Mary Trump’s book is important to anyone who wants to understand what is happening to America months before a presidential election.

Unlike most, if not all, of the self-serving narratives pouring out of Washington, hers has the ring of being written by a patriot and a truth-teller and a highly trained psychologist, all mixed together.

She cares about her country, she worries about the damage her broken uncle can do, and she has the voice of healer as well as an author.

She knows her stuff, both in terms of Trump’s early life and the study of clinical psychology.

Mary Trump stops short of formally diagnosing the President but tells us in a riveting way just how he came to be what he is.

There is nothing bitter or vengeful about her book, it just practically screams that it is careful and that it is true.

I was shocked after reading Too Much And Never Enough, How My Famous Family Created The World’s Most Dangerous Man—and also relieved.

Finally, I was getting to understand what had happened to the man who is leading our country and scaring the crap out of people with so much relish.

In a curious way, the book is a fear-killer. It is so much better to understand than to shiver or rage.

I am no longer surprised or puzzled by his erratic, cruel, and destructive behavior, or why so many people enable and tolerate, even love it. I get it, and I thank her for that.

Understanding Trump rather than arguing about him or fearing him has helped me to gain perspective that I will need in the coming months, and which informs my writing. It is something I value greatly.

It also reinforces my belief that it is futile to argue with him or his supporters or to expect to change their minds at this point. Just as Trump is defined by his own psychology so are many of his supporters tied to his rage and sense of grievance.

There is no talking either one of them out of anything.

This is an important book. It is so much more valuable than hate, fear, and argument, the three traps so many good and freedom-loving people have fallen into and which has clouded their vision.

Donald Trump’s rise may represent the most significant failure of journalism in modern American history. When you learn what he is really like, it is hard to believe this message is so long in coming.

It is only in the past few weeks that this storied institution of journalism – it’s credibility and accountability – has begun to challenge his dishonesty and incompetence rather than enable or broadcast it. No wonder people are so mistrusting of media.

Almost everyone who puts democracy above prosperity or grievance is coming together in a political Tsunami –  a powerful coalition to defeat him.

This new social movement will fail him because he will and is ultimately failing himself as well as our country.

It may be the crowning achievement of Trump and Trumpism that so damaged a human being got so far after a lifetime of deception, corruption, and sociopathic behavior.

The damage he has done will live on for a long time, but he will soon be poisoning the well from Mar-A-Largo or one of his golf clubs rather than the White House. That will be a mess, it will also be an opportunity – a new beginning.

Donald Trump has lost credibility, in the world, in the government, in the country. Some days it feels like he is one of those disconnected talking heads; his mouth keeps opening and closing and spinning him around until the batteries run out.

The Hate And Fear Trump movement has also been destructive and useless.

It has distracted and delayed the country into believing that he is a rational evil-doer and strategic and calculating in his efforts to undermine our democracy.

It’s just not that simple.

President Trump has no “strategies” or “agendas,” says Mary Trump, he has no organizing principles.

His ego has been and is a fragile and inadequate barrier between him and the real world.

Trump’s own  myth, she writes, is the fiction that he strong, smart, and extraordinary in every way, “because facing the truth – that he is none of those things  – is too terrifying for him to contemplate now.”

But he is facing the truth now, he has no choice.

In almost every interview he does, in virtually every press conference, he is being challenged about his lies. This is new, this is different.

And if you watch his face, you can see he is terrified, as anyone is who trails so many lies around. He couldn’t possibly keep up with them.

He has to face the awful truth almost every time he ventures out into the real world—what a horrible place to be.

His delusions are revealing themselves, even in the face of trouble.

It turns out, he told the Governor of South Dakota, that his dream is to have his image added to Mt. Rushmore. (I wonder how they will carve out that nest on the top of his head?)

The media loves to portray Trump as a tough counter-puncher in the mold of the much-hated attorney Roy Cohn, who advised Trump before he died.

