The Secrets of The Trump Family

On April 4, 2017, just months after his inauguration as president, Donald Trump welcomed his entire family to the White House to celebrate his sister Maryanne’s 80th birthday and the 75th birthday of his other sister, Elizabeth.

In the Oval Office, the 45th president points to a black and white photograph of his father on a table.

“Maryanne, isn’t that a great picture of Dad?” he says to the eldest child in the family.

“Maybe you should have a picture of Mom, too,” says Maryanne, a retired federal judge.

“That’s a great idea,” her brother exclaims, as if the idea had never occurred to him.

Donald adds, “Somebody get me a picture of Mom.”

Mary Trump, the daughter of Donald Trump’s late brother, Freddy, tells her story in the prologue of “Too Much and Never Enough,” her book about the family that “created the world’s most dangerous man.” The book sold a record 950,000 copies on the Tuesday it was launched.

In one section, the president’s niece presents the key to understanding her uncle. The president’s mother, a cold woman with poor health, was practically a stranger during her son’s childhood. According to her granddaughter, who inherited her first name, [the elder] Mary “was emotionally and physically absent.” Her five children “essentially had no mother.”*

In contrast, the president’s father, Fred Trump, was all-powerful yet no more loving than his wife.

A Unique Perspective

Many journalists – and at least one former White House official – have described Trump’s intellectual, professional, or moral shortcomings in their books. Psychologists and biographers have tried to make a diagnosis from a distance but none of them have had the pleasure afforded to Mary. She has attended Trump family gatherings, heard unpublished testimonials, and herself suffered the cruelty and greed of the Queens clan.

Mary’s objectivity is probably not above suspicion. After the death of their grandfather in 1999, she and her brother were deprived of the share of the family empire that their father would have inherited had he survived his alcoholism and his profound discontentment with life. In her book, she recalls the explanation her grandmother gave to justify the decision to disinherit them: “Do you know what your father was worth when he died? A whole lot of nothing.”

But Mary’s writing borrows more from her own sadness than from feelings of anger or resentment. Especially when she talks about how her grandfather stripped away her father’s ambitions of pursuing a career as an airline pilot, instead of preparing to take over his real estate business.

“Fred dismantled his oldest son by devaluing and degrading every aspect of his personality and his natural abilities until all that was left was self-recrimination and a desperate need to please a man who had no use for him,” – Mary Trump, in “Too Much and Never Enough”

Fred Trump Jr. died at the age of 42 in 1981.

Son of a ‘Sociopath’

Mary reveals that Trump himself participated in Freddy’s destruction by denigrating him after he was hired by Trans World Airlines as a pilot. She recalls some of the phrases her uncle used to say to her father: “You know, Dad’s really sick of you wasting your life… He says he’s embarrassed by you. … Freddy, Dad’s right about you: you’re nothing but a glorified bus driver.”

The “Too Much and Never Enough” author describes her grandfather as a “high-functioning sociopath” who left the president a legacy of traits now known around the world, including a propensity to narcissism, intimidation and megalomania. Traits that, she says, were not diminished during his childhood and teenage years by a loving and caring mother.

“Fred destroyed Donald too, but not by snuffing him out as he did Freddy; instead, he short-circuited Donald’s ability to develop and experience the entire spectrum of human emotion,” writes Mary.

“By limiting Donald’s access to his own feelings and rendering many of them unacceptable, Fred perverted his son’s perception of the world and damaged his ability to live in it.” – Mary Trump, in “Too Much and Never Enough”

We can’t accuse Mary of playing the amateur psychologist. The president’s niece has a doctorate in clinical psychology as well as a Master of Arts in English literature.

But her book is not just about her diagnosis of her uncle. “I have no problem calling Donald a narcissist – he meets all nine criteria as outlined in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5),” she writes, citing other conditions, including anti-social personality disorder.

The End of a Myth

In particular, Mary’s book reveals the secret role she played in destroying the myth once and for all that Trump is a “self-made man.” She provided reporters from The New York Times with financial documents showing that Fred committed tax fraud for decades and created at least 295 different sources of income to enrich his son, including loans of at least $60 million, most of which were never repaid.

The author of “Too Much and Never Enough” believes that Donald has come to believe this myth built on lies and fraud.

“The more money my grandfather threw at Donald, the more confidence Donald had, which led him to pursue bigger and riskier projects, which led to greater failures, forcing Fred to step in with more help. By continuing to enable Donald, my grandfather kept making him worse: more needy for media attention and free money, more self-aggrandizing and delusional about his ‘greatness,’” she writes.

Unlike her aunt Maryanne, Trump’s niece would not be reassured to learn that her grandmother’s picture now sits next to her grandfather’s in the Oval Office. For she attributes to her grandparents an epic parental failure, from which her country will not recover if her uncle is reelected.

*Editor’s note: Although accurately translated, the quoted remark could not be independently sourced.