In this revelatory, authoritative portrait of Donald J. Trump and the toxic family that made him, Mary L. Trump, a trained clinical psychologist and Donald’s only niece, shines a bright light on the dark history of their family in order to explain how her uncle became the man who now threatens the world’s health, economic security, and social fabric.
Mary Trump
spent much of her childhood in her grandparents’ large, imposing house in the
heart of Queens, New York, where Donald and his four siblings grew up. She
describes a nightmare of traumas, destructive relationships, and a tragic
combination of neglect and abuse. She explains how specific events and general
family patterns created the damaged man who currently occupies the Oval Office,
including the strange and harmful relationship between Fred Trump and his two
oldest sons, Fred Jr. and Donald.
A firsthand
witness to countless holiday meals and interactions, Mary brings an incisive
wit and unexpected humor to sometimes grim, often confounding family events.
She recounts in unsparing detail everything from her uncle Donald’s place in
the family spotlight and Ivana’s penchant for regifting to her grandmother’s
frequent injuries and illnesses and the appalling way Donald, Fred Trump’s
favorite son, dismissed and derided him when he began to succumb to
Alzheimer’s.
Numerous
pundits, armchair psychologists, and journalists have sought to parse Donald J.
Trump’s lethal flaws. Mary L. Trump has the education, insight, and intimate
familiarity needed to reveal what makes Donald, and the rest of her clan, tick.
She alone can recount this fascinating, unnerving saga, not just because of her
insider’s perspective but also because she is the only Trump willing to tell
the truth about one of the world’s most powerful and dysfunctional families.
Psychological disorders and family squabbles: 9
details from the book by Donald Trump’s niece
Here are some of the most revelatory and incendiary
passages from Mary Trump's new book.
By DANIEL
LIPPMAN
07/07/2020
03:33 PM EDT
Updated:
07/07/2020 04:52 PM EDT
A new book
by Donald Trump’s niece Mary Trump describes the president as a person likely
afflicted by multiple psychological disorders who is profoundly unsuited to be
president.
Mary Trump
is the daughter of the president’s older brother, Fred Trump Jr., an airline
pilot who suffered from alcoholism and died of a heart attack at 42. She is a
clinical psychologist who holds a Ph.D. from Adelphi University in New York.
The
president’s younger brother, Robert Trump, is trying to stop publication of the
book, “Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most
Dangerous Man,” copies of which have already been distributed to the news
media. Publisher Simon & Schuster on Monday moved up the publication date
to next Tuesday.
White House
press secretary Kayleigh McEnany told reporters on Tuesday that the book is
full of “falsehoods and that’s about it.”
Sarah
Matthews, another White House spokesperson, said: “Mary Trump and her book‘s
publisher may claim to be acting in the public interest, but this book is
clearly in the author’s own financial self-interest. President Trump has been
in office for over three years working on behalf of the American people — why
speak out now?“
A copy of
the book was shared with POLITICO. Here are some of its most revelatory and
incendiary allegations:
1. Trump
cheated on the SAT
Mary Trump,
the daughter of the president’s deceased older brother Fred Trump Jr., accuses
the president of paying a friend to take the SAT for him when he was applying
to college as a teenager.
“That was
much easier to pull off in the days before photo IDs and computerized records.
Donald, who never lacked for funds, paid his buddy well,” Mary Trump writes in
the book. Donald Trump’s sister, Maryanne Trump Barry, also often did his
homework for him during high school, the author alleges, which helped get him
into the University of Pennsylvania. Matthews, the White House spokesperson,
called the SAT allegation “absurd“ and “completely false.“
2. Trump's
sister called him a "clown" after he announced his presidential
campaign
Trump
Barry, a retired federal appeals court judge in New Jersey, considered her
brother Donald “a clown” who could never win the presidency, Mary Trump writes.
