"This is how my family created the most dangerous man in the world": the controversial book by Trump's niece
Mary Trump, who used to hide being the niece of the US president, has written an explosive bestseller in which she talks about her racism, incompetence, cruelty and why she never laughs
Dinners at the Trump house were marked by their hierarchy. Fred Trump, the patriarch, sat at the head of the table, with his son Donald on the right and his daughter Maryanne on the left. Other members of the family occupied the places that had been assigned to them in descending order of importance.
One Thanksgiving, the eldest son, Fred Jr., found himself relegated to the opposite end of the table with his daughter Mary from him. "During dinner, my grandmother choked," recalls Mary Trump. "My father had been a volunteer ambulance driver in the late '60s and early '70s, so he knew the Heimlich maneuver and he took her very gently into the kitchen and performed this first aid procedure on her, and he saved her."
"Nobody else batted an eye; they all kept eating. They found it uncomfortable and embarrassing that Gam [his nickname] was choking. When they came back in, it was literally like my dad had just taken out the trash: 'Oh yeah. Good job, Freddy ". He couldn't do anything to earn respect or get any kind of recognition, even if he had saved his mother," she recalls.
According to Mary, the first member of the clan to have published a biography of Trump, the president of the United States cannot be understood without knowing his "toxic and dysfunctional family". She is also the first in the family to question his fitness to rule the country. Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man sold nearly a million copies on the day of its release, after a failed attempt at younger brother of the president of the United States, Robert, to prevent the distribution of the biography by judicial means.
The book describes a situation entrenched in the heart of a suburban white family pursuing the American dream. In a conversation with Mary, 55, by phone from Cape Cod, Massachusetts, she recounts how her "sociopathic" grandfather made Trump the man he is today, reflects on the burden of bearing the family name, and warns that sons of the president run for political office.
Fred Trump is the villain of this play. This ruthless, workaholic New Yorker slept about four hours a day and moved for money. Mary points out that she showed little interest in her five children, except when she had to appoint and groom a successor for her real estate business. She despised her eldest son, Freddy, in favor of Donald, deciding that her second son's "arrogant and intimidating" character, and his willingness to lie and cheat, were just what the company needed. .
"If you had met him," Mary says of her grandfather, "you would think he was a cheerful and positive guy, but he was also intimidating and certainly not a warm person. I actually have no problem describing him as a sociopath. He had no problem. no real human feeling and treated her children with contempt.
"Without a doubt, my father, who was the eldest son, heir apparent and namesake, was harshly dealt with and humiliated. Donald, who was seven and a half years younger than his brother, witnessed this humiliation and learned lessons from it. very specific: don't be like Freddy, don't be nice, don't be generous, don't have 'frivolous' interests The other lesson he learned was that humiliation was the worst thing that could happen to a person and that he had to do whatever he wanted. was in their hands to avoid that situation," he explains.
It doesn't take much imagination to think that family meals were torturous and with gigantic egos in conflict. Racist and anti-Semitic language was common, Mary has said during media interviews to promote the book, noting that the Trumps lived in what was then an all-white suburb in New York's Queens borough.
Can she recall a specific situation in which Trump used the N-word [Nigger, a racist and highly offensive term for black people]? "Honestly, no, because it was just said repeatedly and was considered normal. If my father had said it outside the house when we were with him, it would have caught my attention but it never did. At my grandparents' house, It was common and sadly not surprising behaviour."
Trump learned that humiliation was the worst thing that could happen to a person and that he had to do everything in his power to avoid it.
Mary is convinced that her uncle is a racist. Would she use terms like fascist and white supremacist to describe the president of the United States? "I don't think he has any political ideology. For him, this is just the right thing to do. I would say he's behaving like a white supremacist, for sure. He's acting out of his own racism. He's engaging in racist behavior that endangers black people of this country. That's much more important, and it's irrelevant whether he considers himself a white supremacist or not, since he unmistakably acts like one."
In 2016, the Nation magazine published an article with the following headline: "Have You Ever Seen Donald Trump Laugh?" He argued that hardly anyone has. Is it also the case of Mary, who is also a psychologist? "No, and my grandfather didn't laugh either. When you are able to laugh, you let your guard down and that was frowned upon. My father had a great sense of humor; he was a very funny guy and he knew how to laugh. I think in the case of my grandfather He didn't laugh because he wasn't a complete human being."
In his book he claims that Trump paid someone to take the college entrance exam for him. The White House has denied it. For a short time, Freddy worked in the family business but he hated it. In fact, he left it to become an airplane pilot. He died alone in the hospital at the age of 42 after a battle with alcoholism, which ran in the family.
Mary blames her grandfather. "The worst thing my grandfather did, early on, was not accept my father as he was. As soon as he realized that my father wasn't the 'right kind of person' - he wasn't 'aggressive', he wasn't ' hard' - he discarded it immediately and quickly found a replacement in Donald".
