In one particularly disturbing scene from a trip to Mar-a-Lago, Mary recounts how when she was 29 and wearing a bathing suit and a pair of shorts to lunch at the resort, her uncle looked up at her and remarked, “Holy shit, Mary. You’re stacked.”
“Donald!” Marla Maples said to her then-husband, slapping him on the arm.
“I was twenty-nine and not easily embarrassed, but my face reddened, and I suddenly felt self-conscious,” Mary recounts. “I pulled my towel around my shoulders. It occurred to me that nobody in my family, outside of my parents and brother, had ever seen me in a bathing suit.”
The Daily Beast first reported that the book would see Mary revealing herself as playing a critical role in helping The New York Times print its Pulitzer Prize-winning bombshell investigation of the president’s taxes, including how he was involved in “fraudulent” tax schemes and received more than $400 million (adjusted for inflation) from his father’s real-estate empire. As she reveals in the book, Mary supplied the paper with Fred Trump Sr.’s tax returns and other confidential financial information.
The book, obtained by The Daily Beast, opens with a family dinner at the White House in April 2017 to celebrate the birthdays for Mary’s aunts, Maryanne and Elizabeth.
As Mary was walking through the halls of The White House, she recalls passing life-sized paintings of former first ladies. “I stopped in front of Hillary Clinton’s portrait and stood silently for a minute. I wondered again how this could have happened.”
At the dinner, just a few months after her uncle had moved into the White House, Mary recounts how Donald gestured towards Eric Trump’s wife, his daughter-in-law. “Lara, there,” he said. “I barely even knew who the fuck she was, honestly, but then she gave a great speech during the campaign in Georgia supporting me.” The couple had been together for eight years.
Don Jr. went on to give a toast to his father, at which point Mary got a waiter’s attention. “Can I have some more wine?” she asked. When the server returned with two bottles, and asked red or white, Mary responded “yes, please.”
The dinner wrapped in two hours and, as Mary notes, while it was twice as long as Thanksgiving or Christmas at her grandparents’ house, it was less time than Donald spent at a dinner with Kid Rock two weeks later.
The book also publishes intimate and damning thoughts from retired federal court judge Maryanne Trump Barry about her brother. “The only time Donald went to church was when the cameras were there. It’s mind boggling. He has no principles. None!”
“He’s a clown,” Maryanne allegedly confided in her niece. “This will never happen again.”
Mary says she asked her aunt, “Does anybody even believe the bullshit that he’s a self-made man? What has he even accomplished on his own?”
“Well,” Maryanne responded, “he has had five bankruptcies.”
Maryanne also reportedly lashed out at Donald for using the death of her other brother, Fred Jr., for political gain when addressing the opioid crisis. “He’s using your father’s memory for political purposes,” Mary says Maryanne told her, “and that’s a sin, especially since Freddy should have been the star of the family.”
When white evangelicals such as Jerry Falwell Jr. started endorsing Donald for president, Maryanne, a devout Catholic, allegedly remarked: “What the fuck is wrong with them?”
“The only time Donald went to church was when the cameras were there. It’s mind boggling. He has no principles. None!”
Mary also relays details from a combative phone call Maryanne had with her presidential brother, shortly after the election, in which Trump asked his older sister to assess his performance, seemingly assuming her response would be unequivocally positive.
“When she said, ‘Not that good,’ Donald immediately went on offense,” Mary writes.
“‘That’s nasty,’ he said. She could see the sneer on his face. Then, seemingly apropos of nothing, he asked her, ‘Maryanne, where would you be without me?’” The jab, Mary writes, was “a smug reference to the fact that Maryanne owed her first federal judgeship to Donald because Roy Cohn had done him (and her) a favor all those years ago.”
Mary continued: “My aunt has always insisted that she’d earned her position on the bench entirely on her own merits, and she shot back at him, “If you say that one more time, I will level you.”
In another disturbing anecdote, Mary Trump writes that her father, Fred Trump Jr.—a heavy drinker who ultimately quit working for his father in favor of a job as a pilot for Trans World Airlines—died alone at the hospital in 1981 following an alcohol-induced heart attack. He was just 42.
The night his family sent him to the hospital alone, President Trump had gone to see a movie, she said. “Mary Trump describes her uncle as a man who practiced cheating ‘as a way of life,’ even allegedly hiring someone to take the SAT for him.”
Mary Trump also contends the president is a narcissist, meeting all nine criteria for the personality disorder, and potentially incapable of surviving “in the real world.”
“Donald’s pathologies are so complex and his behaviors 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,” she writes.
She calls her uncle his father’s “monster—the only child of his who mattered to him—[who] would ultimately be rendered unlovable by the very nature of Fred’s preference for him. In the end, there would be no love for Donald at all, just his agonizing thirsting for it.
“After the election, Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong-Un, and Mitch McConnell, all of whom bear more than a passing psychological resemblance to Fred, recognized in a way others should have but did not that Donald’s checkered personal history and his unique personality flaws make him extremely vulnerable to manipulation by smarter, more powerful men,” Mary writes. “His pathologies have rendered him so simple-minded that it takes nothing more than repeating to him the things he says to and about himself dozens of times a day—he’s the smartest, the greatest, the best—to get him to do whatever they want.”
[…]
Growing up, Donald Trump sought to win his imperious father’s approval, lying as a means of “self-aggrandizement” and seeking to differentiate himself from Fred Jr., whom their father saw as weak. “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 writes, according to an excerpt reported by The Washington Post. She recalled how Donald Trump would hide his younger brother Robert’s toys and threatened to destroy him when he wouldn’t “stop crying” over it.
[…]
The Trump niece’s tell-all was the subject of a quick and vicious court battle, centered around Mary having signed a nondisclosure agreement with the family in 2001 as part of a settlement over her and her brother, Fred III, disputing the disposition of their grandfather Fred Sr.’s estate.
In the book, Trump details that fight over the elder Trump’s will, and suggests her aunts and uncles lied about the size of the estate in order to stiff her and her brother. She recalls lawyers arriving at a settlement figure “based on suspect numbers,” and her counsel informing her that “We know they’re lying, but it’s [a he-said, she-said]. Besides, your grandfather’s estate is only worth around thirty million dollars.” She added: “That was only a tenth of the estimate Robert had given The New York Times in 1999, which itself would turn out to be only 25 percent of the estate’s actual value.”
Maddow had a long segment last night featuring a bunch of other amazing anecdotes including a bit about how Mary was going to ghostwrite one of his books but couldn’t figure out what he really did all day.
Yikes. I guess I’m going to have to read this one …