At a lunch
with the author after Donald Trump announced in 2015 that he would run for
president, Trump Barry said her brother had “no principles. None!” and that
“the only time Donald went to church was when the cameras were there. It’s
mind-boggling.”
Trump Barry
also noted that her brother’s businesses had five bankruptcies and was
exploiting Mary’s late father, Fred Trump Jr.
“He’s using
your father’s memory for political purposes, and that’s a sin, especially since
Freddy should have been the star of the family,” the author recalls her aunt
saying.
3. Trump
said he "barely even knew" his daughter-in-law
At a family
dinner at the White House in 2017, Donald Trump said he didn’t know his
daughter-in-law Lara Trump well, even though she had been with the president’s
son Eric Trump for almost eight years.
“Lara,
there. I barely even knew who the fuck she was, honestly, but then she gave a
great speech during the campaign in Georgia supporting me,” the president said,
according to the book.
4. Trump's
niece says he suffers from multiple psychological issues
Besides
believing that her uncle fits the nine criteria of clinical narcissism, Mary
Trump believes he also may suffer from antisocial personality disorder,
dependent personality disorder and a “long undiagnosed learning disability that
for decades has interfered with his ability to process information.”
She also
thinks he may suffer from a caffeine-induced sleep disorder, a result of the
several Diet Cokes he reportedly drinks on a daily basis. Asked about the
narcissism claim, McEnany said on Tuesday: “It’s ridiculous. Absurd allegations
that have absolute no bearing in truth.”
5. Trump's
sister also told him to "leave his Twitter at home" before meeting
Kim Jong Un
Trump
Barry, the retired federal judge, called the White House in June 2018 to warn
her brother about his dealings with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un before he
met with him. Her message to the president’s secretary: “Tell him his older
sister called with a little sisterly advice. Prepare. Learn from those who know
what they are doing. Stay away from Dennis Rodman. And leave his Twitter at
home.”
6. Trump's
personality is the product of his relationship with his mother
The author
suggests that Donald Trump’s personality is shaped by the weak relationship she
says he had as a child with his mother, also named Mary Trump. Because of that,
the president’s niece suggests Donald Trump turned as a child to his father,
who was not a warm parent.
“Donald
suffered deprivations that would scar him for life” and developed personality
traits such as “displays of narcissism, bullying [and] grandiosity” as a
result, the author writes. Matthews, the White House spokesperson, said in a
statement: “The President describes the relationship he had with his father as
warm and said his father was very good to him. He said his father was loving
and not at all hard on him as a child.“
7. The
president's father used anti-Semitic language
Donald
Trump’s father, Fred Trump Sr., who was a New York real estate developer,
frequently used the anti-Semitic term “Jew me down.”
Both Fred
Trump Sr. and Donald Trump were sued by the U.S. government in the early 1970s
for allegedly discriminating against African Americans.
8. Trump's
history of crude remarks about women's physical appearance extends to his
family
When
writing a sequel to the bestselling “Art of the Deal,” Trump recorded himself
complaining about women who didn’t want to date him.
“It was an
aggrieved compendium of women he had expected to date but who, having refused
him, were suddenly the worst, ugliest, and fattest slobs he’d ever met,” Mary
Trump, who helped on her uncle’s book, writes in “Too Much and Never Enough.”
At another
point in their interactions, Trump even made a crass comment about Mary Trump’s
breasts after seeing her in a bathing suit. “Holy shit, Mary. You’re stacked,”
the president allegedly said. His then-wife, Marla Maples, slapped him lightly
on the arm. Mary describes her face reddening after her uncle’s comment.
9. Trump
went to the movies instead of the hospital when his older brother died
On the day
the president’s brother Fred Trump Jr. was dying in the hospital in 1981, Trump
and his sister Elizabeth went to the movies, Mary Trump writes in her book. No
one from the family accompanied Fred Trump Jr. to the hospital.
