Why Can’t Donald Trump Laugh?

The president’s niece diagnoses her family’s dysfunction.

On Thursday’s episode of Trumpcast, Virginia Heffernan spoke with Mary Trump, daughter of President Donald Trump’s older brother Fred Trump Jr., holder of a Ph.D. in clinical psychology, and author of the new book Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man. This partial transcript of their conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Virginia Heffernan: How witting is Donald Trump in his worst fraud? What do you think, based on what you know about him?

Mary Trump: I think in the context of this question, the most important thing to know about Donald is that he’ll accept help of any kind if it benefits him. This is a man who knows the difference between right and wrong, but he doesn’t think it applies to him if he can get help that’s going to advance a cause of his.

In my family, it was kind of an unwritten rule that certain behaviors that would have been crossing a line for other people were OK if you were a particular Trump. Not all of us, obviously, but if you were a particular Trump.

How does that get conveyed to you?

Through watching, especially watching how my grandfather treated my dad. Donald learned very early on. My dad was seven and a half years older, so Donald had the benefit, if you want to call it that, of watching his older brother be abused and criticized and humiliated. But he also had the benefit of seeing how my dad was kind and generous and how much his friends loved him. So the message Donald got was don’t be like Freddy. Be a killer, be tough.

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All the kids—well, I don’t know about the girls in the family, but all the boys—worked in my grandfather’s office in the summers and maybe on weekends once in a while, so they saw how he operated. They saw how he treated people. They saw the kinds of people he rubbed elbows with. He was very connected to not just the Democratic machine, which was very influential in Brooklyn back in the ’40s and ’50s, but mob figures and other unsavory creatures.

I think of Felix Sater giving your cousin Ivanka the tour of the Kremlin, letting her sit in Putin’s chair. You bring your kids along to meet the most important people you know!

That’s right.

Sometimes on this show, I’ve wondered, can Donald Trump do anything? He can’t toss paper towels in a normal way or go down a ramp. We know that. But you also make it clear he can’t do business. I mean, can he throw a baseball? Is there some rubber-hits-the-road moment where he displays a talent? The hole at his center seems to be that he’s almost absolutely without merit.

When we were kids, he did throw the baseball around with us. Way too hard, quite honestly. I doubt he could do that anymore. But I agree with you that somebody of such privilege, who had all of the opportunities at his disposal in the world, is so limited in scope in every way, in terms of intellectual curiosity, in terms of interests, in terms of skills. One of the things that was important for me to convey was the concept of his having been institutionalized, essentially.

I find this fascinating. With your training, you can probably recognize the hallmarks of institutionalization, and yet it’s weird to think of Donald Trump as being like someone who grew up in an orphanage. Walk me through that. Is military school when it first starts, or is it just being born into the Trump empire?

Certainly by the time he was a teenager. He’s never wanted for anything, he’s never had to make a living. He never has made a living. He went from my grandparents’ house to the very regimented military school, back to the house, to my grandfather’s company, to the Trump Organization, which I view as a sinecure for him.

And then The Apprentice, whatever that was, and the White House. The Apprentice isn’t a place, but it was an environment that perpetuated the same things. Everything was taken care of, nobody said no, you were protected from your own failures, and you were allowed to succeed despite those failures.

Your father took great pleasure in life. I keep thinking of this prank where he had a friend hijack a hearse and one of them gets in a coffin. It’s exactly the kind of thing you can’t imagine Donald doing. There’s something so humorless and sterile about him. Is he happy?

There’s no way he could be happy because the myths that have been created about him and that he’s perpetuated and believes about himself are always in constant danger of disintegrating. On some deep level, he knows that. He’s very much always living in the moment. So how can you be happy?

And how can you be happy if you don’t laugh or appreciate humor? What that says to me, because my grandfather also didn’t laugh, is that laughing is to make yourself vulnerable, it’s to let down your guard in some way, it’s to lose a little bit of control. And that can’t happen. That is not allowed to happen. So, no, I don’t believe he’s happy. Unfortunately, I don’t believe he’s capable of being happy, because it wasn’t something to aspire to in my family.

I found your book unspeakably bleak. The thing that brought me to serotonin zero was your observation that the Trumps’ signature dish is iceberg lettuce and mashed potatoes. Tell me about the aesthetic of the family.

I think it stemmed, first of all, from the fact that my grandmother was from this tiny village on a tiny island off the northwest coast of Scotland, and she was an awful cook. We had rice out of a box, which is fine, but she still couldn’t cook it properly. And Russian dressing, hysterically enough, was a really big thing. It was the Russian dressing that’s basically mayonnaise, ketchup, and relish mixed together. Part of it is that my grandfather didn’t really care. He was a man of very basic appetites.

