Mary Trump’s “The Reckoning:” A Review

Mary Trump, niece of Donald Trump, with her new book returns to the public square, acknowledging that even she has underestimated her uncle’s fascist tendencies which cultivated what had long existed in much of America’s bitter history. Mary L. Trump, PhD, is a psychologist and her reflections on the trauma that is America is distinctly psychological.

She started writing this book in October 2020 when the COVID-19 had already wrecked the economy, killed nearly 300,000 Americans, and institutionalized trauma. The November election and the Big Lie deepened the trauma. When seventy-four million people voted for a candidate who indulged in unconstitutional behavior, criminality, treachery and treason, in the author’s words, the pathology and trauma became widespread.

Mary Trump, on reflecting on how the country had been knocked to its knees by the least worthy person she knows, felt compelled to address the political crisis that exposed the long-standing fragility of our democracy. Donald Trump was merely a symptom of the disease and in the author’s view it took someone like him to hold up a mirror to America’s dark underside, including slavery, unequal representation, the lie of the Confederacy, and the likelihood of more insurrections.

For a moment the author gets personal, revealing that she had been diagnosed with Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. The morning after the election in 2016 she wrote these words: “demeaned, diminished, debased.” She notes that “for months I alternated among states of dissociation, rage and befuddlement. Once or twice a day, the reality that the so-called leader of the free world was my uncle hit me with the force of a punch to the solar plexus. I kept thinking about those three words I had written and how America would be forever tainted by what it had done.” She acknowledges that by the time she accepted an April 2017 invitation to the White House for her aunt’s birthday party, she “was in the worst psychological shape of my life.” Soon after she went to a treatment center in Tucson that specializes in PTSD. She would be there for weeks excavating decades-old wounds and why her uncle’s elevation to the White House had undone her.

Mary Trump reflected on a trauma she experienced when she was young, reminding the reader that such wounds don’t just disappear. Her uncle was for her a “presenting problem” and may have triggered her PTSD.

She asks rhetorically what does fallout from a calamitous 2020 have to do with the country’s origin story? In her view: everything. Her book is about the trail of impunity, silence and complicity that winds its way through our history, including slavery, Native American genocide, the failure of Reconstruction, and the horrors of Jim Crow. She notes that “Our current trauma is a culmination of our history, the logical outcome of the stories we tell ourselves, the myths we embrace, and the lies we perpetuate.”

In a chapter entitled “Impunity” in which the author recounts sanctioned atrocities against Blacks, she writes “In administration after administration and across centuries, crimes — against decency, against democracy, and against humanity — have been committed by presidents, legislators at all levels of government, the judiciary, and ordinary Americans without punishment, reprisal, or justice for the victims. The Donald came along and left all of them in the dust.”

“The Reckoning” seems a timely and necessary book about America’s trauma and its dark, unfinished history. Mary Trump skillfully examines the “The Long Shadow” of political and judicial malfeasance.

The need for a reckoning now seems on full display every day in America as the Big Lie has metastasized, voter restrictions mount, Texas puts a bounty on abortions and the relic called the filibuster still lives.