Family business: Trump fears latest damning memoir – this time by his liberal niece
It was election night 2016 and Donald Trump, having stunned the world by winning the American presidency, paraded beaming family members in the ballroom of a New York hotel. But at least one relative was not celebrating.
“This is one of the worst nights of my life,” the president-elect’s niece, Mary Lea Trump, wrote on Twitter. “What is wrong with this country? I fear the American experiment has failed.”
She has presumably had many more bad nights since. It emerged this week that Mary, a clinical psychologist from Long Island, is to publish an unflattering memoir about her uncle entitled Too Much And Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man.
There have been many damning insider accounts about Trump, most recently by his former national security adviser John Bolton, but perhaps no perceived betrayal will sting like the one that springs from his own flesh and blood.
“I think he’s freaking out,” said Michael D’Antonio, author of Never Enough: Donald Trump and the Pursuit of Success. “He will treat her savagely.”
On Sunday, Axios reported that Trump insists Mary Trump is “not allowed” to write her book, because doing so would violate a non-disclosure agreement she signed.
Trump told Axios: “She’s not allowed to write a book. When we settled with her and her brother, who I do have a good relationship with – she’s got a brother, Fred, who I do have a good relationship with, but when we settled, she has a total ... signed a nondisclosure.”
He also spoke warmly of his younger brother, saying: “I have a brother, Robert, very good guy, and he’s – he’s very angry about it.” Trump said the
NDA was a “very powerful one. It covers everything.”
For Trump, life has always been a family business, and it is impossible to tell where family ends and business begins. Framed photos of his late parents loom over his shoulder in the Oval Office; the death of his elder brother casts a long shadow; his children, perhaps the only people beyond suspicion of disloyalty, work for his company or his campaign or in the White House.
Mary, 55, is the daughter of Fred Trump Jr, the president’s older brother, who died in 1981 at the age of 42 from a heart attack linked to alcoholism. She has bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English literature, as well as a PhD in clinical psychology from Adelphi University in New York, according to Forbes.
D’Antonio commented: “It makes her someone that Donald would fear on a very elemental level. She thinks for herself, she’s analytical when it comes to humans and she can express herself, so this is a nightmare for him.”
Mary, also a certified professional life coach, joined Twitter in December 2012 – her bio currently states,
“#blacklivesmatter, ῑ,she/her/hers” – and is following accounts that would do any New York liberal proud: Planned Parenthood, Greenpeace USA, the National Center for Transgender Equality. She also follows Democratic politicians such as congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and liberal actors including Stephen Fry, Mark Ruffalo and Kerry Washington.
Her antipathy towards her uncle long predates his foray into populist rightwing politics. When Trump’s father, Fred Trump Sr, died, his will distributed his estate among his children and their offspring with the exception of his son Fred Trump Jr. The children of Fred Jr objected that they had been included an earlier will, written before Fred Sr was diagnosed with dementia, and took legal action.
Mary told the New York Daily News that her aunt and uncles “should be ashamed of themselves”. And soon after the lawsuit was filed, Trump changed a health insurance policy so that Fred Jr’s grandson, who had cerebral palsy, lost coverage. Eventually the lawsuit was settled and the child regained health insurance.
The president is now reportedly considering suing Mary over the memoir, due to be published on 28 July by Simon & Schuster. It is expected to disclose Mary was a key source of confidential documents for a Pulitzer prizewinning New York Times investigation into Trump’s personal finances.
Publicity material states: “She recounts in unsparing detail everything from her uncle Donald’s place in the family spotlight and Ivanka’s penchant for regifting to her grandmother’s frequent injuries and illnesses and the appalling way Donald, Fred Trump’s favorite son, dismissed and derided him when he began to succumb to Alzheimer’s.”
Trump’s relationship with his father, a tough man who preached that winning is everything, has always been a source of endless fascination. In a rare moment of self-reflection, Trump wrote in his 2007 book, Think Big: “That’s why I’m so screwed up, because I had a father that pushed me pretty hard.”
His mother, Scotland-born Mary Trump, is understood to have been somewhat distanced and detached but no less consequential. D’Antonio said: “They are more of a psychologically profound presence than a reality-based influence. The idea of his father’s demanding expectations got into his head and his mother’s many absences when he was a boy left him with a yearning, and it’s probably one of the injuries that has never healed in him.
“This is something that I know Mary L Trump is going to be addressing in her book and it’s accurate: his mother was sick a lot and not very attentive. The insatiable drive for attention, I think, comes from that absence and then this concurrent desire to live up to his father’s expectations,” he added.
As a patriarch himself, Trump has been compared to a mob boss, regarding family as a means to enforcing his will and expanding his power.
His daughter Ivanka and her husband Jared Kushner – known as “Javanka” – are senior advisers at the White House. His sons Don Jr and Eric stepped in to run the Trump Organization, the family business, when Trump was elected and are prominent surrogates for his reelection campaign.
D’Antonio added: “It also reminds me of organisations where everybody in it has committed something ethically, morally or legally wrong, and so everyone has the goods on everyone and no one breaks away because everyone is vulnerable. He likes the family to pose, but where are his brother and two sisters?
“Throughout his presidency, I don’t recall ever seeing a photograph of them with him. He’s not capable of the kind of close attachments that you would expect.”