Trump assumed the role of patriarch. He was also a distant father who did not get involved, for example, in diapering, but encouraged his children to join the family empire. His sons, Don Jr. and Eric, have become two of the Republican nominee's most aggressive surrogates at campaign rallies, and his eldest daughter, Ivanka, is a White House adviser.
Mary, who is more than ten years older than her cousins and doesn't know them, says: "It seems pretty clear that they think the way to get their father's attention is through cruelty and subservience, and it's pretty horrible. verify it".
Both Don Jr. and Ivanka have been half-jokingly, half-seriously pitched as potential future presidential candidates. If you can feel a chill on a phone line, come now. "If that were allowed, it would be wrong," says Mary. "They are not qualified. Ivanka is the only one who is technically part of the government and is not qualified to be an adviser, let alone run for political office."
"None of them have ever done anything for themselves. They've worked in their father's conglomerate and, as far as I can tell, they've done nothing but continue to benefit from the family money. So I think the fact running for public office would bankrupt the Republican Party.
In fact, perhaps a more interesting question than Trump's narcissism is what his victory over the United States reveals. He has shed a harsh light on the country's divisions, inequalities, insecurities, negative partisanship, neuroses and prejudices, and shows how far some are willing to go to taste the honeys of power.
"That's the one thing I didn't anticipate," Mary continues. "One of the reasons his victory in 2016 completely devastated me is that even though I knew [my uncle] was completely incompetent and incompetent and cruel, I never thought that 100% of elected Republicans would allow, to the extent that they have done, that he behave as he has done".
"It's been horrible because, in that sense, he's not the problem. If they had asked him the same thing as other people in his position, if they had cared about the transgressions he's committed, the red lines he's crossed, then he would have been neutralized, or at least controlled. But not only have they allowed him to behave like this, they have also reinforced this type of attitude."
The psychologist has witnessed Trump's lies, exaggerations and trickery. When Mary met [Trump's wife] Melania, her uncle told her, "You dropped out of college, right?" She then commented, "He was really bad for a while, and then he started taking drugs."
Mary says that she has never done drugs in her life, but Trump enjoys telling stories like that. "It's just a power play. He knew he was lying. He knew I knew he was lying. But he enjoys that kind of thing." It is a revealing anecdote about Trump's "don't let the facts spoil a story" attitude, with which he seeks the complicity of his public, and the media.
After her father's death in 1999, Mary and her brother fought a bitter legal battle. However, she has always kept a low profile despite sharing a last name with a man who for decades occupied the covers of the New York tabloids, was a reality TV star and is now a Washington political swamp star.
"I've kept a very low profile until recently; I guess that's not the case anymore," she muses. "When I was very young, I had no trouble staying in the background because no one outside of New York knew who my grandfather was," says the author.
"I had a harder time in college, and I learned early on that if someone asked me if I was related to Donald Trump, which was every time I paid with a check or used a credit card, I just said no because it was so much easier. So I even hid it from my friends," she says.
Mary voted for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election and Senator Elizabeth Warren in the 2020 Democratic primary, and now she fully supports Joe Biden in campaigning for him as the Democratic nominee in the November presidential election. "I will do everything I can to help you get elected." When she was asked if she would accept an invitation to speak at the Democratic National Convention next month, she said simply that "it would be an honor."
In fact, the polls show that Biden is ahead of Trump, but what if, despite everything, the president is re-elected? "I have a hard time imagining that scenario but I think the simplest and clearest way to answer this question is to state that, in my opinion, his victory would spell the end of the American dream. The fact that the citizens elected him four years ago was devastating. That someone thinks it's a good idea [to vote for him again] and continue as before is unthinkable".
Mary last spoke to the president at her aunt's birthday party, which was held at the White House in April 2017, and she has no interest in doing so again. In 2018, she secretly assisted New York Times reporters in an investigation into how Trump and his siblings evaded millions of dollars in taxes.
His victory in 2016 completely devastated me is that even though I knew [my uncle] was completely incapable and incompetent and cruel
Do you want his uncle? "No, I don't want it," she says without hesitation. "I used to feel sorry for him. I really did. But later, when I started to find out what he had done and see what he has been doing since January 20, 2017, it became impossible for me to feel sorry for him anymore." .
Mary's guide to Trump's psychological labyrinth supports the idea that 'the boy is the father of the man'. If we are all products of our circumstances, does Trump deserve any sympathy? She responds emphatically again. "No, he doesn't deserve it. I fully understand someone feeling sympathy and empathy for the boy who suffered so much, but it's not an excuse for his behavior."
"He is an adult human being who knows the difference between good and evil, even if he does not believe that these rules apply to him. He knows what he is doing and one of the reasons why we are the way we are is that he has never been held accountable. So his transgressions become more egregious over time and he needs to be held accountable."