So it’s not really surprising that people in that family would grow up to be feeling starved. And that’s what’s so weird. Even with all of that money, not Donald, but certainly Maryanne and my dad, they were starved of everything.*

What’s the deal with sexuality in the Trump men? It’s similar to the starvation around the mashed potatoes. No imagination, no sense of romance, nothing human about it.

We can look at a lot of things this way in the context of this family. There’s something—an activity or a need that all human beings share, but for them, the actual human element of the need or the activity is completely elided. So the thing that makes it actually worth having doesn’t exist for them.

With women—and my grandfather had a bit of a reputation, too—it’s the objectification of them as objects to be taken, controlled. It’s not so much about the physical pleasure as it is about the control or the getting away with something.

But then it’s also this weird way that he has of reducing women to their parts. He can’t see them as fully whole human beings. How can you engage in any substantive interesting, romantic, loving way with somebody if that’s the only perspective from which you experience them?

Have You Ever Seen Donald Trump Laugh?

As Trump himself might say, there’s something going on.

The less honest you are with yourself, the less likely you are to laugh.

.. “Self-deception inhibits laughter.”

.. “There’s a huge correlation showing that people who score high in self-deception laugh less,” Lynch told me. Furthermore, he said, “there’s a pretty robust correlation between self-deception and an inflated ego, or unwarranted high self-esteem. Some of the self-deception is telling yourself that you’re greater, more powerful, smarter than you are.”

.. It’s a lot harder to laugh when you don’t recognize absurdity. Think of how much Trump must have had to lie to himself, perhaps even unconsciously, in order to convince millions that Obama was born in Kenya
.. (By the way, the liars-laugh-less formulation doesn’t work in reverse: People who don’t laugh aren’t necessarily self-deceptive or narcissistic at all.
.. some people don’t laugh out of low self-esteem. “Self-deception,” Lynch estimates, “explains about 20 percent of why people don’t laugh.” Besides, if we didn’t tell ourselves little white lies, he adds, “we wouldn’t get out of the bed in the morning.”)
.. “Superficially, the problem that torments Trump is trade. But his language—they ‘beat’ us and ‘laugh’ at us—provokes the emotional power of shame,”
..  “all about shame—avoiding it himself, and inflicting it on others.”
..  As his biographer, I see it in his struggle to satisfy a strict and demanding father and his banishment, at age 13, to a military academy in Upstate New York where, Trump has said, he was subject to violence at the hands of Army veterans who staffed the school.
.. Trump was major-shamed again, D’Antonio writes, “when he lost his Trump Airline and the Plaza Hotel and became a symbol of failure in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Out of this defeat he fashioned a comeback that saw him become richer and more famous than ever.”
.. At the 2011 White House Correspondents Dinner, for example, President Obama coolly humiliated the birther-in-chief, getting the crowd and soon the whole world to laugh at him, while Trump sat there stone-faced. In all likelihood, that experience motivated him to finally make a real run for the presidency.
.. As best we can tell, Trump’s whole psychological dynamic might be explained as a serial encounter with public shame over his fear of inadequacy.
.. Like Dostoevsky’s The Gambler, Trump likes the thrill of getting so close to being exposed and still winning—until, of course, he finally loses, which may be what he really wants
.. “laughter relieves shame.” Laughing, especially at oneself, “is one of the main ways in which shame can be dissipated or released.”

Trump Gives White Supremacists an Unequivocal Boost

President Trump buoyed the white nationalist movement on Tuesday as no president has done in generations — equating activists protesting racism with the neo-Nazis and white supremacists who rampaged in Charlottesville, Va., over the weekend

.. angrily asserting that so-called alt-left activists were just as responsible for the bloody confrontation as marchers brandishing swastikas, Confederate battle flags, anti-Semitic banners and “Trump/Pence” signs.

.. But members of the president’s staff, stunned and disheartened, said they never expected to hear such a voluble articulation of opinions that the president had long expressed in private. National Economic Council Chairman Gary Cohn and Treasury Secretary Steven T. Mnuchin, who are Jewish, stood by uncomfortably as the president exacerbated a controversy that has once again engulfed a White House in disarray.

.. And of the demonstrators who rallied on Friday night, some chanting racist and anti-Semitic slogans, he said, “You had a lot of people in that group that were there to innocently protest and very legally protest.”

