When Sue Craig and Russ Buettner published their massive piece in The New York Times on October 2, 2018, I realized that the calculus involved in damaging Donald, in making a dent in the hold he had over the Republican Party, had only gotten more difficult since 2016. Death by a thousand lashes became my mantra.
Because the Times opus did not reveal a single event but, rather, detailed a lifelong pattern of fraud, misrepresentation, and possible criminality, I thought it would do more than make a dent. The piece also put to rest, once and for all (or at least it should have), the myth that Donald was self-made, legitimate, or successful. Yet we watched in amazement as Donald got away with transgressions against women, veterans, and basic human decency so frequently that I got sick of hearing the phrase, “This would have ended the career of any other politician.”
As proud as I was to have been even a small part of the Times investigation, I needed to do more. And I needed to do it publicly.
The publication of Too Much and Never Enough in July 2020 changed everything and nothing. I had been a very private person for my entire life, and now I was supposed to know how to juggle requests for interviews, fundraisers, and endorsements. I was expected to be media savvy. People asked me to send emails to a network I didn’t have. Although the number of my Twitter followers went from ninety to hundreds of thousands overnight, I knew very few people in the real world.
People I’d admired for most of my life sent me emails and DMs and actual letters, but I didn’t know how to respond; responding, in fact, felt presumptuous.
I had finished the book while I was quarantining in my basement in April 2020, and COVID was still surging that summer. Everything was done via Zoom.
And then there were the lawsuits, my family’s love language. My uncles, Donald and Robert, had sued to prevent the publication of my book. When that failed, they sued to prevent me from speaking about it. In the fall of 2020, I brought a fraud suit against Donald, Robert, and Maryanne as the executors of my grandfather’s estate, based on information from the New York Times investigation that in turn had been based on the discovery documents I’d given them.
I’d seen Rob once since Ivanka’s wedding, in 2009, during which he made a show of saying, “I think the statute of limitations on family conflict has passed.” He repeated that phrase several times in a gregarious way that would have convinced anybody who didn’t know him not just that he was a good guy but that he meant what he said. He did not.
This became clear when Fritz and I, a few months after the wedding, were summoned to Maryanne’s apartment, presumably to address “the elephant in the room,” as she put it. Robert stayed for an hour and then opted not to join us for lunch. The next time I saw him was nine years later, in the lobby of the hotel in DC, waiting for our ride to the White House.
Rob had thoroughly revealed himself after the election—sucking up to a brother he had hated for decades, spouting Fox propaganda, and espousing white evangelical hatred. Maryanne told me about his bursts of irrational rage toward her and his bizarre sycophancy toward Donald. But in his speech at the dining room table in the residential dining room, he outdid himself. As he droned on, referring to his older brother as “Mr. President” at every turn, my contempt for him grew. It didn’t surprise me when he agreed, at Donald and Maryanne’s insistence, to take the lead in the lawsuit against me despite the fact that he had recently been in the ICU of Mount Sinai Hospital. He died two months later.
When my brother and I sued my grandfather’s estate in 1999, after months of trying to negotiate with my uncle Robert to reach a fair settlement, Maryanne came up with the idea of canceling the health insurance we’d been receiving through my grandfather’s company since we were born. She believed this would be an effective way to get us to drop our lawsuit because my infant nephew was gravely ill, and taking away our insurance would have been potentially catastrophic to my nephew’s health and my brother’s solvency. Donald supported this plan because, as he said, “Why should we give him medical coverage? They sued my father, essentially. I’m not thrilled when someone sues my father.”
We weren’t suing my grandfather—he was dead after years of decline due to Alzheimer’s disease, and unlikely to be affected by the lawsuit—and before his death lawyers had warned him that the draconian nature of our disinheritance would likely end in litigation. But by then, Donald had been bullying weaker parties into submission for years, getting his way not because he had the better claim or the better case, but because he could outspend his adversaries and he had no sense of basic human decency to hold him back.
My brother and I had to initiate another lawsuit to force Maryanne, Donald, and Robert to reinstate my nephew’s health insurance. This was another massive expense and provided my aunt and uncles with yet another outlet for their cruelty. Their lawyer, a nasty piece of work who acted like a thug every step of the way, referred to the round-the-clock nurses—who had been hired because my brother’s son William was still having seizures that sometimes caused his heart to stop—as overpriced babysitters. He went on to suggest my brother and sister-in-law learn CPR if they were so concerned.
The only people I heard discuss my family’s strategic cruelty before the 2016 election were MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell and David Cay Johnston of DCReport, for which I was deeply grateful. But nobody else noticed that the Republican candidate for the presidency had willfully endangered the life of a sick infant. There was too much else to be horrified by, after all. And far too many of Donald’s supporters simply didn’t care.
Then there was an ironic aftermath. A few months after we settled the lawsuit, my then-partner and I found out we were having a baby. I was the happiest I’d ever been, until the day my daughter was born. But when my brother heard the news, he stopped speaking to me. He wouldn’t answer my emails or phone calls. He didn’t even respond to me after the September 11 attacks, when I tried frantically to get in touch with him to make sure he hadn’t been in the city that day.
I finally heard from him two weeks after Avary was born. He emailed me to say that we were not welcome at his house for Thanksgiving, where we’d been celebrating it for years. He did not approve of my life choices, he wrote matter-of-factly. And that was it.
We did end up going to Thanksgiving that year because my sister-in-law told me the invitation was still open, but my brother ignored me and barely acknowledged my daughter’s existence. This went on for eight years. We reconciled in 2009, but too much damage had been done, and it didn’t last. When I told him in 2019 that I was writing a book about the family, which was slated to be published in advance of the election, he stopped speaking to me again. By the time Too Much and Never Enough was released, in July 2020, we were completely estranged.
By September, when the clamor over the book had passed, I focused entirely on the election. I was concerned, deeply, but I didn’t feel the same kind of dread I’d felt in 2016—not because I was more confident, but because we were living through so many contemporaneous tragedies that it was impossible to stay constantly attuned to the potential for even more catastrophe and still function. I kept myself cocooned, head down, blinders on.
Even during the delay after Election Day, while we waited for the votes to be counted and Donald declared premature victory, I felt hopeful if not optimistic. This wait felt much less onerous than the weekslong delay after the 2000 election.
Then Biden won. We were going to be OK.