My uncle Donald? He’s a cheat, and the world’s most dangerous man
That’s the bombshell claim from his own relative (a clinical psychologist), whose new book says Trump’s ‘sociopath’ father turned the President into ‘Frankenstein without a conscience’
DoNALD Trump had been President for three months before he thought to ask his extended family over for lunch at the White House. They were bused in and out in just two hours. The get-together was supposedly to celebrate his sisters’ birthdays — one 80, the other 75 — but it inevitably became a celebration of his election victory and yet another chance for his relatives to pamper his needy ego, says his niece Mary. After the family were unceremoniously squeezed into two vans for the journey up the White House drive, Mary walked past a portrait of Trump’s defeated opponent Hillary Clinton and ‘wondered how this could have happened’.
After a classic Trump family lunch of steak, mashed potato and iceberg lettuce salad, the President sat crossly, arms folded, as his sister Maryanne — the one celebrating her 80th — told an old story about how their brother Freddy had once emptied a bowl of mashed potato over Donald’s head ‘ because he was being such a brat’. This wasn’t the sort of family time he had in mind.
As Mary queued with other relatives for a photo with the great man on their way out, she whispered supportively to her uncle, whose administration was already showing cracks: ‘Don’t let them get you down.’ Trump assured her: ‘They’re not going to get me.’
Now, however, it’s Mary who is managing to ‘get him down’ with an astonishing new book that provides an unprecedented airing of the family’s dirty laundry, including excoriating claims that the U.S. President was left a hopeless emotional and mental wreck by a ‘high functioning sociopath’ father.
Mary, 55, makes no secret of her determination to bring down Trump before he brings down the country. She lays bare what she says is a dysfunctional, cruel and greedy family that drove her father, Donald’s elder brother Fred Jr, to an early grave.
While his siblings extracted hundreds of millions of dollars from their tycoon father Fred Sr’s lucrative New York property empire, Fred Jr had very little to his name when he died aged 42 of an alcohol-related illness, says his daughter.
Although the Trumps looked after Mary and her brother, also Fred, following their father’s death, they allegedly tried to muscle them out of the family millions when Fred Sr died in 1992, prompting an acrimonious lawsuit that was finally settled in 2001 (although the two sides have since reconciled).
Mary’S alleged breaking of a non-disclosure agreement in discussing that lawsuit in her book has prompted the family to try to stop its publication. The White House has dismissed the tome, Too Much And Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man, as a ‘book of falsehoods motivated by financial selfinterest’. According to a Trump spokesman, the President had a ‘warm relationship’ with a father who was ‘very good to him’.
Trump has been particularly keen to reject Mary’s claim that, having embraced ‘cheating as a way of life’, a young Donald paid a friend to take his SAT, the standardised exam used for university admissions.
That’s just one of a string of alleged family secrets that Ms Trump, an academic living in Long Island, New York, has been happy to impart. She claims her uncle Donald ogled her when, aged 29, she appeared in a swimsuit at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, saying: ‘ Holy s***, Mary, you’re stacked!’
She also reveals that, when she was only 12, her patriarch grandfather sniggeringly showed her a photo he kept in his wallet of a topless teenager. And Mary claims that
Donald and first wife Ivana were either so mean or so lazy that they would recycle presents for family members.
Mary’s mother, Linda, once received a handbag from Ivana that contained a used Kleenex tissue while Mary herself one year received a gift bag of food that had already been looted and another year a $12 three-pack of underwear.
But no behaviour seems too crass in a family like the Trumps, portrayed in the book as money-grubbing and lacking in human empathy. Donald is the most damaged and dysfunctional, allegedly ‘Frankenstein without the conscience’, claims Mary.
She lays the blame squarely on her manipulative and workaholic grandfather Fred Sr, for whom the love of his children — Maryanne, Fred Jr, Elizabeth, Donald and robert — ‘ meant nothing … he expected obedience, that was all’.
What’s particularly fascinating is that Mary is no hustler on the make in search of money or fame. In fact she has a PhD in clinical psychology and applies her professional expertise to the President, effectively putting him on the couch and pulling apart what she sees as the inner workings of his mind.
Thus she refers to ‘twisted behaviours’ which she attributes to the pressures of trying to live up to his father’s exacting expectations as the heir to his property empire.
Fred wanted his sons to be ‘killers’ but actually over-indulged Donald. ‘No honest work was ever demanded of him, and no matter how badly he failed, he was rewarded in ways that are almost unfathomable,’ Mary writes. The ‘narcissist’ Trump was ‘ destroyed’ by his father who crushed his ‘ability to develop and experience the entire spectrum of human emotion’.
Mary claims that Donald may ‘meet the criteria for anti-social personality disorder, which in its most severe form is generally considered sociopathy, but can also refer to chronic criminality, arrogance and disregard for others’.
