Mary Trump, Donald Trumps Niece, Dishes on Toxic Family, Dark ...
Why the President Didn't Want the World to Read Mary Trump's Story
The new memoir takes you inside a dysfunctional American family—and into Donald Trump's heed.
In that location have been so many Trump World tell-alls over the by few years that y'all'd be forgiven for wondering: Is there actually any more to say? Donald Trump'due south niece, Mary, thinks then. Her new memoir, Too Much and Never Plenty: How My Family Created the World's Virtually Dangerous Man, offers an intimate wait at the president'southward babyhood and psychology, and information technology's remarkably blunt about its motive: taking downwards Donald Trump. On Thursday's episode of What Next, I talked to Washington Mail reporter Shane Harris about what we can learn from Mary'southward portrait of the president and what it has in common with erstwhile national security adviser John Bolton'due south Oval Function exposé, The Room Where It Happened. This transcript has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Mary Harris: Talk to me a little scrap about who Mary Trump is.
Shane Harris: Mary Trump is the daughter, one of two children, of Fred Trump Jr., who is Donald Trump'due south older brother, often chosen Freddy. Freddy was one of five Trump children and, early on in life, was the presumed heir to the Trump existent estate business concern, and of course information technology didn't work out that way. Mary Trump grew up effectually her father and his extended family unit, as well as her mother. Her parents divorced when she was younger. Her father becomes this blackness sheep, if you will, of the Trump family and actually is living a life that is quite singled-out from the one that his younger blood brother and other siblings are living.
She describes a family very much controlled by Fred Trump Sr., Donald Trump'due south father. I recall she even calls him a sociopath.
She does at one indicate telephone call him a sociopath and says that what the sociopath does is co-opts others towards his ends. Her argument there is that that is what Fred Trump did with Donald Trump when he realized that Freddy was, in his optics, good for nothing and was not going to be the inheritor or the heir that he had hoped that he would be. Information technology is a family in which the disappointment of the male parent is what the children fear. It's his rules only. He's not a physically calumniating man, as she describes him, simply definitely emotionally then.
And she paints in the picture of her father and her uncle two very dissimilar reactions to the elder Trump. Her father is someone who is much more sensitive, much more in, and kind of retreats from his father, even though he's trying to delight him, but he simply can't alive upward to his expectations. Donald, on the other hand, embodies what his father would encounter every bit "the killer." He has this instinct to always win, to trounce other people, that life is a zero-sum game. So there's some kind of natural instinct for Donald to ever demonstrate this bent to his father. And what's actually fascinating is equally Donald Trump gets older, she writes, his begetter begins to envy him for his ability to non just beat other people, just to flout convention, to interruption the rules. All of the things that we now know Trump doing as president he was doing when he was younger in the business world, and his male parent is sort of in awe of his ain son and can't believe how he'southward gone beyond what information technology was that he hoped to create. She compares information technology to Frankenstein'southward monster.
And then I feel like we can't go much further without exploring Mary Trump's motivations. She's liberal, and she says at the outset of the book she doesn't desire him reelected. She was also cutting out of the family wealth.
That's right. After her father had been expressionless for some time, and then her grandfather dies, and it comes time to divvy up his estate or to allocate it amongst the surviving children. She sees her father essentially being erased.
And she sued over this.
She refused to sign off on the volition, which would accept let it go into probate. And then she and her brother held up the works for two years, with lawyers going back and forth on it. Ultimately she and her brother signed a settlement, the terms of which are not disclosed. But importantly, when she does that, she does it assertive that the total value of her granddad'due south estate is around $xxx 1000000. She later finds out it'south actually a billion dollars. So she now believes that she signed this settlement and accompanying nondisclosure requirements that go with it on false pretenses, and that the family unit defrauded her, which is an argument that she's making now for why that nondisclosure requirement should no longer hold.
