“Too Much and Never Enough” by Mary L. Trump, Ph.D.: a multiple personality joke told by the president’s niece when she was eight years old

I am halfway through this biography of President Trump by his niece, a psychologist, who has observed, but apparently never interviewed, her uncle; nor, apparently, has she ever read anything in which he expresses his private thoughts.

Thus, in my lookout for anything possibly related to multiple personality, I am reduced to relating an anecdote involving the author and her father, the future president’s older brother. The issue of multiple personality is inadvertently raised in a joke she tells her father when she was eight years old.

Does her making this joke, or her father’s overreaction to it, mean that it might have reflected something actually going on in the family? I don’t know.

“We’d just finished eating when I started to recount the adventures I’d had with my mother at the bank that afternoon. While she waited in the very long line, I had stood at one of the counters and filled out deposit slips with all sorts of aliases and wild sums of money I planned to withdraw in order to fund various schemes. I could barely contain how funny I thought the whole thing was. But as I told [him] about the secret identities, the secret withdrawals of cash, and my fiendish plots to disperse them, Dad got a wary look in his eyes…

“Dad got increasingly agitated…He was drunk and trapped in some old narrative…” (1, pp. 104-105).

1. Mary L. Trump, Ph.D. Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man. New York, Simon & Schuster, 2020.