Tuesday, May 27, 2025
Mary Trump at Hay
Trump’s crass and demeaning remarks about his enemies — calling them pigs, ugly, fat and losers — is rooted in his upbringing, according to his niece Mary L. Trump, who has written a new memoir, “Who Could Ever Love You.” This is the third book she has published since 2020, all of them critical of her uncle.
It’s safe to say that Donald Trump won’t be thrilled with his niece’s new book, which expands on themes she has explored before: the Trump family’s callousness, arrogance and win-at-all-costs credo. Now she offers vivid new detail about how those family values harmed her and her father.
⁸Mary and Donald Trump have been at odds for years. He was furious when she gave the New York Times tax documents and information about the family real estate empire, leading to embarrassing stories about controversial financial practices and tax avoidance schemes.
He tried to undercut her credibility when she published her first book, “Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man,” in 2020. That book, which was a bestseller, explored the dynamics of the Trump family and offered personal insights into Donald Trump’s upbringing and behavior. (Mary Trump is a clinical psychologist.)
In an interview with Fox News, President Donald Trump said Mary Trump was “a scarred person,” called her book “stupid and so vicious it’s a lie,” and said she is “not a person that I spent very much time with.”
Now, in her new book, Mary Trump elaborates with stories based on what she says are eyewitness observations of the Trump family dysfunction.
Trump, the daughter of Donald Trump’s older brother, Fred Trump Jr., describes the former president’s mother as “seriously ill and psychologically unstable” and his father as “a sociopath.” She says that Fred Trump, Sr., was hard-hearted, and so craved publicity that he devoted a room to news clippings about the real estate empire he founded and felt zero empathy for tenants in his cockroach-infested New York apartments. She says her Uncle Donald became just like him.
As a child, Donald Trump was a bully who had no friends and developed a “widening cruel streak,” his niece writes. When her uncle became one of the most famous people in the world, his lack of empathy and disrespect to others made her ashamed to even use her credit card bearing her last name. In 2021, she sank into a depression so severe that she tried ketamine therapy.
Several of this memoir’s most vivid scenes revolve around Mary’s father, who struggled with alcoholism and died at age 42. Donald Trump has said his older brother’s alcoholism is why he never drank, for fear he would not stop.
“Dad’s embarrassed by you,” Donald told his brother, according to Mary Trump. “He tells everybody you’re just a glorified bus driver.”
Mary Trump recalls other gratuitously hurtful comments by Donald Trump, who became president of the family business in his mid-20s. While she was away at school in 1981, her seriously ill father was rushed to the emergency room in New York. Her grandfather informed Donald, then in his 30s, but he “went to the movies,” she writes, adding that her father died alone that night.
This session will be worth attending.
