Donald Trump with his parents Fred Sr and Mary Anne in 1996. Photo / Getty Images
REVIEW
Donald Trump has called Kamala Harris “real garbage”, “a wack job”, and even reposted a crude slur to millions of his followers that a certain sex act may have boosted her political career.
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.
Mary and Donald Trump have been at odds for years. He was furious when she gave The New York Times his tax returns, 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 behaviour. (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.
Fred Trump Jr was pressured by his father to take over the family business, but became a pilot instead.
“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.
Weeks later, Mary Trump describes being in the home of Fred Trump Sr, a teetotaller, for Thanksgiving. Her aunt, Maryanne, offered a toast to her deceased brother.
“To Freddy,” she said.
We raised our glasses of apple juice and Coke, which is all that was ever offered.
My grandmother sat next to me, and I could see her lips trembling.
“To Freddy,” the rest of us responded.
Except for my grandfather, he didn’t bother.
Mary’s only sibling, Fred Trump III, also describes Uncle Donald’s heartlessness in his recent book, All in the Family: The Trumps and How We Got This Way. He has a son with cerebral palsy who suffered severe seizures and, after his grandfather died in 1999, his family, with its significant medical bills, was cut off from the Trump family’s health insurance plan, leading to a lawsuit that received widespread media attention at the time.
But when Trump became president, Fred Trump III said he was grateful to his uncle for allowing a White House meeting where he and others advocated for more resources for those with disabilities - until it was over and his uncle spoke to him privately and said, “Those people … The shape they’re in, all the expenses, maybe those kinds of people should just die.”
The takeaway is that Donald, like his father, who flashed the $100 bills he carried, valued money over people - and squeezed every last cent out of everyone.
In a telling detail, Mary Trump said that her father had to write a check to Donald to use a room at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in Times Square, which he developed, to throw her a 16th birthday party in 1981. And yet, “Donald walked in, expansive about his new hotel, crowing about the fixtures to a roomful of teenagers who couldn’t have cared less. He swanned about it as if it was his grand opening, as if he were the host,” not her father.
Mary says her father paid a heavy price for trying to go his own way. Donald Trump, on the other hand, revered his father. He kept his photo in the Oval Office and called him his role model. “Freddy and Donald were mirror images of each other,” she writes. “One genuinely successful but cast as a failure, the other incapable of succeeding at anything but propped up by a father who evaluated his sons through a very different lens than any objective observer.”
Decades ago, Mary said Donald and Fred Sr religiously clipped articles from New York newspapers that mentioned the Trumps, piling them on chairs and tables in a room off the kitchen in her grandfather’s home. Every time she went to that house, she says, “Donald and my grandfather stood there discussing the clippings and rearranging them.”
At the end of her book, Mary concludes: “Here we are, Donald and I, still on diametrically opposite ends of everything, just as we were at my grandparents’ formal dining room table. The difference now - he’s not the only one with power.”
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