Donald Trump's behavior was shaped by his
'sociopath' father, niece writes in bombshell book
Guardian obtains copy of Too Much and Never Enough
Author thanks president’s sister for ‘enlightening
information’
@MartinPengelly
Published onTue 7
Jul 2020 20.19 BST
Donald
Trump’s extraordinary character and outrageous behaviour “threaten the world’s
health, economic security and social fabric” and were shaped by his
“high-functioning sociopath” father during childhood, according to a bombshell
book written by the president’s niece.
Too Much
and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man by Mary
Trump will be published next Tuesday, 14 July. The Guardian obtained a copy.
As well as
an extended consideration of familial dysfunction which she says shaped Donald
Trump, Mary Trump alleges multiple instances of shocking behaviour by the
president as a younger man, including academic cheating to get into a
prestigious business school, and brutal treatment of women.
In the
acknowledgments, Mary Trump thanks her aunt, Maryanne Trump Barry, “for all of
the enlightening information”. Maryanne Trump Barry, the president’s sister, is
a federal judge who retired in 2019, thereby ending an inquiry into fraudulent
tax schemes.
Mary Trump
was reportedly a key source for the New York Times’ Pulitzer-winning reporting
on Trump family tax affairs. The US supreme court is currently considering
whether the president’s tax and financial records should be released to the
public.
On Tuesday
afternoon, the White House press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, said the
president had “no response, other than it’s a book of falsehoods … ridiculous,
absurd allegations that have absolutely no bearing in truth”.
The White
House, she said, “had yet to see the book but it’s a book of falsehoods”.
Donald
Trump’s niece writes her study of his character from the perspective of a
trained clinical psychologist.
“Child
abuse is, in some sense, the expectation of ‘too much’ or ‘not enough’,” she
writes. “Donald directly experienced the ‘not enough’ in the loss of connection
to his mother at a crucial development stage.
“… Having
been abandoned by his mother for at least a year, and having his father fail
not only to meet his needs but to make him feel safe or loved, valued or
mirrored, Donald suffered deprivations that would scar him for life.
“The
personality traits that resulted – displays of narcissism, bullying,
grandiosity – finally made my grandfather take notice but not in a way that
ameliorated any of the horror that had come before.”
Donald
Trump’s mother, also called Mary, suffered health problems resulting from an
emergency hysterectomy. That, she writes, left the future president and his siblings
dependent on their father, Fred Trump, a New York property developer who died
in 1999.
Mary Trump
describes Fred Trump as a “high-functioning sociopath” and details his
bullying, antisemitism, racism, sexism and xenophobia – all traits the
president is regularly accused of.
Fred
Trump’s oldest son, also called Fred, died in 1981 in his early 40s, from the
effects of alcoholism. His daughter writes that Donald Trump’s character was
formed by watching the traumas inflicted on and suffered by his older brother.
The man
that emerges is ruthless and utterly self-centered, she writes. In a section on
Trump’s education, Mary Trump describes how he paid someone else to take his
SAT tests for him.
“Donald,
who never lacked for funds, paid his buddy well,” she writes, of “Joe Shapiro,
a smart kid with a reputation for being a good test taker”.
The scheme
included Trump’s brother putting in a word at the Wharton Business School, at
the University of Pennsylvania. Mary Trump writes that it “may not even have
been necessary”, as “in those days, Penn was much less selective than it is
now.”
Other than
Maryanne Trump Barry, the judge, Donald Trump’s surviving siblings are Robert
Trump, a businessman, and Elizabeth Trump Grau, a retired banker.
Robert
Trump has sued Mary Trump in New York, claiming a non-disclosure agreement
signed in 2001 over Fred Trump Sr’s will precludes publication. The president
has said he thinks the NDA, which includes Maryanne Trump Barry, means the book
cannot come out. Mary Trump has argued in appeal filings that the NDA was based
on fraudulent financial information. A hearing was scheduled for Friday.
Simon &
Schuster was dropped from the suit and subsequently brought publication forward
by two weeks.
