Mary L. Trump is an American clinical psychologist. She is President Donald Trump’s niece. In order to know Donald’s reckless hyperbole and unearned confidence that hid his pathological weaknesses and insecurities we need to go thorough family history to what and who made him became the man he is now who threatens the world’s health, economic security and social fabric. According to the author, Donald meets the criteria for anti-social personality disorder or sociopathy, dependent personality disorder and long diagnosed learning disability disorder. But who would have known? It needs a full psychological and neuro psychological tests to be able to have an accurate diagnosis—whom President Donald Trump would never take.
It all started with Mary’s late grandmother and grandfather problematic parenting style—President Donald Trump’s parents namely Mary Anne and Fred Trump Sr. They have 5 children namely Maryanne (the eldest), Elizabeth, Robert (the youngest), Donald (the middle child) and Freddy (the eldest boy and Mary’s father). Mary is physically and mentally ill during their children’s formative years. Mary’s absence—both literal and emotional—created a void in the lives of their children. Fred Trump Sr. on the other hand, is the patriarch of the family and was noted as a high-functioning sociopath! His lack of real human feeling, his rigidity as a parent and a husband and his sexist belief in woman’s innate inferiority left her wife and children’s feelings unsupported. It became harder for Donald and Robert growing up without their parents’ attention. The more they distressed about it, the more Fred rebuffed them. For them, “needing” became equated with humiliation, despair, and hopelessness. Their incompetent parenting made their children isolated not just from the rest of the world but from one another. Donald directly experienced the “not enough” in the loss of connection to his mother and his father’s neglect at a crucial developmental stage. This deprivation developed powerful but primitive defenses on Donald.
Fred was the owner of a real estate empire in Brooklyn and Queens, making his fortune through cutting secret deals with New York City politicians who gave him profitable tax breaks and federal housing grants. Lying and bullying were the central ingredients to his business plan. He expected his first-born son, Freddy, to be his successor. Freddy’s status as the oldest son in the family had gone from protecting him from Fred’s worst impulses. However, he was deprived to live a life the way he wanted it to be. This pushed him to lie about what he and his friends are up to, that he is smoking etc. To him, lying became a defense from his father’s resentment and disapproval. On the other hand, for Donald, lying was primarily a mode of self-aggrandizement meant to convince other people he was better than he was.
Freddy lived a life with criticism thrown towards him by his father due to shortcomings. Fred wanted Freddy to be to a “killer” in his parlance. Donald observed it all and learned that failure to comply with his father’s rules was punished by severe and often public humiliation. Donald’s growing arrogance, in part a defense against his feelings of abandonment and an antidote to his lack of self-esteem, served as a protective cover for his deepening insecurities. One thing that Donald keeps on his mind was to stay out of his father’s crosshairs and another to get into his good graces. Encouraged by his father, Donald eventually started to believe his own hype. Donald due to his experiences knew that he would never be comforted—this rigid personality protected him from pain and loss. Freddy kept trying and failing to do the right thing; Donald began to realize that there was nothing he could do wrong, so he stopped trying to do anything “right.” He became bolder and more aggressive because he was rarely challenged by the only person in the world who mattered—his father.
Finally, by 1959, Donald’s misbehavior—fighting, bullying, arguing with teachers—had gone too far. He was unstoppable even from his own mother that is why he was sent to New York Military School. He developed a combative, rigid persona to shield him from the terror of his early abandonment, along with his having been made to witness his father’s abuse of Freddy.
After graduating college, Freddy worked as full-time employee at Trump Management in 1960, accompanying his father. And soon got married to Linda who perceived to have lack of sophistication and education. Whom his parents’ think as a gold digger. They have two children namely: Frederick and Mary L. Trump. He continued working to his father but whenever he told his father with ideas for innovations, he was always shut down. Freddy felt unhappy and soon resigned and became a commercial pilot, Fred was stunned. It was a betrayal, and he had no intention of letting his oldest son forget it. He belittled his son as a “bus driver” in the sky. The family’s constant denigration of his chosen profession contributed to his struggles with alcoholism and other issues, leading to both his aviation career and marriage failing. His father’s approval still mattered more than anything else. After less than a year, he crawled back to his father for a job. But Fred stuffed Freddy into a double bind.
With Freddy’s apparent fall from grace, Donald saw an opportunity to take his place as their father’s right-hand man at Trump Management. Donald set his sights on the University of Pennsylvania. Maryanne his elder sister was the one who was making her assignments. And he hired Joe Shapiro, a smart kid with a reputation for being a good test taker, to take his SATs for him. On the other hand, Trump Management completed the purchase of Steeplechase Park for $2.5 million in July 1965. Fred blamed Freddy for the failure of Steeplechase. Donald did a fair amount of armchair quarterbacking. After the Steeplechase deal collapsed, there was less for Freddy to do at Trump Management.
