Donald
Trump pushed me to ketamine therapy, niece Mary says in new book
Bestselling
author, a trained psychologist, describes debilitating effects of being related
to the former president
Martin
Pengelly in Washington
Fri 30 Aug
2024 08.24 EDT
In a new
memoir, Mary L Trump, niece of Donald Trump, writes of being pushed to despair,
and ketamine therapy, by her uncle’s victory in the 2016 presidential election,
his chaotic, far-right administration and his refusal to leave national
politics despite his defeat by Joe Biden in 2020.
“I’m here
because five years ago, I lost control of my life,” Mary Trump writes,
describing ketamine treatment undertaken in December 2021. “I’m here because
the world has fallen away and I don’t know how to find my way back.
“I’m here
because Donald Trump is my uncle.”
Her doctor,
she says, answered: “I’m sorry. That must be very difficult for you.”
Now 59, Mary
Trump is a trained psychologist and bestselling author. Her new book, Who Could
Ever Love You: A Family Memoir, will be published in the US on 10 September.
The Guardian obtained a copy.
Donald
Trump, 78, is the Republican candidate for president for a third successive
election, despite having been convicted of 34 criminal charges arising from
hush-money payments to an adult film star and facing as many as 44 other felony
charges, concerning retention of classified information and election subversion
culminating in his incitement of the deadly January 6 attack on Congress.
Trump has
also been ordered to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in civil suits
concerning business fraud and defamation arising from a rape allegation a judge
called “substantially true”.
Despite it
all, he remains locked in a tight race with Kamala Harris, the vice-president
and Democratic presidential nominee.
Mary Trump’s
first book, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most
Dangerous Man, was published to acclaim and huge sales in 2020, as her uncle
sought re-election. A second book, The Reckoning: Our Nation’s Trauma and
Finding a Way to Heal, followed in 2021, when Donald Trump was contemplating
the third presidential run that now nears completion.
Mary Trump’s
third book chiefly concerns her unhappy life as a granddaughter of the New York
property magnate Fred Trump Sr and daughter of Fred Trump Jr, Donald Trump’s
older brother who died aged 42 in 1981.
Who Could
Ever Love You follows on the heels of a strikingly similar memoir, All in the
Family: The Trumps and How We Got This Way, by Fred C Trump III, Mary Trump’s
now estranged older brother.
That book
also depicted the byzantine and cruel dynamics of Trump family life, including
startling descriptions of callous behavior by Donald Trump including alleged
racism and a supposed suggestion, while president, that his nephew should let
his severely disabled son die and then “move down to Florida”.
A
spokesperson for the former president dismissed Fred C Trump III’s book as
“completely fabricated and total fake news of the highest order”. Hostility to
Mary Trump has included an unsuccessful attempt to stop publication of her
first book.
Now, Mary
Trump depicts familiar scenes of casual cruelty involving her uncle, his
siblings and their father, who died in 1999. She also discusses how her uncles
and aunts sought to disinherit her, threatening health insurance vital to the
care of her disabled nephew; proliferating family lawsuits; and ultimately her
role as a source for New York Times reporters who in 2018 published a
devastating exposé of Trump family tax affairs that prompted another suit.
As books
about Donald Trump continue to sell, so the Times exposé will soon be the
subject of its own book, Lucky Loser: How Donald Trump Squandered His Father’s
Fortune and Created the Illusion of Success, due out in mid-September.
Mary Trump’s
work with the Times led her to write Too Much and Never Enough, which she now
says “launched me into the national conversation about my Uncle Donald”. Fame
came with benefits, Trump writes, making her a “public person” who people saw
“on television several times a week”. But she also found herself under
pressure, “juggl[ing] requests for interviews, fundraisers, and endorsements …
expected to be media savvy”.
Amid it all,
she was unable to forget the simple misery of being a Trump. Just saying Donald
Trump’s name, she writes, “reminded me of all the times, at a restaurant or a
store, that I’d used a credit card and was asked, ‘Are you related?’ I always
said, ‘No.’ And the response was always some version of, ‘Don’t you wish you
were?’”
Mary Trump
says she first turned to writing while at a facility in Tucson, Arizona, in
2017, for “intensive trauma treatment”.
“In one
exercise,” she writes, “I was asked to write six reasons I wanted to stay in
treatment. For number six I wrote: ‘I want to live.’”
Years later,
she writes, she turned to therapy using ketamine, a synthetic drug defined by
the US Drug Enforcement Agency as a “dissociative anesthetic hallucinogen” and
is approved to treat depression, if not without attracting controversy over
potential misuse.
Having been
driven to ketamine therapy by “a shame that proved impossible to disassociate
myself from”, Trump writes that the drug left her feeling “high”, and “lighter
than I had in a very long time, almost euphoric”.
“Anything
seemed possible,” she writes. “I made connections in my mind. I made plans. I
saw potential.”
Nonetheless,
she writes that she started writing her third book “because I realized I was
killing myself – with stress, with self-loathing, but above all with isolation
that started on 9 November 2016” – the day after her uncle won the White House.
“But I don’t
want to die,” Mary Trump writes, in a book to be published two months before
election day.
“I want to
live.”
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