Donald Trump’s niece, Mary Trump, has made mind blowing allegations against the US President, revealing a series of mind games and family drama in a new book her family attempted to block.
The new book titled “Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man” presents a damning portrait of Mary’s uncle Donald Trump, revealing how his alleged dysfunctional upbringing and a domineering father affected the man who in 2016 became the president of the United States.
Mary Trump, a licensed clinical psychologist, in the book says she used her knowledge of his childhood to paint a broader portrait of Trump alleging he started to show contempt towards his father when his father became sick with Alzheimer’s disease.
The White House has rejected all of her claims in the book, as other members of the Trump family had attempted to prevent the book’s publication, citing a non-disclosure agreement she signed during a dispute over her grandfather’s will from which she received an enormous inheritance.
In the book, Mary claims Trump paid someone to take his SATs exams, she alleges Trump’s father Fred, a once-overpowering patriarch was reduced at the end of his life to being taken care of by his son whose entire career and mentality were shaped by him.
“He short-circuited Donald’s ability to develop and experience the entire spectrum of human emotion,” Mary Trump writes in the book already obtained by CNN and New York Times.
“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.”
Mary Trump describes her uncle as something of a proxy for her grandfather’s long-sought but unachieved dreams, which she says he was prevented from obtaining for himself because of his still-accented English and character.
“In retrospect, Fred was the puppeteer, but he couldn’t be seen pulling his son’s strings,” she writes.
“Fred was willing to stake millions of dollars on his son because he believed he could leverage the skills Donald did have — as a savant of self-promotion, shameless liar, marketer, and builder of brands — to achieve the one thing that had always eluded him: a level of fame that matched his ego and satisfied his ambition in a way money alone never could.”
Mary Trump then alleges Donald treated his father with contempt as his Alzheimer’s disease progressed.
“Whatever had once tied them together, Fred’s remaining sons had given up all pretense of caring what their father thought or wanted,” she writes. “Having served his father’s purpose, Donald now treated him with contempt, as if his mental decline were somehow his own fault.”
The White House has denied her allegations in the book, revealing that Trump upon taking office, put a black and white framed photograph of Fred Trump in the Oval Office.
The picture was the first and only personal item Trump placed in the Oval Office behind the Resolute Desk before adding photos of his mother and wife
The White House said the book’s depiction of the President’s relationship with his father was false.
“The President describes the relationship he had with his father as warm and said his father was very good to him,” said deputy press secretary Sarah Matthews.
“He said his father was loving and not at all hard on him as a child.”
Mary frames Trump’s childhood as one lacking in proper parenting or displays of empathy, a pattern she says carried to his adult life and his presidency.
She also says Trump’s fondness for authoritarian leaders was due to his early association with Roy Cohn, the controversial lawyer hired by the Trumps after they were accused by the Justice Department of refusing to rent apartments to African Americans.
She said Trump’s affinity for dictators and strongmen came from his father.
“Fred had also primed Donald to be drawn to men such as Cohn, as he would later be drawn to authoritarians such as Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un or anyone else, really, with a willingness to flatter and the power to enrich him,” she writes.
Mary describes her family holiday gatherings as similar to Trump’s current circle of advisers, who she says are only there to appeal to the President’s ego and feed his impulses.
At holiday gatherings, she says family members “formed a claque with one mission: to prop Donald up, follow his lead in conversation, and defer to him as though nobody was as important as he was.”
“It was easier to go along for the ride,” she says, likening the experience to West Wing advisers letting Trump be Trump:
“Donald’s chiefs of staff are prime examples of this phenomenon., from the world through cheating
“Donald has, in some sense, always been institutionalized, shielded from his limitations or his need to succeed on his own in the world,” she writes.
“Honest work was never demanded of him, and no matter how badly he failed, he was rewarded in ways that are almost unfathomable.”
That includes Trump’s alleged efforts to cheat his way into college, which she claims involved paying someone else to take entrance exams, and his venture into business backed by his father even when the businesses failed.
The White House denies the assertion Trump cheated on his SATs, calling it ‘false’.
Mary Trump says Donald’s penchant for “lying was primarily a mode of self-aggrandizement meant to convince other people he was better than he actually was.”
“In Donald’s mind, he has accomplished everything on his own merits, cheating notwithstanding,” she writes.
She said when one of Trump’s casinos in Atlantic City was failing, her grandfather dispatched his chauffeur with $3 million to purchase chips as a way to bolster the business, though that wasn’t enough to prevent it from failing.
From an early age, Trump received little parenting from his mother, according to Mary Trump, who says the household was split along strict gender lines, even for the 1950s.
“It’s clear that Fred and his wife were never partners,” the book states.
“The girls were her purview, the boys his.”
She described Trump and his father as men who had a crude sensibility toward women, even in the months following the death of their brother and son: “Fred and Donald didn’t act as if anything was different,” she writes, “Their son and brother was dead, but they discussed New York politics and deals and ugly women, just as they always had.”
Mary Trump also describes when, at age 12, her grandfather showed her a nude photo of a woman “who couldn’t have been more than eighteen and might have been younger” he kept in his wallet.
“Look at this,’ he had said, sliding the picture out of its slot,” she writes.
Looking to her uncle Donald for a clue on how to respond, Mary Trump writes “he’d merely leered at the picture.”
A few decades later, when Mary Trump was visiting her uncle at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida, she says he reacted inappropriately when she arrived to lunch wearing a bathing suit: “Holy sh*t, Mary,” he told his niece. “You’re stacked.”
She describes the death of her father Fred Jr. (Trump’s brother pictured below) from a heart attack at age 42 as a regretful episode that illustrated the dysfunctional family dynamics of her grandfather and uncle.
According to her no one sought medical help for her father, despite Trump’s family’s financial dealings to many hospitals in New York.
Fred Trump Jr. had suffered from alcoholism and a faulty heart valve, for weeks as he was ailing in their family home.
“A single phone call would have guaranteed the best treatment for their son at either facility. No call was made,” she writes.
She also claims when they were receiving bad updates on the health of her father, none of his family members went to be with him. Instead, Donald Trump and his sister Elizabeth went to the movies.
After Fred Jr.’s death, Mary Trump said she wanted his ashes to be spread in Montauk instead of buried, a wish she said her father had voiced loudly when alive but her grandfather refused.
Book excerpts culled from New York Times and CNN.