After Donald graduated, he became vice president of several companies that fell under the Trump Management umbrella. Unlike his elder brother, Donald managed to curry favor with his father by emulating his ruthlessness. He also turned cheating into a way of life, and never apologized to anyone. For the next couple of decades, Fred worked behind the scenes to bankroll all of Donald’s reckless business endeavors. While Fred harbored no illusions about Donald’s competence, he enjoyed being his puppeteer, as his son achieved a level of fame that had been unattainable to him. In the late 1960s, for example, Fred developed a high-rise for the elderly in New Jersey and in part an example of how far he was willing to go to enrich his second son. Although Donald put no money toward the development costs of the building, he received consulting fees. In a similar sleight of hand, Fred bought Swifton Gardens and he secured a $5.7 million mortgage when he later sold the property, Donald got all the credit and took all the profit.
Donald, whose own lifestyle became more extravagant as the years passed. Donald had already been living in Manhattan when he married Ivana. Within five years they were living in the $10 million penthouse triplex in Trump Tower, while Donald was still effectively on Fred’s payroll.
In 1973, the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division sued Donald and his father for violating the 1968 Fair Housing Act. But apparently, they managed to win the case. Donald won because of all the press coverage. Fred’s growing confidence in Donald created a bond between them and an unshakable self-confidence in Donald. In interviews in the early 1980s, Fred claimed that Donald’s success had far exceeded his own. 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. Fred could no longer separate himself from his son’s brutal ineptitude; he had no choice but to stay invested. His monster had been set free. All he could do was mitigate the damage, keep the cash flowing, and find somebody else to blame.
On September 29, 1981, Freddy, Mary’s father died due to a heart attack in a hospital away from family and his brother Donald at a movie theater. On the other hand, in yet another sign of Fred’s waning influence, Donald purchased three casinos, a Mar-a-Lago, yacht, Eastern Airlines Shuttle. By then Donald’s ventures already carried billions of dollars of debt. But Donald didn’t understand, and refused to learn, that owning and running casinos were vastly different from owning and running rental properties in Brooklyn. Yet, Fred wanted to continue lending Donald money to keep his casinos afloat. Banks are getting tighter on Donald. Despite the restrictions, Donald continued spending cash he did not have, including $250,000 for Marla’s engagement ring and $10 million to Ivana as part of their divorce settlement. The banks admonished him. However, still Fred helped him get away with it.
Trump Management was doing well. Fred paid himself more than $109 million between 1988 and 1993 and had tens of millions more in the bank. The Trump Organization, the company Donald ostensibly ran, was, however, in increasingly serious trouble. As the bankruptcies and embarrassments mounted, Donald was confronted for the first time with the limits of his ability to talk or threaten his way out of a problem. He secretly approached two of my Fred’s longest serving employees and told them to draft a codicil that would put him in complete control of Fred’s estate. Donald’s attempt to wrest control of Fred’s estate away from him was the logical outcome of Fred’s leading his son to believe that he was the only person who mattered.
Years after, Mary focuses on how the family turned on her after Fred Sr.’s death on June 25, 1999, including the cutting off of their health insurance, resulting in precarious conditions for her brother’s child. Mary decides to settle by allowing the rest of the family to buy out her partnership of a family corporation at what she now understands to be a significant undervaluation. She eventually learned the true value of her family’s wealth by acting as an anonymous source in the Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times investigation. On October 2, 2018, the New York Times published an almost 14,000-word article, the longest in its history, revealing the long litany of potentially fraudulent and criminal activities his grandfather, aunts, and uncles had engaged in.
Even if Donald succeeded in getting the press to believe that he was a self-made man, but nobody in the family ever bought into this myth. This made him won the Presidential election. Donald today is much as he was at three years old: incapable of growing, learning, or evolving, unable to regulate his emotions, moderate his responses, or take in and synthesize information. This can be proved through his response to COVID 19. In 2020, his pandemic “press briefings” quickly devolved into mini–campaign rallies filled with self-congratulations, demagoguery, and ring kissing. We must dispense with the idea of Donald’s “strategic brilliance” in understanding the intersection of media and politics. He doesn’t have a strategy; he never has. Fifty years later, people are literally dying because of his catastrophic decisions and disastrous inaction. This is the result of Donald’s having continually been given a pass and rewarded not just for his failures but for his transgressions—against tradition, against decency, against the law, and against fellow human beings.
Fred’s monster—the only child mattered to him—would ultimately be rendered unlovable by the very nature of Fred’s preference for him. Let us end this with a quote from Victor Hugo, Les Misérables: If the soul is left in darkness, sins will be committed. The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but the one who causes the darkness.
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