Arguing on
first amendment grounds for the freedom of speech, lawyers for Mary Trump have
pointed to how the president has “contributed to his and his family’s notoriety
in a variety of ways, including as the author of nearly 20 books on topics
including his family, his wealth, his businesses and his own life.”
Mary Trump
details how she was contracted to ghostwrite one of those books, The Art of the
Comeback.
“A few
weeks after Donald hired me,” she writes, detailing an experience familiar to
many of the president’s business partners and contractors, “I still hadn’t
gotten paid.”
Trump’s
notorious treatment of women is also discussed. Mary Trump says that when her
uncle provided material, it was “an aggrieved compendium of women” – Madonna
and the ice skater Katarina Witt among them – “he had expected to date but who,
having refused him, were suddenly the worst, ugliest and fattest slobs he’d
ever met.”
“I stopped
asking him for an interview,” she writes, adding that on a visit to Trump’s
Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida to work on the book, she was wearing a bathing
suit when Trump looked at his niece and said: “Holy shit, Mary. You’re
stacked.”
Trump has
been accused of sexual misconduct and assault by more than 20 women. He denies
all such claims.
Trump fired
his niece from the project. Characteristically, Mary Trump writes, he had
someone else tell her.
Mary Trump
has expressed opposition to her uncle on social media. In her book, she writes
of turning down an invitation to his 2016 election night party, because “I
wouldn’t be able to contain my euphoria when [Hillary] Clinton’s victory was
announced, and I didn’t want to be rude.”
Of the day
after Trump’s victory, she writes, “I was wandering around my house, as
traumatized as many other people but in a more personal way: it felt as though
62,979,636 voters had chosen to turn this country into a macro version of my
malignantly dysfunctional family.”
Like a
White House memoir by the former national security adviser John Bolton, also
published by Simon & Schuster, Mary Trump’s book is now in the public
domain.
In the
words of a federal judge in Washington who declined to block Bolton’s book,
“the horse is out of the barn”.
Inside the 'dysfunctional family' that gave us
Trump, according to his niece
The president’s father fueled division and detested
weakness, says Mary Trump. Now the country is paying the price
Donald
Trump talks to his father in a photo from the 1980s.
Donald
Trump talks to his father in a photo from the 1980s. Mary Trump describes Fred
as a ‘high-functioning sociopath’.
David Smith
David Smith
in Washington
@smithinamerica
Published
onWed 8 Jul 2020 08.00 BST
Happy
families are all alike, Leo Tolstoy observed, while every unhappy family is
unhappy in its own way. Then there are the Trumps, who sound like they were
incapable of getting through a Thanksgiving or Christmas without blood on the
walls.
In a
tell-all memoir Mary L Trump, psychologist and niece of Donald Trump, portrays
the US president’s father, Fred, as the domineering, stone-hearted patriarch of
a “malignantly dysfunctional family” that she says explains much about Donald’s
empathy issues.
“The
atmosphere of division my grandfather created in the Trump family is the water
in which Donald has always swum, and division continues to benefit him at the
expense of everybody else,” she writes in Too Much and Never Enough: How My
Family Created The World’s Most Dangerous Man, to be published later this
month.
“It’s
wearing the country down, just as it did my father, changing us even as it
leaves Donald unaltered. It’s weakening our ability to be kind or believe in
forgiveness, concepts that have never had any meaning for him.”
Mary L
Trump, 55, is the daughter of Trump’s older brother, Freddy, who died in 1981
aged 42 after a struggle with alcoholism. The president has identified his
brother’s experience as one of the reasons he does not drink.
The Trumps
took sibling rivalry to a new level, the president’s niece writes. “Even for the
1950s, the family was deeply split along gender lines,” she says, noting that
Fred and his wife Mary were “never partners” and “the girls were her purview,
the boys his”.
