The real villan
Mary L trump, a highly literate, trained and licensed gay clinical psychologist and Donald Trump’s only niece, shines a ray of light on the dark history of their family and explains how her uncle became the man who now threatens the world’s health, economic security and social fabric. Older brother Freddie, who died an alcoholic at the age of 42, Mary Trump along with her brother Fred Trump III, was famously cut out of their grandfather’s will. After a fight, the four surviving siblings, and their offspring, cut Mary and her brother a meagre deal that included a non-disclosure agreement about the family.
Mary’s story began in 1930s household ruled by Fred Trump, who was a developer and landlord of New York outer borough housing, who had no interest in children, the paterfamilias, and his Scottish born wife Mary Ann Trump. The source for much of Mary’s account is Maryanne, the first of his children, and the US president’s elder sister. The children were variously bullied and neglected by their father, whom Mary describes as a sociopath with their bed-ridden mother hardly present.
The lesson he drew was never to be needy. The children received no love, and too much fear. “ The role that fear played on his (Donald’s) childhood and the role it plays now can’t be overstated” Mary writes.
The only self-made one among them was Mary’s father, an airline pilot who worked for TWA and was never forgiven for leaving the family business.
Trump Senior disapproved of his wife Linda who brought no capital to the marriage.
When Donald was much older, he briefly commissioned the young Mary to ghost write a book about him. The only material he gave her was a 10-page “compendium of women he had expected to date but who, having refused him, wetr suddenly the worst, ugliest and fatterst slobs he’d ever met” Mary recalls.
Mary forged a life-long bond with Mary Anne, Trump’s sickly mother as she was the only one to accompany Mary Anne home after her grandfather’s funeral –at which their connection turned out to mean nothing.
When the battle over the will ensued, Mary was shocked to discover her medic al insurance , and her brother’s , had been severed. He brother had a son with cerebral palsy. When Mary telephone her grandfather for help she was told by Trump’s mother “ Do you know what your father was worth when he died? A whole lot of nothing” .
As the daughter of Donald Trump’s late Mary Trump spent most of childhood in her grandparents’ large imposing house in Queens, New York, where Donald and his four siblings grew up and reveals the nightmare of traumas, destructive relationships and large combination of neglect and abuse.
She also explains how specific events and general family patterns created a damaged man who currently occupies the Oal office including the strange and harmful relationship between Fred Trump and his two oldest sons, Fred Jr and Donald.
She recounts in unsparing detail everything from her uncle Donald’s place in the family spotlight and Ivana’s penchant for re-gifting to her grandmother’s frequent injuries and illnesses and the appalling way Donald, Fred Trump’s favourite son, dismissed and derided him when he began to succumb to Alzheimer’s.
The White House rejected all of hr claims in the book, as other members of the Trump family had attempted to prevent the book’s publication, citing a non-disclosure agreement she signed during a dispute over her grandfather’s will from which she received an enormous inheritance.
Mary claims, Trump paid someone to take his SATs exams, she alleges Trump’s father Fred, a once overpowering patriarch was reduced at the end of his life to being taken care of by his son whose entire career and mentality were shaped by him.
Mary Trump describes her uncle as something of a proxy for her grandfather’s long-sought but unachieved dreams, which she says he was prevented from obtaining for himself because some od his still-accented English and character.
“Fred was willing to stake millions of dollars on his son because he believed he could leverage the skills Donald did have – as a savant of self-promotion, shameless liar, marketer and builder of brands- to achieve the one thing that had always eluded him a level of frame that matched his ego and satisfied his ambition in a way money alone never could.”
Trump inherited $413 million and calls himself self-made. “Nobody has failed upward as consistently as the ostensible leader of the shrinking free world” Mary writes.
Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man by Mary L Trump, Simon & Schuster $28, 240 pages.