Mary Trump’s book, Too Much and Never Enough, describes Donald Trump as a wounded soul who never develops the capacity for intimacy, empathy, compassion, or understanding. He’s not a fully developed human being; he is stunted emotionally and psychologically. But the most fascinating dynamic revealed in the book is the one controlling the monumental effort that has gone into fooling the world into believing the book’s subject, Donald J. Trump, is some sort of genius.

It’s not a new thing to take the weakest, least capable family members and keep them hidden or send them away. The rich and famous have done that for centuries. What’s new is rather than send Donald away, his family chose to prop him up. As Mary Trump, Donald Trump’s niece, makes clear in various ways throughout her book, the Trump family dynamic was such that their survival as a business (which is what this family is and was from the moment Fred Trump and his wife created their dynasty) required a front man to make it successful, and Donald fit that bill.

Donald’s incessant need for attention has always made it impossible to ignore him, so people enabled him instead. For the family, there was no upside to confronting Donald with the truth, so nobody did. They’d experienced the tantrums and cruelty Donald was capable of when he was still a child. They knew his propensity for holding grudges and punishing those he perceived as having slighted him. Donald always won. He had to…