Trump Niece’s Tell-All: Donald Is a Narcissist and Son of a Sociopath

Kim Honey | July 7th, 2020

President Donald J. Trump learned to lie and self-aggrandize at a young age in order to win his father’s approval and avoid his wrath, Mary J. Trump writes in her new tell-all memoir. Photo: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post/Getty Images

It’s been alleged and debated for years, and now it’s confirmed: U.S. President Donald Trump is a narcissist who “embraces cheating as a way of life,” according to a new tell-all memoir by his niece.

Mary Trump, daughter of Donald’s older brother, Fred, should know. In addition to being privy to family secrets for more than 50 years, she is a licenced clinical psychologist with a PhD from Adelphi University. In other words, she knows the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders inside and out.

And Mary, whose manuscript Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man is leaking out everywhere two weeks before its July 14 publication date, says Donald meets all nine criteria of a narcissist.

“The fact is Donald’s pathologies are so complex and his behaviours so often inexplicable that coming up with an accurate and comprehensive diagnosis would require a full battery of psychological and neurophysical tests that he’ll never sit for,” Mary writes.

She blames Fred Trump Sr., a domineering man who belittled his sons — particularly her father, Fred Jr., an alcoholic who died of a heart attack at 43 — so much so that Donald learned to lie to convince people he “was better than he actually was.”

“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,” she says in the book.

She also uses the “S” word to describe her grandfather. “That’s what sociopaths do: they co-opt others and use them toward their own ends — ruthlessly and efficiently, with no tolerance for dissent or resistance.”

In the book, Mary, 55, reveals she gave 19 boxes of tax documents to New York Times reporter Susanne Craig — a former Globe and Mail reporter who was born in Calgary — who, along with David Barstow and Russ Buettner, won a 2019 Pulitzer Prize for their 18-month investigation into the president’s claims he was a self-made billionaire, which revealed “an empire riddled with tax dodges.”

The Trump family has been trying to quash the publication of Too Much and Never Enough in court for weeks, but a judge ruled July 1 it could go ahead, since its publisher, Simon & Schuster, was not party to the confidentiality agreement Mary signed 20 years ago after she and her brother, Fred Trump III, contested Fred Sr.’s will.

The judge is expected to rule on that allegation, central to the family’s case, although Mary and her lawyers argued the agreement was based on “fraud” and that the book had “deep national relevance.”

The book, which is partly a family history and partly an analysis of Donald’s personality, includes other nuggets:

Donald cheated on the university admission test called the SAT, hiring someone else to write it for him and using that high mark to get into Wharton, the University of Pennsylvania’s blue-ribbon business school, which he has bragged about being “the hardest school to get into, the best school in the world” and “super genius stuff.”
Donald’s sister, federal judge Maryanne Trump Berry — who retired after the New York Times Trump-family financial exposé — thought he was unfit for office. “He’s a clown — this will never happen,” Mary says her aunt told her during a lunch date in 2015, after Donald announced he would run for president.
She lays the blame for her father’s slide into alcoholism at the feet of the family, saying her dad was a sensitive, adventurous soul who was mocked relentlessly by Fred Sr. Donald “had plenty of time to learn from watching Fred humiliate” him, Mary writes. When her father, who turned his back on the family business to become a pilot, had to go to the hospital in 1981, the family sent him there alone. Fred Jr. died the next day.

Promoted as an “authoritative portrait of Donald J. Trump and the family that made him,” the book promises to explain how the president became the man “who now threatens the world’s health, economic security and social fabric.”

“I’d Never Forgive Trump” Writes Michelle Obama in New Memoir

Wherever Donald Trump Goes, Frenzied Outrage is Sure to Follow