Trump’s worldview forged by neglect and trauma at home, his niece says in new book
WASHINGTON POST
President Trump’s view of the world was shaped by his desire during childhood to avoid his father’s disapproval, according to the niece, Mary L. Trump, whose book is by turns a family history and a psychological analysis of her uncle.
[Mary describes how the five Trump children of her father’s generation all struggled to make do in a household where their mother’s chronic health problems left them at the mercy of a patriarch who was both uncaring and controlling. The oldest, Maryanne, was the uptight good girl; Freddy was the laid-back rebel; Elizabeth was the unassuming middle child; Rob was the baby, quiet and eager to please. And Donald, the second-youngest, was Donald: ingratiating to his father, disobedient to his mother and bullying to his younger brother, stealing little Rob’s favorite toy trucks and goading him into kicking a hole in the bathroom door--.NY TIMES ]
[Mary writes of Donald's mother that “… she was the kind of mother who used her children to comfort herself rather than comforting them. She attended to them when it was convenient for her, not when they needed her to. Often unstable and needy, prone to self-pity and flights of martyrdom, she often put herself first.” She was “emotionally and physically absent,” she writes “The five kids,” she says, “were essentially motherless.”--POLITICO ]
[Mary sketches Fred Trump as a callous, sneering, domineering, lying, cheating, vindictive, workaholic bigot. (He didn’t rent apartments to die Schwarze, which is how he referred to Black people, employing his first language of German. He also frequently used the phrase “Jew me down,” a pejorative term for haggling for a lower price.) He was in the end, a “torturer,” “an iron-fisted autocrat,” “a high-functioning sociopath” who equated kindness with weakness and favored his second son at the disastrous expense of his four other children—particularly his namesake, Fred Jr., who “wasn’t who he wanted him to be” and was “dismantled” because of it.--POLITICO ]
She writes that as Donald matured, his father came to envy his son’s “confidence and brazenness,” as well as his seemingly insatiable desire to flout rules and conventions, traits that brought them closer together as Donald became the right-hand man in the family real estate business.
Mary Trump’s father, Fred Jr. — the president’s older brother — died of an alcohol-related illness in 1981, when she was 16 years old. President Trump told The Post last year that he and his father both pushed Fred Jr. to go into the family business, which Trump said he now regrets.
While the arc of Trump’s life has been well-chronicled, Mary Trump, 55, provides new details of family fights and recriminations, and she infuses the volume with her background as a clinical psychologist to analyze her uncle. Ahead of the July 14 publication date, the book became an instant bestseller based on advance orders, underscoring the intense interest among the public in the forces that shaped the man who became president.
The book, “Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man,” chronicles the fruitless efforts by Mary’s father, Fred Jr., to earn his father’s respect as an employee. His younger brother Donald reliably ridiculed him as a failure who spent too much time following his passion, aviation. Fred Jr. subsequently left his job in real estate to become a pilot for Trans World Airlines.
[The sanitized version of the family myth is that Fred Trump valorized the importance of hard work, but Mary says this simply isn’t true. Fred’s real estate business depended on political connections and government largess; what he taught the Trump children to revere was not so much effort as dominance. “The person with the power (no matter how arbitrarily that power was conferred or attained) got to decide what was right and wrong,” Mary writes. The world was a zero-sum death match between winners and losers. Mary explains how a child would experience such life lessons as confusing, terrifying and stultifying. Her father, the eldest son, tried to resist, becoming a commercial pilot before despair and alcoholism crushed his career, his marriage and his health; he died of a heart attack at 42, when Mary was a teenager.--.NY TIMES ]
[Fred Trump Sr. could be brutal to his namesake, shouting at him once as a group of employees looked on, “Donald is worth ten of you,” Ms. Trump writes. Ms. Trump tells the story in her book about how his family sent him to the hospital alone on the night of his death. No one went with him, Ms. Trump writes. Donald Trump, she added, went to see a movie.--NY TIMES ]
The president, Mary Trump says, is a product of his domineering father and was acutely aware of avoiding the scorn that Fred Sr. heaped on the older brother, Freddy. “From an early age, Mary Trump writes, the future president demonstrated a willingness to cheat and a penchant for ridicule, once telling a neighborhood girl how “disappointed” he was by where she attended boarding school.
After graduating from military school, then living at home with his parents and commuting to Fordham University, Donald decided to apply to the University of Pennsylvania, which he perceived as a more prestigious school, but worried that his grades alone wouldn’t win him entry.
Mary Trump writes that Donald’s sister Maryanne “had been doing his homework for him” but that she couldn’t take standardized tests in his place. “To hedge his bets, he enlisted Joe Shapiro, a smart kid with a reputation for being a good test taker, to take his SATs for him. . . . Donald, who never lacked for funds, paid his buddy well.”
Trump was friends with a young man named Joe Shapiro when he attended the University of Pennsylvania. If Mary Trump is referring to that person, he is deceased, according to Shapiro’s sister, Beth Shapiro. She said in a telephone interview that her brother did not meet Trump until they both attended the Philadelphia school, and thus, she said, the timing the book describes does not make sense. “My brother never took a test for anybody else in his entire life,” she said.
