Trump – A Psychological Case Study – Before the Trials.
Mary L Trump – is Donald Trump’s niece – now 56 and an American author – who has a doctoral degree in clinical psychology and has been very critical of Donald and the Trump family.
She is the daughter of Fred Trump Jr. – often referred to as Freddy, the president’s older brother, who died in 1981 at the age of 42
He struggled with alcoholism for much of his life and his premature death was caused by a heart attack linked to his drinking.
In an interview last year with the Washington Post, Mr Trump said he regretted pressuring his older brother to join the family real estate business – because he wasn’t suited for or attracted by business.
After Mr Trump won the election in 2016, Mary L. described the experience as the “worst night of my life”.
We should be judged harshly,” she tweeted. “I grieve for our country.
Her 2020 book about him and the family – with the striking title – “Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man” describing her uncle as a fraud and a bully – sold nearly one million copies on the day of its release.
The White House rejected the claims made in the book, and Trump sued to block its publication – unsuccessfully.
Some extracts:
More than narcissism
Ms Trump writes that, her uncle, “exhibits all the characteristics of a narcissist. But this is far beyond garden-variety narcissism.
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.”
She says, he was influenced by watching his father, Fred Trump Sr, bully her father Freddy – that Trump Sr was extremely harsh to her father – his eldest son, whom he wanted to take over the family real estate business. But as Ms Trump’s father drifted away from the business, Trump Sr had no choice but to turn to his second son, Donald.
It was not a happy choice; Ms Trump claims. “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,” she writes of the senior Trump’s bullying and abrasive attitude towards Donald – the future President of the USA.
The White House rejected the claim that Mr Trump’s father had been abrasive and harsh, saying that the president ‘describes the relationship he had with his father as warm and said his father was very good to him’.
In the book -she writes – “When Trump senior died – his monster had been freed. I had to take him down”
She describes how she waited for a month, watching as – she wrote – “Donald shredded norms, endangered alliances, and trod upon the, vulnerable.”
she supplied tax documents to the New York Times, which used them to publish a 14,000-word investigative article into Mr Trump’s “dubious tax schemes during the 1990s, including instances of outright fraud, that greatly increased the fortune he received from his parents”.
before deciding to contact the NY Times.
After smuggling 19 boxes of legal documents out of the law firm where they were kept (quite how this was done is not revealed), she handed them over to reporters. She describes hugging them and calls the moment “the happiest I’d felt in months”.
University ‘cheater’
She claims, that her uncle paid a friend to take the SAT test for him – a standardised exam which determines university placement – because he was “worried that his grade point average, which put him far from the top of his class, would scuttle his efforts to get accepted”.
He hired “a smart kid with a reputation for being a good test taker, to take his SATs for him,” she writes, adding: “Donald, who never lacked for funds, paid his buddy well.”
- Trump attended Fordham University in New York City, but later transferred to the Wharton School of business at the University of Pennsylvania.
The White House denied that the president cheated on the university entrance exam.
Donald was ‘destroyed’ by his father
She blames the Trump family patriarch, Fred Trump Sr., for much of the family’s alleged dysfunction. She says Trump Sr. “destroyed” Donald Trump by interfering in his “ability to develop and experience the entire spectrum of human emotion”.
“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,”
“Softness was unthinkable,” for Trump Sr, adding that he would grow furious whenever her father – apologised for any errors.
Fred Sr, she said “would mock him. Fred wanted his oldest son to be a ‘killer.'”
Donald, who is seven years younger than his late brother, “had plenty of time to learn from watching Fred humiliate” his eldest son’.
“The lesson he learned, at its simplest, was that it was wrong to be like Freddy: Fred didn’t respect his oldest son, so neither would Donald.”
A problem with women
Ms Trump writes that her uncle had asked her to ghost write a book about him, called the Art of the Comeback, and provided “an aggrieved compendium of women he had expected to date but who, having refused him, were suddenly the worst, ugliest and fattest slobs he’d ever met”.
He later had someone else fire her and never paid her for her work, she alleges.
She says Mr Trump made suggestive comments about her body when she was 29 years old, even though she is his niece and Mr Trump was married to his second wife, Marla Maples.
She says Mr Trump told his current wife Melania that his niece had dropped out of university and took drugs around the time he hired her for the book project. It is true that Ms Trump had left college, but she says she never took any drugs, and that she believes her uncle made up the story to present himself as her “saviour”.
“The story was for his benefit as much as anybody else’s,” she writes, “and by the time the doorbell rang, he probably already believed his version of events.”
She claimed that the 1991 will of Trump Sr. – was “procured by fraud and undue influence” on the part of Donald Trump and his siblings, and that her aunt and uncles “should be ashamed of themselves in the legal battle which followed.
“Given this family, it would be utterly naive to say it has nothing to do with money,” she told the newspapers at the time.
Mary and her brother filed another lawsuit after their medical insurance provided by the Trump company was cancelled in apparent retaliation for the first legal action.
He likes his revenge – but now has to be careful.
He was admonished by a judge in a recent arraignment – for posting an open social media post saying:
‘If you go after me – I’m coming after you’
The judge describing it as tantamount to intimidation of future witnesses – – and subsequent judges – in their introductions – have made a point of warning him to avoid any public statements about the case or the evidence or face an action for contempt of court.
His options are becoming limited.