Mary Trump says despite strong family resemblances, she is able to live without people seeing the connection to the former President. Photo / Supplied
"When your motive is not simply winning at all costs but grievance and revenge," according to Mary Trump, "you're more dangerous than a straight-up psychopath. Donald is much worse than that – he's someone with a gaping wound where his soul should be."
Mary is Donald Trump's niece, the daughter of his deceased older brother, Fred Trump jnr. She doesn't mince words. On a cloudy summer afternoon in New York's Soho, where she has just moved after living on Long Island for some years, she is relaxed and expansive, but there are no holds barred when it comes to her opinions of her uncle, the ex-President, whom she will only refer to as "Donald".
Her first book, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man, was a first-person tell-all account of being raised amid America's most dysfunctional clan. It sold 1.35 million copies on its first week of release, a record for its publishers.
She revealed a family focused entirely on money and power, willing to sell out anyone – most notably each other – in their pursuit of those goals. Donald was depicted as an incompetent businessman with an abusive personality. The generational history of the family, from the patriarch Fred snr onwards, was one of favour or vengeful rejection. She described Donald as a "universal cheater" who even paid others to sit his school exams.
Given her family experiences and opinions, ask Mary how she kept sane during the Trump presidency and she's quick to reply.
"You are making a huge assumption that I did," she laughs. "Ask my therapist."
In her new book, The Reckoning (subtitled America's trauma and finding a way to heal), she describes both her own deeper personal experiences of the Trump years and those of the American nation more generally. She might have knowledge gained from an upbringing within the Trump family, occasionally inside the White House, but she also has the judgements of a psychologist and as an observant American who has been impacted by Presidential and Republican decision-making, viewing them critically. It is a unique combination.
In Too Much and Never Enough, she had outlined the family history from her own viewpoint. Now, in The Reckoning, she attempts to explain it. She begins with the Trump White House years and her own treatment for PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder), which was the consequence of her upbringing, her alcoholic father's brutal treatment from his family including from his brother, Donald, his early death, and the many financial moves that meant Mary did not receive a fair share of her grandfather's vast estate.
"It was never about split loyalties. I had never felt loyalties towards those people because they had never shown any loyalty to me. I do not believe that family – if you forgive the phrase - 'trumps' everything else," she says. "It doesn't.
"I think that most people think that if someone is family that they should be able to get away with more. I think if you are family, you should treat your family's members better. I have no feeling of loyalty for [Donald] at all and even if I did, if he and I had a reasonably good relationship, his politics are despicable."
The Reckoning is, as she explains, an attempt to pull the lens back in time, to try to figure out how the United States got to such a dangerous place – a raging pandemic, a threatened insurrection and roll-backs on many international treaties and domestic laws - with her very flawed uncle as its president.
"It can't just be one person. It wasn't a fluke. So what historic forces were at work, currently and historically, that can help us understand this? If we don't figure it out, then the world as we know it will be over because it is on the brink of becoming an autocracy or an apartheid state.
"Not only is our system totally geared in the Republicans' favour, which I tried to make clear in the book by looking at all sorts of things like voter suppression, but if they succeed it will make it almost impossible for them to lose an election, even though they couldn't win one legitimately."
But it is her own analysis of her shock at Donald's election in 2016 that the book becomes visceral, as she explains the consequences of having many buried memories of her own past reawakened.
"I started with the present because it has been all-consuming. From the horrific morning of November 9 2016 on, the horror of it was almost surreal," she explains. "I couldn't wrap my head around it and for me, obviously, it was very personal and it triggered my own PTSD, not because Donald has anything to do with my PTSD, it was just this enormous injustice.
"How could this absolutely worst possible person continue to be enabled and get away with it? And end up with all this power and the rest of us get screwed?
"And it just kept on getting worse," she continues. "The next thing you know is the Muslim Ban is enacted, children are being put in concentration camps and whipped from their parents, and on and on … So along with all that, of course, which revealed things in a way I hadn't seen before, was the fact that a lot of the people in this country like cruelty as long as it is inflicted on other people, or the people they consider 'other'."
Mary's great-grandfather founded the family fortune by keeping a very profitable brothel and tavern during the Canadian gold rush. Her grandfather, Fred snr, used that money to accumulate vast real estate holdings in New York while her grandmother was chauffeured around New York in a primrose-coloured Rolls Royce, collecting coins from the laundry rooms in Trump tenements. Then there were the surprising allegiances and the savage rifts and ructions between their children, including Donald and Fred jnr.
Mary noted the recurrence of patterns.
"When I wrote the first book, I was looking at through-lines to explain not only how Donald got to where he is, but how we got to where he is … I had also noticed the same things had happed historically and the two major things had been that I kept coming back to was that powerful white men in America are never held accountable, and that white supremacy pervades our culture and our politics.
"It's not something we have transcended and it's not something we have grappled with or acknowledged and now we see now that essentially it is a platform for one of our two major political parties."
While she considers the whole history of America, beginning with slavery and the resulting racism of the South and ending with Covid, it is the Trump presidency that embodied many of its worst aspects.
"It is kind of interesting that when he came on to the political scene again, he was not a neophyte by any stretch of the imagination … Then he got the presidential nomination, which meant there was a greater than zero chance that he could get into the White House, which was horrifying to me. November 9 2016 happened and I knew with absolute certainty that he was going to be monstrous.
"And I wouldn't have said that two years before, because he wasn't in a position to be – to have that kind of power. I think it is safe to say that a lot of my assessment of him has been borne out."
Mary considers Donald to be a product of both his father and the Republican Party, which has enabled his worst impulses.
"He's not new. He's not doing anything new," she says with repeated emphasis. "He's just doing it a little bit differently. He's not different from the traditional Republican Party. He is it. He is held up as a mirror so we can all see its face, which it has been for decades but they have hidden it better. One thing that Donald has interpreted uniquely is that he has shown if you just keep pushing the envelope you can get away with anything, because he has.
"He's been impeached twice and he should have been convicted both times but he got away with it. He got away with trying to steal an election. He got away with obstruction of Congress. He got away with sedition, in my view. The other thing he has done is to make it as clear as possible that to be openly racist in the Republican Party is a perfectly acceptable political strategy.
"I don't think Donald was doing it to tear the country down," she adds, "he was doing it because it benefited him in some way and they were willing to let him do it. They didn't care if he was cruel. They didn't care that he was racist. They didn't care if he was trying to steal the election or if he was trying to steal money from the treasury. He was showing them just how far they could go and they love it."
But how does Mary deal psychologically with the weight of the family name in light of this recent history?
"It was so completely separate from me because it was just him, right? And I never took it on in any way and it was very easy for me to say in response to the question "Are you related?", "No", because no one ever made the assumption I was. Despite the fact it is a very uncommon name. Despite the fact that there is a very strong family resemblance. Despite the fact that I am from New York. Despite the fact I have the same name as his mother.
"If someone asked me "Are you related?" and I said "No", they never questioned me. Possibly because in people's minds they think "Who would ever deny that?" and, as friends of mine told me, because it never occurred to them because I am nothing like that, which I have always considered a compliment.
"My name," she says, "means something very different to me. My name is something people called me as a kid and I am kind of attached to it."
The Reckoning, by Mary L. Trump (Allen & Unwin, $33).
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