Reached by phone, Shapiro’s wife, former tennis star Pam Shriver, said her late husband never said he had taken a test for Trump, nor did she believe he would.
For years, Donald Trump said his admittance to what was then called the Wharton School of Finance at the University of Pennsylvania was proof that he was a “super genius.” The Post reported last year that the admissions officer who interviewed Trump was a close friend of Fred Jr., that many applicants to the school were admitted at that time and that the admissions officer did not see any evidence that Trump was a “super genius.”
Mary Trump writes that her grandfather’s children routinely lied to him, but for different reasons. For her father, “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 her uncle Donald, however, “lying was primarily a mode of self-aggrandizement meant to convince other people he was better than he actually was,” Mary Trump writes.
She wrote that her father had a “natural sense of humor, sense of adventure, and sensitivity,” which he worked hard to hide from the family patriarch.
“Softness was unthinkable in his namesake,” she writes. Mary writes of the way her grandfather treated her father. Fred Sr. “would mock him. Fred wanted his oldest son to be a ‘killer.’ ”
Donald, 7½ years younger than his brother, “had plenty of time to learn from watching Fred humiliate” his eldest son, Mary Trump writes. “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.”
This was not Mary Trump’s first effort to write about her uncle. Decades ago, she writes, Donald Trump asked her to help write his book “The Art of the Comeback.” She says she did research and tried to interview her uncle, but he kept putting her off, and the publisher eventually sought someone with more experience as a co-author. The anecdote underscores that Mary Trump’s relationship with her uncle was, at times, a close one.
But the relationship fell apart when she learned that Donald and his siblings were trying to prevent her and her brother, Fred III, from receiving most of what they believed they would inherit from Fred Sr. If her father had lived, he would have expected to get 20 percent of the estate, she writes. Instead, she says, the Trump family intended to give her “less than a tenth of one percent of what my aunts and uncles inherited.”
While Mary Trump says she and her brother challenged the will, she does not reveal how much she eventually received, which is covered by a confidentiality agreement. Robert Trump, the president’s younger brother, filed a petition seeking to stop publication of the book by citing that agreement, but the New York Supreme Court last week lifted a temporary restraining order against publisher Simon & Schuster.
Mary Trump writes that when her uncle announced his candidacy for president in 2015, “I didn’t take it seriously. I didn’t think Donald took it seriously.” The heir to the family business, she writes, “simply wanted free publicity for his brand.”
She says that Trump’s sister Maryanne, [above] who served until last year as a federal appeals court judge, shared her assessment and that both women were incensed to see prominent religious figures embrace Trump and hold him out as a religious man. “The only time Donald went to church was when the cameras were there. It’s mind boggling. He has no principles. None!” Maryanne Trump said, according to her niece. “He’s a clown — this will never happen,” she quotes her aunt as saying.
[ According to Too Much and Never Enough, Trump and [Roy] Cohn played a pivotal role in Maryanne’s elevation to the federal bench. At the time, she was only an assistant federal prosecutor, an unusual launchpad to a federal judgeship. Strings were pulled. When Maryanne had the temerity to tell Trump his presidency was failing, her niece now writes, he reminded her that he made her. Like Fred Sr, Trump brooks no hint of disloyalty.--GUARDIAN ]
During the fight over the inheritance, Mary Trump says, she was told that her grandfather’s estate was worth $30 million. But after being contacted by a reporter for the New York Times in 2017, she retrieved boxes of financial papers that she says showed the estate was actually worth $1 billion.
[Maryanne was an executor of the estate. Ironically, she has emerged as her niece’s muse. The judge leaked like a sieve. The author thanks her aunt in her acknowledgement “for all of the enlightening information”.As for Aunt Maryanne’s role in the mess, Mary Trump lumps her in with the rest of them: “They all knew where the bodies were buried because they buried them together.”--GUARDIAN]
Ms Trump writes that she became a key source for the newspaper’s 2018 investigation of the family finances, which won a Pulitzer Prize.
She describes how one of the Times’ reporters gave her a disposable cellphone to communicate securely. She says she loaded 19 boxes of Trump family financial material into a truck and shared the boxes with several Times reporters. She says she had a new mission: “I had to take down Donald Trump.” The Times did not respond to a request for comment and previously has declined to comment.
At the end of the book, Mary Trump concludes that it was inevitable that her uncle would rely on division to govern the country, replicating the way she says Fred Sr. “turned his children against each other.” Donald Trump, she writes, “knows he has never been loved.”
This is a book that’s been written from pain and is designed to hurt. Recalling her decision to share financial documents with New York Times reporters, Mary describes feeling so damaged by her grandfather’s cruelty “that only a grand gesture would set it right.” Forget the psychologist’s vocabulary of childhood attachment and personality disorders; it’s when Mary talks about her need “to take Donald down” that she starts speaking the only language her family truly understands.