Trump’s niece depicts him as inept liar
WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump’s niece said he was scarred by his father and developed habits of lying and self-deception that shadowed him into the White House, according to a copy of her much-anticipated memoir obtained by USA TODAY.
Mary Trump, in a book called “Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man,” said the president 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 synthesize information.”
“This is far beyond garden-variety narcissism,” she wrote. “Donald is not simply weak, his ego is a fragile thing that must be bolstered every moment because he knows deep down that he is nothing of what he claims to be.”
Mary Trump, 55, a psychologist, is the daughter of Trump’s elder brother, the late Fred Trump Jr.
Her book, the subject of a legal fight between Mary Trump and her family members, including the president’s brother Robert, is set to be published July 14 by Simon & Schuster, two weeks earlier than planned.
In the book, Mary Trump described how she helped The New York Times obtain tax documents showing the Trump organization consistently undervalued its properties to reduce its tax bills. Those documents also showed that Fred Trump Sr. propped up Donald Trump after his business failures.
She also wrote that in order to get into the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, a young Donald Trump hired someone to take his Scholastic Aptitude Test.
“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,” Mary Trump wrote.
The book said that after Trump announced his White House run in 2015, Trump’s sister, retired appeals court Judge Maryanne Trump Barry, mocked him.
“He’s a clown – this will never happen,” Judge Barry said, according to her niece.
Trump Barry – who said Trump has “no principles! None!” – later criticized him for invoking their brother’s alcohol problems during a campaign discussion about addiction.
She told the author: “He’s using your father’s memory for political purposes and that’s a sin, especially since Freddy should have been the star of the family.”
Mary Trump blames Fred Trump Sr. for giving Donald his bad habits. She also blames the family patriarch for driving her own father to alcoholism and an early death.
The elder Trump is cast as a cold and forbidding patriarch who wanted his son to follow in his footsteps – his eldest son. But as young Fred struggled, the father shifted his attention to Donald, demanding he follow lessthan-scrupulous real estate practices.
“When things turned south in the late 1980s, Fred could no longer separate himself from his son’s brutal ineptitude; the father had no choice but to stay invested,” Mary Trump wrote.
“His monster had been set free.”