The only niece of Donald J. Trump and a clinical psychologist, Mary Trump has titled her new book Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man. States Ted Johnson, Deadline, her wording “is perhaps apt for this moment, as the president dominates each news cycle yet is seemingly unable to sit one out. It’s a bit of a personality paradox that she ascribes to the president: the insecurity of feeling less than and greater than at the same time.”

Among the diagnoses the author believes 45 has are narcissistic personality disorder, dependent personality disorder, antisocial personality disorder, a learning disability, and a sleep disorder. But, “The fact is, Donald’s pathologies are so complex and his behaviors so often inexplicable that coming up with an accurate and comprehensive diagnosis would require a full battery of psychological and neurophysical tests that he’ll never sit for.”

Kurt Andersen, Los Angeles Times: “Her basic theory of the case is that Fred, the patriarch of ‘my malignantly dysfunctional family,’ a crude, cruel, selfish, boastful, money-grubbing liar, raised his second son to become a crude, cruel, selfish, boastful, money-grubbing liar.” Paternal approval was contingent on such traits as being a “killer,” for example. “And so Donald’s transgressions ‘became an audition for his father’s favor, as if he were saying ‘See, dad, I’m the tough one. I’m the killer.’”

Supporting this premise, per Lloyd Green, The Guardian, “Mary Trump writes that if the president ‘can in any way profit from your death, he’ll facilitate it, and then ignore the fact that you died’.”

Even if no one is particularly surprised by Mary Trump’s revelations, perhaps we can at least reflect on the parallels between his “malignantly dysfunctional family” and what he’s been creating in the government and in our society. On such current crises as COVID-19, for instance, she states:

His ability to control unfavorable situations by lying, spinning, and obfuscating has diminished to the point of impotence….His egregious and arguably intentional mishandling of the current catastrophe has led to a level of pushback and scrutiny that he’s never experienced before, increasing his belligerence and need for petty revenge as he withholds vital funding, personal protective equipment, and ventilators that your tax dollars have paid for from states whose governors don’t kiss his ass sufficiently.

But the pandemic, of course, is not all. Carlos Lozada, Washington Post: “All the chaos playing out on the national and world stage is a form of family dysfunction writ largest, she explains, with the president’s incessant bragging and bluster directed at ‘his audience of one: his long-dead father’.”

What matters most now, though, is that Trump continues to occupy the White House despite his vast shortcomings and has major enablers. As Megan Garber, The Atlantic, reports, in addition to both her grandparents Mary Trump also blames “the banks that, having vested interests in Trump’s self-mythology, financed him through bad investments and bankruptcies. She blames the media—the tabloids of the 1980s, the television shows of the early 2000s, the political press of 2016—that treated his lies as harmless entertainment. She blames all those who know what he is and still do nothing.”

Of those who know and do nothing, many are appointed, many are elected. With different leadership, the newly elected will replace the appointed in question. To put an end to Trumpism, we need to vote as though our lives depend on it—because, of course, they do.