With 119 days to go before the US election, Donald Trump’s niece Mary Trump has blown the whistle on the President in a scathing criticism of him in her forthcoming book, accusing him of “hubris and willful ignorance” dating back to his early days.
Mary Trump’s book, “Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man,” charges that Donald Trump’s father Fred Trump created a toxic family dynamic that explains the President, and that she could “no longer remain silent” following the past three years of his presidency.
“Donald, following the lead of my grandfather and with the complicity, silence and inaction of his siblings, destroyed my father. I can’t let him destroy my country,” Mary Trump wrote in the book, a copy of which was obtained by CNN. In earlier years Donald Trump appeared have looked up to his older brother. In old interviews he described Fred II as a “great guy…best looking…life of the party.”
Mary Trump, a licensed clinical psychologist, writes that she voted for Hillary Clinton, and didn’t attend Trump’s election night party in 2016 because she “wouldn’t be able to contain my euphoria when Clinton’s victory was announced, and I didn’t want to be rude.”
Mary Trump writes that she didn’t take her uncle’s run for president seriously at first. “I didn’t think Donald took it seriously,” she wrote. “He simply wanted the free publicity for his brand.”
“‘He’s a clown,’ my aunt Maryanne said during one of our regular lunches at the time. ‘This will never happen,’ ” Mary Trump wrote.
Mary Trump is the eldest grandchild of patriarch Fred Trump Sr., and the daughter of Fred Trump Jr.—the second of Fred Sr. and Mary Trump’s five children. Fred Trump Jr. died from a heart attack, due to complications from alcoholism, at age 42 in 1981. He left behind two children—Mary L. Trump and Fred Trump III, teenagers at the time—with Linda Lee Clapp, his onetime wife.
Fred Jr.’s death left enduring scars on the family, including the now-President. Fred Sr. had hoped that Fred Jr. would take over the family business, but Fred Jr. was reticent to do so, preferring to pursue a career as a TWA pilot. “There was a lot of tension between not only the old man but also between him and Donald,” one of Fred Jr.’s friends, Annamaria Forcier, told the Washington Post in 2019. “There was a lot of tension because they didn’t want him to be an airline pilot.”
Famously, Fred Jr.’s struggle with alcoholism would put Donald off drinking entirely. Donald Trump told the Washington Post, “I do regret having put pressure on him.”
Unlike some other members of her family, Mary has chosen to live largely under the radar. Not much is known about her personal life, other than that the 55-year-old lives with her daughter in New York, and is an expert in psychology. Mary holds a master’s degree in literature from Columbia University and a doctorate in psychology from Adelphi University, per CNN; according to her biography on the Simon & Schuster website, she’s taught courses in trauma, psychopathology, and developmental psychology.
Mary publicly slammed her extended family about the way Fred Trump Sr.’s estate was handled after his death in 1999.
After Fred III and Mary learned that they would receive a far smaller portion of Fred Sr.’s estate than they expected, they filed lawsuits to challenge the outcome, alleging that Donald had pressured Fred Sr. to change his will while Fred Sr. was suffering the effects of dementia.
Her brother, Fred III, had recently had a child with cerebral palsy, who required pricey medical care. The expenses had been covered by a Trump company insurance plan. But after Fred III and Mary challenged Fred Sr.’s will, Robert, Maryanne, and Donald dropped the medical coverage for Fred III’s young son in retaliation. “When [Fred III] sued us, we said, ‘Why should we give him medical coverage?'” Donald told the New York Daily News in 2000. The dispute was settled confidentially.
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