Since the 1960s, Republican politicians have made muscular appeals to white voters, especially those in the South, on broad cultural grounds. But as a rule, they have taken a hard line on the party’s racist, nativist and anti-Semitic fringe. Ronald Reagan, George Bush and George W. Bush roundly condemned white supremacists.

.. In 1991, the first President Bush took on Mr. Duke, who was then seeking the governor’s seat in Louisiana, saying, “When someone has so recently endorsed Nazism, it is inconceivable that someone can reasonably aspire to a leadership role in a free society.”

.. But his unifying tone, which his staff characterized as more traditionally presidential, quickly gave way to a more familiar Trump approach.

No sooner had he delivered the Monday statement than he began railing privately to his staff about the press. He fumed to aides about how unfairly he was being treated, and expressed sympathy with nonviolent protesters who he said were defending their “heritage,” according to a West Wing official.

.. Mr. Trump prides himself on an unapologetic style he learned from his father Fred Trump, a New York City housing developer, and Roy Cohn, a combative lawyer who served as an aide to Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s.

.. The president was about to revert to his initial, more defiant stance. As Mr. Trump approached the microphone in the lobby of Trump Tower on Tuesday, aides winced at the prospect of an unmediated president. With good reason.

.. the hiring of Mr. Kelly, who was to impose discipline on a chaotic West Wing.

.. He added that efforts by the president to equate the actions of the counter-protesters, however violent they may have been, with the neo-Nazis and the driver of the car that murdered a protester were “unacceptable.”

“There’s no moral equivalence,” Mr. Cantor said.

President Trump’s Really Weak Week

In his speech, Trump encouraged police brutality and said he was “the big, big believer and admirer of the people in law enforcement, O.K.?” He said that he’s protecting the backs of law enforcement “100 percent.” Except for Sessions, Sally Yates, Preet Bharara and Robert Mueller.

As two people close to Trump told The Times’s Maggie Haberman when asked why he was tormenting Sessions instead of firing him: Because he can.

.. And in his paranoid, aggrieved isolation, he’s even thinking about nixing Steve Bannon, nemesis of the Mooch, and mulling firing the one who could get him fired, Mueller, and pardoning himself for possible charges.

.. Trump learned his technique of publicly criticizing and freely firing from George Steinbrenner, one of the ruthless, towering characters he modeled himself on when he started hanging out at Yankee Stadium in the ’70s.

.. Trump had always resented Priebus for advising him to get out of the race after the Billy Bush “Access Hollywood” tape story broke — known as Priebus’s “scarlet A.H.,” according to The Washington Post — and for not understanding that Trump is not a mere Republican; he’s the head of his own “beautiful,” us-against-them movement, “the likes of which the world has never seen.”

.. As The Post reports, Trump’s delighted demeaning of Priebus included this incident: “At one point, during a meeting in the Oval Office, a fly began buzzing overhead, distracting the president. As the fly continued to circle, Trump summoned his chief of staff and tasked him with killing the insect.”

.. After torturing Reince for months, Trump happily gave him the final humiliating shove. As the tweets hit the White House cellphones, Priebus’s colleagues Stephen Miller and Dan Scavino jumped out of the Suburban they were sharing with Priebus, leaving the jobless man in a driving rain on the tarmac at Andrews Air Force Base, the weakest link tossed off the sled for the press wolves.

.. You’re a killer and a king or a loser, as Fred Trump liked to say. And anyone who doesn’t understand that Trump is more important than the G.O.P. or the institution of the presidency is, in his mind, a loser. Anyone who doesn’t get that the loyalty should be for him personally, rather than the country, is, to Trump, a loser.

.. With Priebus, The Post reported, the president obsessed on impotence. “The word was ‘weak’ – ‘weak,’ ‘weak,’ ‘weak,’ ‘Can’t get it done,’” an official told the paper.

.. But after all his bragging about being a great negotiator and closer, it is President Trump who can’t get it done. He couldn’t even close the deal on a pathetic, bare-bones health care bill, ineffectually bullying Lisa Murkowski, a Republican senator from Alaska, and failing to win over John McCain, who gleefully had his revenge for Trump’s mockery of him as being a loser because he was captured in war.

.. Trump can’t get it done for his pal, Putin, either. In fact, the biggest legislative accomplishment before Congress leaves for August will have been passing new sanctions on Russia because lawmakers don’t trust their own president. Talk about weak.

.. Congressional Republicans are losing their fear of Trump, making ever more snarky comments about him. North Korea is shooting off missiles and the White House is flustered. The generals are resisting Trump’s tweet edicts. The mortified leader of the Boy Scouts had to apologize for the president’s suggestive and partisan speech.

And what could be weaker than that?