Donald saw
his younger brother, Robert, as weaker and relished tormenting him. He
repeatedly hid Robert’s favourite toys, a set of trucks that were a Christmas
gift, and pretended he had no idea where they were.
The author
writes: “The last time it happened, when Robert’s tantrum spiraled out of
control, Donald threatened to dismantle the trucks in front of him if he didn’t
stop crying. Desperate to save them, Robert ran to his mother.
“Mary’s
solution was to hide the trucks in the attic, effectively punishing Robert,
who’d done nothing wrong, and leaving Donald feeling invincible. He wasn’t yet
being rewarded for selfishness, obstinacy or cruelty, but he wasn’t being
punished for those flaws, either.”
At one
point Donald, who was tormenting Robert again, was given a taste of his own
medicine, according to the book. “When Freddy, at fourteen, dumped a bowl of
mashed potatoes on his then seven-year-old brother’s head, it wounded Donald’s
pride so deeply that he’d still be bothered by it when [their sister] Maryanne
brought it up in her toast at the White House birthday dinner in 2017.”
Family
dinners were often an awkward affair with certain subjects – such as where
babies come from – taboo. “Table etiquette at my grandparents’ house was
strict, and there were certain things Fred did not tolerate. ‘Keep your elbows
off the table, this is not a horse’s stable’ was a frequent refrain, and Fred,
knife in hand, would tap its handle against the forearm of any transgressor.”
Fred, “a
high-functioning sociopath”, lived by rules of “never show weakness” and “never
apologize”, his granddaughter writes. If Freddy ever did say, “Sorry, Dad,” his
father “would mock him. Fred wanted his oldest son to be a ‘killer’.”
Donald took
the lesson to heart, Mary L Trump continues. “The lesson he learned, at its
simplest, was that it was wrong to be like Freddy: Fred didn’t respect his
oldest son, so neither would Donald.”
Fred’s sons
frequently lied to him. For Freddy, “lying was defensive – not simply a way to
circumvent his father’s disapproval or to avoid punishment, as it was for the
others, but a way to survive”; for Donald, “lying was primarily a mode of
self-aggrandizement meant to convince other people he was better than he
actually was”.
Things
hardly improved when the siblings reached adulthood. Freddy hated working for
his father’s property business and eventually quit to become an airline pilot.
Fred Trump had little compassion for his son. As employees look on, he once
shouted at Freddy: “Donald is worth ten of you.”
Donald did
not endure similar scorn because “his personality served his father’s purpose”,
Mary L Trump writes. “That’s what sociopaths do: they co-opt others and use
them toward their own ends – ruthlessly and efficiently, with no tolerance for
dissent or resistance.”
When Freddy
went to hospital in 1981 on what would be the night of his death, no family
members accompanied him, according to the book. Indeed, Donald, for his part,
went to a cinema.
Asked to
comment on the book on behalf of the president, the White House press secretary
Kayleigh McEnany said Tuesday: “I have yet to see the book, but it is a book of
falsehoods.”
Even the
genesis of the book has exposed a family riven by factions at each other’s
throats, however. Robert Trump, the president’s younger brother, sued Mary L
Trump to block its publication, citing a 20-year-old agreement between family
members that emerged from another dispute over Fred Trump’s inheritance. A New
York appellate court cleared the way for the book’s publication.
When Donald
ran for president, his sister, Maryanne, who used to do his homework for him,
took the view: “He’s a clown – this will never happen.” Mary L Trump writes
that she turned down an invitation to attend her uncle’s election night party
in New York in 2016, convinced she “wouldn’t be able to contain my euphoria
when [Hillary] Clinton’s victory was announced”.
But in fact
she found herself wandering about her house a few hours after Trump’s victory
was announced, fearful that voters “had chosen to turn this country into a
macro version of my malignantly dysfunctional family”. Or as the poet Philip
Larkin warned: “Man hands on misery to man./ It deepens like a coastal shelf./
Get out as early as you can,/ And don’t have any kids yourself.”
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