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Vessels of Wrath
What if God, willing to shew his wrath, and to make his power known, endured with much longsuffering the vessels of wrath fitted to destruction: And that he might make known the riches of his glory on the vessels of mercy, which he had afore prepared unto glory. (Romans 9:22–23, KJV)
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Mary Trump’s Too Much and Never Enough stands apart from other President-Trump-as-nightmare books in that it is very well written. It reads like a novel, an American gothic tale of a cruel, heartless, and venal clan destined both to conquer and to collapse in due time, like Poe’s House of Usher. The fact that the time has not yet come due is the source of the United States’ current existential dread.
Nothing in Mary Trump’s book is surprising — how could Donald Trump’s family romance be anything but a dysfunctional horror? But it still is, or ought to be, shocking. If we are no longer shocked by the Trump era because we have become numb to its relentless, sadistic depravity, we need to wake up to it, and quickly. Poe’s narrator got out just in time. We may not be so lucky.
Tolstoy’s quip that “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way” is almost, but not quite, contradicted by the Trump family saga. While reading Too Much and Never Enough, I couldn’t help thinking that the parallels of the Kafka family of Prague and the…
