CSI: American Carnage (Thursday, December 12, 2019)
Editors’ Note
Today’s report comes from reporter, analyst, and commentator nonpareil, Susan Caba, an investigative observer well known for her foreign musings. As diligent readers well know, CSI: American Carnage is committed to publishing what other outlets do not. Please read Susan carefully. – The Editors
MOMMY DEAREST
By Susan Caba
Look no further than her hair.
Mary MacLeod Trump’s hair, in her later years, swept upward and back like a tsunami about to break for shore. Back-combed, buttressed and lacquered to an improbable height, the ‘do is the original Trump Tower, an impressive piece of Oedipal architecture. A single metaphor could never do it justice.
Donald J. Trump’s mother is, many people are saying, responsible for the infantile, craving and craven puddle of Id that occupies the White House and threatens the mental health of the nation. Her hair alone puts Mary Trump in the pantheon of toxic mothers, somewhere on the spectrum close to Norma Bates.
The hair, I’m telling you, is the tell.
Put photos of Donald and Mary side by side. Is his hair not the same (unnatural) color as his mother’s? Did he not (until an unsung post-election stylist did a gradual nip-and-tuck) swirl and sweep and tease and spray his locks into a pale imitation of her inimitable coif? The president hasn’t—so far—managed to merge as fully as Norman Bates did with his mother, but the urge is clearly there.
Oh, sure, Donald—his mother’s fourth child—describes Mary MacLeod in anodyne terms such as “fantastic” and “tremendous” and “very warm” and a “great beauty.” He mentioned her meatloaf in 2005 on Martha Stewart’s show. “My mother was a wife who was a really great homemaker. She always said, ‘Be happy!’ She wanted me to be happy.”
Please note that he misspelled her maiden name in his 2009 book, Think Like a Champion. But then, he’s misspelled the name of his current wife, too.
Let’s not go all psycho-babble—although many people do.
“A solid relationship with what we sometimes call an ordinary, devoted mother establishes a foundation on which critical personal and emotional architecture can be built,” writes an expert whose name has been lost in the mists of time. “Your mother helps you identify your feelings and develop a cognitive structure so you don’t have to act on them immediately.”
“We rarely saw Mrs. Trump. But we did see a lot of the housekeeper,” said one of Donald’s childhood friends.
Some people say the president’s sucking wounds of insecurity, his incoherent rages and his daily excursions into alternate realities can be laid at Mary Trump’s feet. She had a difficult fifth pregnancy when Donald was two, followed by complications that kept her in the hospital for an extended time. When he was 13, it was off to a military boarding school for the unruly adolescent. Is it any wonder he’s still an infant squalling for Mommy?
(All sons are, in reality, infants squalling for Mommy. Because as Norman Bates said, “A boy’s best friend is his mother.” Except sometimes she’s not.)
Mrs. Trump, meanwhile, was out and about in her rose-colored Rolls Royce, collecting coins from the laundry machines in the family’s outer-boroughs empire of apartment buildings. Or she could be glimpsed in the back seat, swaddled in fur, long fingers perfectly manicured, attending to varied social obligations befitting the wife of a New York real estate tycoon.
She enjoyed the accoutrements of money, and who can blame her?
The 10th child of a Scottish fisherman and his wife, Mary MacLeod left the desolate village of Tong (on the outskirts of Stornoway, in the Outer Hebrides, on the Isle of Lewis—that’s how remote it is) for America at age 17. The family home sat on mudflats that oozed with the tides, a landscape characterized by terms like “human wretchedness.” Mary returned every year, slipping into Gaelic the minute she arrived. Donald visited once as an adult, when he opened a golf course and spent a precise 97 seconds in his mother’s original home.
It might be said—though not by me, I would never say it—that Donald married his mother when he wed his first wife, Ivana Zelníčková. The Czech-born model shared Mary Trump’s immigrant background, taste for the luxuries of life and, of course, flaxen hair of a certain color, teased to improbable heights. When Donald left Ivana for Georgia Peach Marla Maples, an exasperated Mary Trump was said (by Ivana) to sigh, “What kind of son have I created?”
A question asked by many and yet to be fully answered.
— Thursday, December 12, 2019