Banal: So lacking in originality as to be obvious and boring.  I am two thirds of the way through Mary Trump’s book, Too Much and Never Enough. I expected some outsize characters, some outsize actions…after all this is the family that created our monstrous joke of president. No such characters emerge…All I keep hearing in my head is Hannah Arendt’s statement:

“Evil comes from a failure to think. It defies thought for as soon as thought tries to engage itself with evil and examine the premises and principles from which it originates, it is frustrated because it finds nothing there. That is the banality of evil.” (Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil)

There is not one single outstanding thing about the entire Trump family. Fred, the father who helped create Donald, is nothing special in intellect, character, personality or appearance. He was just a pitiful specimen of an egocentric, money-grubbing, selfish, unpleasant human. The rest of the family is mostly a pathetic bunch, remaining squished firmly under his thumb, who never (except for one aunt [a coward] and Mary, the author), did much of anything worthwhile. But Fred did help create Donald…gotta give him that. He took a son, who obviously in hindsight, had mental health issues in the form of overlapping personality disorders and who wasn’t too smart (to say the least) and encouraged him to go for it–whatever the ‘it’ he desired was. Voila! Mr. President. The epitome of the ‘banality of evil.’

I’ll finish the book today…I want to get into something interesting like one of the other three nordic noir/history books I picked up at Bookworks this week (Bookworks is more important for sanity than the grocery store is for your stomach. Order Books. Lots of books. Guaranteed to make you feel better. [unless you’re reading about Trumps])

I doubt I’ll learn much new about Donald covering the latter years. Although Mary Trump does manage to explain the corruption and double dealing succinctly and clearly. Coming up are bound to be some of Donald’s most heinous actions, actions that effect a broad swath of the world as we know it. I believe I’ll finish it still overwhelmed/underwhelmed by the sense of the ‘banality of evil.’ What a boring, slimy, insecure, sick, dumb, dull creature the U.S. managed to elect as president. Are we such a banal bunch of humans as that?

I’ll be back to apologize if I find anything new and interesting about the banal one during the rest of the book.