But in truth, he is more like Loki, the Marvel supervillain, capable of creating warring clans of superheroes, of uniting villains, sowing seeds of discord and attacking New York City.

He has, say the Marvel Comic writers, “no chill.” That is, he can never go with the flow. That is the point of him. That is the source of his idea of himself as great.

I have this recurring idea that the inside of his head is like a blender mixing milk and fruit.

He cannot be reasoned away, he can only be defeated – as the bad guys throughout history are – by movements that strive to be better, more rational, humane, and above all, competent.

People write to me every day to say they are sorry; they can’t forgive him. I’m sorry too, they miss the point.

Nobody needs to apologize to me for how they feel about Donald Trump. It’s not my business how anyone else thinks about him, especially strangers.

My point is that hating him is just another way of enabling him and feeding his delusions about himself. He feeds off of it.

More and more, people who are paying attention are learning to ignore him, as much of the world has learned to do. Fewer and fewer people are listening to what he says because he has lied so often. His words and provocations rise up like a steam cloud, and mostly just fade into the sky.

The more he is hated, the more he needs to be loved and praised.

The more he needs to be loved and praised, the more destructive, dishonest, and quasi-legal things he is compelled to do.

This is because his “badness,” his contempt for norms, his mandate to disrupt our system of government completely, is the bond that ties him to his supporters.

He is broken, full of anger and grievance. So are so many of them. That is their bond with one another. That is the reason there is no dialogue with him, or with them.

The problem with hating sociopaths, as Mary Trump points out about her uncle, is that they can’t tell good from evil, or wise from foolish. They believe in their greatness.

They can’t help themselves or change without a lot of help.

Donald Trump has managed to be slick and convincing all of his life and avoided help, or did not need it in his mind. Why wouldn’t this pattern work now?

It is a sad statement on our troubled country that it took a pandemic and so many dead people for us to see it. As he is broken, so are we.

Donald Trump is all about hating things and feeling aggrieved and mistreated. Hatred is the fuel at the pump for him; he pulls in every time he needs a refill.

Mary Trump makes it clear to me what I could see but not quite comprehend because I’ve never seen anything like them in a President in my life. He is a small and vain man, disconnected from ordinary human beings.

There is a part of me that could simply not accept that the American people would do so reckless and irresponsible a thing as put so damaged a man in charge of our country.

Could we really think so little of ourselves?

I accept it now, it’s time to move past my own confusion.

Donald Trump is a scared little boy living in a big White House with a big plane to take him to his golf castles all over the country. He makes certain lots of people are there to cheer and applaud.

He doesn’t need to be forgiven. He needs to be replaced.

We are not Gods, and it’s not up to me to tell anybody how to feel about him. He needs to be understood so that he can be replaced with something different, something better.

Mary Trump explains in her book how it is that a President of the United States can stand up in a press conference full of cheering wealthy golfers and lie about being the first president in 50 years to pass meaningful Veteran’s care legislation.

When a reporter called out his oft-repeated lie for the first time in four years, he froze and ran away.

He just couldn’t process what was happening. It was a chilling and revealing moment in Donald Trump’s life, something that had never occurred in any of his 74 years. And something Mary Trump explains and predicts in her book.

Trump, says Mary, didn’t drag his feet responding to the coronavirus because of his narcissism, he did it because of his fear of appearing weak or failing to project the message that everything was “great,” “beautiful,” and “perfect.”

The irony, as she points out, is this failure to face the truth every health expert was seeing has led to massive failure and almost certain defeat in November.

You can lie all you want about your greatness, but you can’t lie about Grandma dying alone in her hospital room,  and all those bodies piling up in morgues.

Trump has run out his clock; he is drowning in his fantasies.

As President, he is unable to acknowledge any of the tragedy that accompanies the death of 160,000 people.

He has convinced himself he’s done a better job than anybody else in the world could have done or did because only 160,000 died, it could have been two million.

