Lying, Cheating, Amoral
to His Core; Still a Child Fearing a Wrathful Father
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| Donald Trump with his parents, Fred and Mary Anne. |
Donald Trump’s niece has two advantages that the small band of us who have long studied Trump closely do not.
First, she’s family.
No one knows you like your family. Your family knows how you behaved at crucial
moments when life-changing events occur—births, deaths, weddings, divorces and
medical emergencies—as well as mundane events like Saturday breakfast.
Mary, the 55-year-old
daughter of Donald Trump’s dead older brother, Fred Jr., is the first Trump
family insider to go public about his Donald’s behavior since he announced his
run for the presidency more than five years ago.
Her most chilling anecdote is
about how as Fred Jr. was rushed to a hospital where he died of an
alcoholism-induced heart attack, Donald and his sister Elizabeth went to the
movies. The parents, Fred Sr. and Mary Anne, stayed home.
She describes Donald as
so desperate to avoid his father’s wrath that he never developed a conscience,
only a feral instinct for self-preservation.
Second, Mary is a
clinical psychologist with a doctorate.
Her insights are informed by her deep education into how psyches develop and, in the case of her uncle, how cold, cruel and brutally demanding parenting warps personalities. She describes Donald as so desperate to avoid his father’s wrath—which destroyed her father—that he never developed a conscience, only a feral instinct for self-preservation.
Her insights are informed by her deep education into how psyches develop and, in the case of her uncle, how cold, cruel and brutally demanding parenting warps personalities. She describes Donald as so desperate to avoid his father’s wrath—which destroyed her father—that he never developed a conscience, only a feral instinct for self-preservation.
There’s also a good
reason to trust what Mary writes because the anecdotes and observations in
published excerpts are all consistent with my decades of reporting on Trump as
well as the penetrating works of Timothy O’Brien and Harry Hurt III and
my good friend the late Wayne Barrett, the first
journalist to expose Trump’s con games.
Generations of Schemers
The book, officially
being published July 14, is also consistent with Gwenda Blair’s richly
detailed 2001 book The Trumps.
Blair showed how the Trumps have been schemers all the way back to 1885, when
Friedrich Drumpf fled the German draft, came to America, changed his name, got
rich running bordellos and lied to get his American citizenship.
Friedrich died a
century ago during the flu pandemic that killed 50 million people worldwide.
That his grandson has no understanding of the science of pandemics is itself a
revealing insight into the utter lack of traditional family values in the
self-proclaimed “very stable genius” who now resides in the White House.
The Trump White House,
in a statement, attacked Mary’s book as a work motivated by “financial gain.”
That is a most curious charge to be leveled by Donald Trump’s minions given his
lifelong indulgence and avarice and his endless false boasts that he is a
multibillionaire.
A Wealthy Woman
Mary Trump, by any
standard, is a very rich woman, according to none other than Donald Trump. Back
two decades ago, when he cut off health care to the newborn son of Mary’s
brother, Fred III, Donald did so to leverage a settlement that would entitle
him to more money from his father’s estate.
Today, Mary claims Donald and the rest of the family vastly undercounted the Fred Trump estate, a fraud she says that nullifies a non-disclosure agreement she signed then.
Today, Mary claims Donald and the rest of the family vastly undercounted the Fred Trump estate, a fraud she says that nullifies a non-disclosure agreement she signed then.
Donald, who taunted and
abused his troubled brother, declared back then that the two
children of his late older brother lived luxurious lives thanks to his father.
Mary’s book says Trump often sees people only in monetary terms, something I
observed in many conversations with him.
But that Trump would
dictate to his personal publicists, who are paid by taxpayers as White House
press staff, to denounce making money from a book is a reminder that Donald
Trump lives in the moment and assumes no one remembers the past or checks the
record.
‘Cheating Is a Way of
Life’
Trump, I have often
explained, lies as easily as the rest of us breathe. Mary writes that for her
uncle “cheating is a way of life.” She says he even hired a pal named Joe Shapiro to take his SATs, something hard to accomplish today but easily done in the 1960s when photo IDs were rarities.
She writes of her
joy—something Trump has never known—in collecting 19 boxes of Trump family
financial documents and turning them over to three New York Times reporters.
Those family business records furnished the basis of the newspaper’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2018 expose establishing that Trump and his surviving siblings are, like their father Fred, major league serial tax cheats.
Those family business records furnished the basis of the newspaper’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2018 expose establishing that Trump and his surviving siblings are, like their father Fred, major league serial tax cheats.
She also quotes Trump’s elder sister Maryanne, who did his homework for him, calling Donald “a clown” in 2015 after he announced his campaign for president. Maryanne spent years as a federal judge but resigned to stop the judicial ethics investigation into her role in the years of Trump family tax cheating.
Tried to Block
Publication
Here’s one more compelling
reason to believe Mary Trump. Donald, through his little brother Robert, tried
to block publication of the book, just as he did John Bolton’s revealing look
at Trump’s incompetent and dangerous actions on national security. Both times
he failed.
Like my 2016
biography, The Making of
Donald Trump, his niece’s book is a work of reliable information
that he desperately hopes you won’t read because nothing is more dangerous to
Donald than accuracy and truth.
The family has known
all this for decades. The small band of journalists who have studied him
closely also have known this for decades and reported it.
Now at long last, one
brave Trump family member has stood up to tell the truths that Donald Trump has
strived to kept quiet with bribes, litigation and payoffs.
Pay attention, please.