She does come at this from a point of existent grievance and, bluntly, admirably, she lays that all out in the book. She's non hiding information technology. And there are parts where, frankly, it is hard to separate to some degree that grievance from the film that she's painting. Merely she'southward too painting a portrait that's been fleshed out by journalists in some cases. Nosotros accept heard stories about the Trump family unit and how they operated. And that portrait really does line upwards quite a lot with what we've heard elsewhere. And so while she does accept a bone to pick, at the aforementioned time, I think that she's rendering a pretty credible motion-picture show of what family life was like.
Mary Trump has a Ph.D. in psychology. There have been and so many armchair psychologists who've looked from the outside at this president and tried to analyze what'south going on in his heed, and so it's interesting to me to meet an actual psychologist with bodily access endeavor to put into words motivations for how the president is behaving.
Aye, I agree. This volume is both a family memoir and a work of psychoanalysis, if I tin can use that term. You know, she is conscientious non to say I am diagnosing him with the following conditions. She does heighten atmospheric condition that he might have and seems to bespeak that he probably does. Merely she is maxim, The man y'all see before you today is a product of the following influences, and this is what I think is going on in his heed, and these are the black holes that he is constantly trying to fill up.
For her, it really comes downwards to ii big ideas. One is that his parents never loved him. They never nurtured him. And so he is constantly trying to fill this void that he never got from his parents. And the other is that he'south living in a constant state of fear. It's fear of failure, fear of ridicule, fear of antipathy. And I recall we clearly see that in the way that he is constantly exaggerating everything. Everything is the best. It's the greatest. Information technology's the No. 1. Remember when he got into that give-and-take salad where he talked well-nigh how he tested negative for the coronavirus, but he kept trying to say that was positive? He tested negatively in the positive management. It was like this weird impulse to say positive, positive, positive, not negative.
Subsequently reading this book and Bolton'due south book, I wonder what you recall each of these authors wanted to accomplish with what they wrote.
I exercise think that both Bolton and Mary Trump want Donald Trump not to be elected once again. I call up that they are trying to forcefully warn people nigh what they encounter as the danger of his presidency and of his personality. So in that sense, they accept a lot in common. I think where they differ is that Bolton actually wants people to focus on what he sees every bit the damage that Trump is doing to the establishment of the presidency and the mode he is perverting political tradition in the Usa and the hazard that that causes of long-term impairment. What Mary Trump is doing is trying to explain the person of Donald Trump as a product of this cauldron in which he was brought up, as someone who is the cease result of a family civilization that prized loyalty and aggression higher up empathy and sharing and selflessness. It'south much more of a personal portrayal.
Does it make a difference to you that either John Bolton or Mary Trump waited to put these allegations out there and put them out on their own terms in a way that they could profit from them?
As a journalist, I want to encourage every public official and every person close to someone empowered to, whenever they're ready, come out and talk. And I don't see annihilation in principle wrong with them existence compensated for the piece of work. Bolton's decision to publish seems more problematic to me in the sense that he had an opportunity to evidence before Congress—putting aside that he has an argument for why he was unable to do that. The cynical argument, which I'm persuaded by more than and more, is that he wanted to practice that considering he wanted to promote book sales. And he seems quite dismissive of the whole impeachment endeavour anyway, so I'g non sure he felt all that badly about having not availed himself of the opportunity to evidence to Congress.
Mary Trump's is different, though. The timing is notable. It's coming out not long before an election, although they did speed up the publication date partly considering of these legal battles they've been involved in. But she does write in the book near how she's wrestled with the question of whether or non to speak out, and she's honest about the process that she went through in deciding to do it. She could have spoken out during the election, and she talks about that, and frankly I think needs to say a bit more about why exactly she didn't. But she'southward at least honest with her struggle about when to speak. And at present, fifty-fifty if it's arguably a little scrap belatedly, if she idea this was important for people to know four years ago, she's laying all her cards on the table.
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Source: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/07/mary-trump-memoir-donald-family-psychology.html
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