Book is scathing portrayal of Trump
eras were there. It’s mind boggling. He has no principles. None!”
White House press secretary Kayleigh Mcenany slammed the book Tuesday, saying, “It’s ridiculous, absurd accusations that have absolutely no bearing in truth.”
Mary Trump traces much of her pain to the death of her father when she was 16. The president, who rarely admits mistakes, told The Washington Post last year that he regretted the pressure he and his father had put on Fred Jr. to join the family business when his brother wanted to be a pilot instead.
“It was just not his thing. ... I think the mistake that we made was we assumed that everybody would like it. That would be the biggest mistake . ... There was sort of a double pressure put on him,” Trump told the paper.
Yet as her father lay dying alone, Mary Trump claims, “Donald went to the movies.”
She says that, as a child, Donald Trump hid favorite toys from his younger brother and took juvenile stunts — like Fred Jr. dumping a bowl of mashed potatoes on his then-7-year-old head — so seriously that he harbored resentments even when his eldest sister, Maryanne, brought it up in her toast at his White House birthday dinner in 2017.
She paints Trump, who often called her “Honeybunch,” as a self-centered narcissist who demanded constant adulation — even from his family — and had little regard for family members’ feelings. Trump’s crude rhetoric on the campaign trail, she said, was nothing new, reminding her “of every family meal I’d ever attended during which Donald had talked about all of the women he considered ugly fat slobs or the men, usually more accomplished or powerful, he called losers.”
The book is, at its heart, a lengthy psychoanalysis of the Trump family by a woman trained in the field, who sees the traits of her uncle that critics despise as a natural progression of behaviors developed at the knees of a demanding father. For Donald Trump, she writes, “lying was defensive — not simply a way to circumvent his father’s disapproval or to avoid punishment ... but a way to survive.”
Publisher Simon & Schuster announced Monday that it would be publishing the book two weeks early, on July 14, after a New York appellate court cleared the way for the book’s publication following a legal challenge.