The goalposts keep moving as the body count keeps rising. It just to be just a few thousand.

During the early days of the pandemic, Mary Trump points out, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s honest and fierce response to the virus “revealed Donald as a petty, pathetic, little man – ignorant, incapable, out of his depth, and lost in his delusional spin.”

According to people working in the White House, the praise Cuomo was receiving infuriated and obsessed him.

The truth revealed in Mary’s book was also lost for years on most of our so-called savvy media, mired in he-said he-said journalism, bouncing back from one side to the other, but taking their sweet time to say what they knew was true.

Media sees politics much as a football game, good ratings, lots of money, all play by play, and drama.

Trump had blown it, and a lot of people were going to pay the price.

Trump got caught in his lies – there is no reason to do anything differently because no one – certainly not a governor like Andrew Cuomo – has ever done a better job than he has.

“As the pressures upon him have continued to mount over the last three years,” wrote Mary Trump, “the disparity between the level of competence required for running a country and his incompetence has widened,  revealing his delusions more starkly than ever before.”

A strong economy had kept most Americans shielded from the effects of his pathology.

Still, the out-of-control COVID-19 pandemic, the possibility of an economic depression, deepening social divides along political lines, have created a perfect storm of catastrophes that no one is less equipped to manage than the President of the United States.

Donald Trump has been lying all of his life, and successfully, and without punishment or harm.

He cannot comprehend the world he is in, or the mess he is in. Hating him accomplishes nothing but heartburn. The President is no different than a homeless schizophrenic living in the fantasies of his consciousness.

What, really, is the point of hating him and raging about him on Twitter?

Understanding him instead of railing about him on Facebook or Twitter will remove him from the presidency. Hating him does nothing but make Mark Zuckerberg another billion dollars.

This week, the New York Times reported that Wall Street CEO’s are abandoning the Republican Party in droves, not because they love Joe Biden but because they have come to fear what President Trump is doing to the country more than they fear a Democratic administration or new taxes.

We have become a selfish and morally lazy country; few people seem willing to put the country’s interests about their own, including so-called Christian leaders who take their pants down with beautiful women and pose for pictures.

I’ve argued for some time that the media has failed in the most profound way to understand Trump or challenge the glaring flaws in his character and psyche.

Reporters, alone among most Americans, see him almost every day. They are uniquely qualified to call out his lies and delusions.

Understanding Donald Trump is not the same as forgiving him or sanctioning what he has done.

Understanding him with perspective, thoughtfulness, and yes – compassion – is essential to understanding how to feel about him and why he cannot possibly and ultimately succeed.

It also helps people to understand how to respond to him and defeat him. The kids on Tik-Tok and the reporter at his golf club Friday revealed a great deal about the fear and chaos that live in his head.

Mary Trump wrote a revealing and courageous book, one I suspect will be remembered long after the others are forgotten. I hope she finds peace and happiness in her life..

I wish Mary Trump had taken some time to study the psychological make-up of Trump supporters, now referred to as the “MAGA” people, the heart of Trump’s loyal constituency.

I live in rural America, and know and have spoken to many Trump supporters. I don’t buy the stereotype of them as mindless bigots, most seem to be good and hard-working people.

But they have come of age in a time of grievance and much suffering for many working-class and rural Americans.

So many have lost their jobs and children and health, all those things a pathway to the American Dream. They are drawn to media that promotes racial resentment and bitter hatred of government. They are desperate for help and attention.

When Trump is defeated, they will follow him wherever he ends up. Nothing will change for them until their sons and daughters get better lives than most of them now have.

Nelson Mandela showed the world that even the most bitter and hateful divisions could be healed: his Reconciliation Movement saved a million lives and kept his country from a civil war.

It can be done. President Trump is not the person to do it. I hope Joe Biden is.

The man I see on TV sync’s almost entirely with the man I see in her book.

The damage he has done is real and makes me sad. He is too small and damaged to fear.