald in 2016, although Mary describes a conversation that she had with her aunt Maryanne before the election agreeing that Donald was not qualified. Maryanne supposedly became incensed at Donald’s racism and lies, but never spoke out. This time the family wasn’t at fault for Trump’s political rise, it was the media. “The media failed to notice that not one member of Donald’s family, apart from his children, his son-in-law and his current wife said a word in support of him during the entire campaign.” Maryanne used her judgeship as a shield of neutrality to avoid speaking up. But Maryanne voted for Donald and would later be caught up in the family’s multi-million dollar tax fraud scheme and would resign her federal judgeship to avoid prosecution. 

“Nothing Donald said during the campaign — from his disparagement of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, arguably the most qualified presidential candidate in the history of the country, as a ‘nasty woman’ to his mocking of Serge Kovalewski, a disabled New York Time reporter — deviated from my expectation of him. In fact, I was reminded of every family meal I’d every attended during which Donald had talked about all of the women he considered ugly, fat slobs or the men, usually more accomplished or powerful, he called losers, while my grandfather and Maryanne, Elizabeth, and Robert all laughed and joined in. That kind of casual dehumanization of people was commonplace at the Trump dinner table. Why did it surprise me was that he kept getting away with it?” (p. 9)

Why should it have surprised her?  Donald’s family enabled him from childhood on and never spoke out against him in private or in public! Why should others be any different? For a psychologist, she lacks awareness of human behavior and sees no parallels in her family’s behavior and in the behavior of the GOP and press who have enabled Donald for years. He had early and regular experience at saying abusive things about others and being enabled in this dehumanizing behavior.  Why should he stop it when he got all the benefits and none of the repercussions?

See Part 3 of this review about how Abusive Parents Create Abusive Children