She also believes he meets some of the criteria for so-called ‘dependent personality disorder’, marked by an inability to take responsibility, discomfort when being alone and going to extreme lengths to obtain support from others. Today, Donald is
much as he was at three years old, incapable of growing, learning or evolving, unable to regulate his emotions, moderate his responses or take in and synthesise information,’ Mary writes.
Crucially, his mother became ill when he was two and a half, ‘suddenly depriving’ him of his ‘main source of comfort and human contact’ and leaving Fred Sr as his only available parent.
However, Fred believed it wasn’t his duty to deal with young children and continued working 12 hours a day, six days a week at his company Trump Management.
‘He could not empathise with Donald’s plight, so his son’s fears and longings went unsoothed,’ she adds. ‘Over time, Donald became afraid that asking for comfort or attention would provoke his father’s anger or indifference when Donald was most vulnerable.’
Tragically, he became dependent on a caregiver who also terrified him, and ‘suffered deprivations that would scar him for life’. Trump possessed a ‘ carefully cultivated but delusional belief in his own brilliance and superiority’, a defence he had developed as a young child to ‘ protect himself against the indifference, fear and neglect that had defined his early years’, she says.
‘Fred perverted his son’s perception of the world and damaged his ability to live in it.’
Mary argues that what happened long in the past is having consequences now. She draws a link between the way Trump’s overbearing behaviour was indulged by his family in his early years to the way it is being indulged now by White House officials and Republicans in Congress who have failed to stand up to him.
Seeing how his father had bullied his older brother, Donald tore into Fred Jr, too. (He also picked on his younger brother, Robert, hiding his treasured Tonka toys and threatening to pull them apart in front of him when he cried, the book reveals.)
Trump himself has previously admitted he regrets putting too much pressure on his older brother to join the family business. Fred Jr instead pursued his dream of becoming a commercial pilot.
According to Mary, Donald mocked her father, telling him: ‘Freddy, Dad’s right about you. You’re nothing but a glorified bus driver.’ Fred Jr turned to drink and smoked heavily. Mary recalls once waking up to see him laughing while aiming a gun at her screaming mother’s face. The couple divorced in 1971 and he died of a heart attack in 1981. None of his family accompanied him to hospital and Donald visited the cinema the night he died, says Mary.
She and her brother, Fred III, remained on the periphery of the family but always managed to disappoint their grandfather, either through what he saw as their lack of a driving work ethic or their appearance.
Their aunt, Maryanne, a former federal judge, recalled them never staying long at family gatherings. ‘On each time they came Freddy was never wearing a tie, which drove my father bananas, and Mary was in pants and a baggy sweater, which drove him bananas as well,’ she said.As the ageing Fred Sr declined, his family stopped being scared of him. Mary reveals how his children ridiculed his vain preoccupation with a receding hairline that he hid under a wig.
His attempts to match his moustache and eyebrows in colour often proved disastrous as he left the cheap hair dye on too long, leaving them a ‘jarring shade of magenta’.
Fred’s wife, (Donald’s mother), Scottish- born Mary MacLeod Trump was a devotee of the Royal Family and had very strict moral views. Mary says in her book: ‘I’d realised it was better that she didn’t know I was living with and engaged to a woman.’
When Mary was 29, Trump rang her from his private jet saying that he wanted her to write his next book about business success, The Art Of The Comeback.
AFTeR
repeatedly asking him for an interview, he finally gave her 10 pages that were ‘an aggrieved compendium of women he’d expected to date but who, having refused him, were suddenly the worst, ugliest and fattest slobs he’d ever met,’ she says.
Revelations included that Madonna ‘ chewed gum in a way Donald found unattractive’ and that Katarina Witt, a German Olympic skater, had ‘big calves’.
Refusing to sit down for an interview, he instead gave her a list of names of friends and associates to talk to. ‘He didn’t seem to understand that writing the book without any input from him would be close to impossible,’ she says. Trump later had his editor sack her, leaving his bemused niece still none the wiser about ‘ what he actually did’.
Mary expresses surprise that the media never picked up on the fact that apart from his wife and children, nobody in the Trump family would publicly endorse his election campaign. She says his sister, Maryanne, told her that he was a ‘clown’ and couldn’t believe that evangelical Christians were supporting his bid. ‘It’s mind boggling ... he has no principles. None!’ she reportedly said.
Maryanne once prided herself on being the only person Donald listened to and — hoping that she could still work her magic — rang his White House secretary just before his historic June 2018 summit with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Un.
She left a message: ‘Tell him his older sister called with a little sisterly advice. Prepare. Learn from those who know what they are doing. Stay away from Dennis Rodman [the eccentric U.S. basketball star who struck up an unlikely friendship with Kim]. And leave his Twitter at home.’
True to form — or certainly true to his niece’s withering portrait of him — he ignored all of it.