When she was six years old, Mary Trump used to play knockabout baseball with her uncle in the back yard of her New York home. “I was six and he was 28, or whatever, I don’t remember how much older he is than I am, but, you know, in his late 20s and I’m a little six-year-old kid.
“He would still throw that ball as hard as he could at me. He did it once and I thought I had broken every single bone in my hand, you know, because he has to be, he has to win, he has to be better than everyone. He has always been that guy.”
Mary Trump pauses. “Um, can I swear?”
Well, I answer, of course and if it is too strong then we can always edit it out to spare the blushes of our delicate readers.
“I mean, as we say in America, he’s always been an a-----e. Right? But you know, he was our uncle, so what are you gonna do? And nobody’s terrible all the time. Right? I mean, he had his charms. There was a time when there was this very small spark of kindness. Like he had an impulse to be kind. But that became eradicated because it didn’t serve my grandfather’s purposes by any stretch of the imagination. And it didn’t serve Donald’s.”
What to make of President Donald J Trump, the most consequential political figure of the 21st century? His enemies – and Mary Trump, his niece, is one of them – rail and shout and are desperate to open the eyes of all who support him.
His fans shake their heads and point out that the establishment had its chance and failed, and Donald Trump is the antidote. The “established way” failed to allow everyone to share in the riches of globalisation. It failed to secure the borders. It failed to secure the futures of those that worked hard in the hope of a monthly pay cheque at the end of the year that was slightly higher than it was at the beginning.
For America, read also Britain, the European continent, Argentina. Insurgency is in the air, a new age of disruptors – the fighters against what went before who will, as Malcolm X once said, overthrow the old order by “any means necessary”.
Trump’s political achievements are mesmerising, in the true sense of the world, at once awesome and, for many of the defeated multitudes (including Mary Trump) frightening. Fifty-five years after those dusty baseball games, Uncle Donald became only the second person in history to serve two terms as president of the United States despite losing office after his first term. Most people have forgotten the first US president to achieve such a spectacular feat (Grover Cleveland in 1893). No one will forget the second.