Mary Trump last saw her uncle at the White House in 2017 at a birthday party thrown for aunt Maryanne
Credit: Avary Trump via AP
The last time Mary Trump saw her uncle was at a birthday party thrown for her aunt at the White House in 2017. “Donald was on the diet coke, of course. I was on the wine,” Ms Trump recalls.
“I only went for Maryanne (Trump Barry), I wouldn’t have gone otherwise,” she says, alluding to the complicated Trump family dynamic. “Needless to say it was very, very stressful.”
It was by then months into Donald Trump’s first term but Mary was still struggling to comprehend how the “high-functioning sociopath” she had grown to both fear and loathe in equal measures had made it to America’s highest office.
The staunch Democrat’s relationship with Mr Trump — the younger brother of her late father Fred Jnr — had been fraught for a number of years, but not long after the awkward final gathering it broke down completely.
The 55-year-old clinical psychologist became the first of Mr Trump’s relatives to publicly break ranks with the president, and did so in spectacular fashion. She wrote a scathing tell-all book about “the world’s most dangerous man”, who would seemingly stop at nothing to win. She is now working on a second.
(L-R) Robert Trump, Fred Trump, Donald Trump, Ivana Trump, Elizabeth Trump, Mary Anne Trump and Roy Cohn attend 38th Annual Horatio Alger Awards Dinner on May 10, 1985 at the Waldorf Hotel in New York City
Credit: Getty
Her intimate understanding of his upbringing, coupled with her training, gives her unparalleled insight into her uncle’s thinking and an uncanny ability to predict what he might do next.
While Mr Trump may no longer occupy the White House, he continues to hold an vice-like grip on the Republican Party and is in a position to shape the direction of the country like no former president before him.
“That very decision affects so many people,” Ms Trump told The Telegraph this week by phone from her home in Long Island, New York. As a liberal who has advocated for black and LGBT rights, she hopes — for her sake and the sake of the nation — he retires quietly from politics.
She believes that privately he will be smarting from his recent election loss, despite still not being able to acknowledge it publicly.
Mr Trump has hinted at plans to run again in 2024, but nothing more concrete. Ms Trump believes he will tease the idea, but ultimately won’t see it through. “He’s terrified of losing and he won’t want to face that possibility again,” she says. ”In my family, losing was simply unacceptable.”
Ms Trump writes in her book, Too Much and Never Enough, of how her grandfather taught his children that weakness was a fatal flaw. If they were ever to get ahead in life, he said, they would have to stamp it out.
Real estate magnate Fred Snr liked to pit them against one another to win his approval — and ultimately his love — creating “Lord of the Flies-like” environment in which only the toughest thrived, she writes in her book, which sold a record-breaking 950,000 copies in its first day.
Mary Trump published bestselling book Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man last year
Credit: Simon & Schuster
“He’s going to pretend to run for a while so that he still has leverage with voters who are stupid enough — and I’m sorry to use that word — to give their money to Donald,” she says.
Mr Trump, who leaves the White House in much more dire financial straits than he entered, has raised more than $150 million (£108m) since the November election canvassing for donations from supporters.
She is speaking out now after filing a lawsuit against Mr Trump and his siblings, alleging they worked together to cut her out of Fred Snr’s will in 1999, depriving her of what she sees as her rightful share of untold millions. The suit paints a picture of a deeply dysfunctional family, one which seemed to value money above almost all else.
Ms Trump, whose quiet life in Long Island with her daughter is a million miles from the former president’s luxury Trump Towers in Manhattan, has not spoken to her uncle in years.
They had been close at various times during her 20s and 30s (when she was 29, Ms Trump was briefly hired by Donald to write one of his books). They planned a research trip to Mar-a-Lago, so she could see the Palm Beach mansion firsthand.
It would never come to fruition, however, and relations between her and the family became acrimonious following the death of Fred Snr.
Donald Trump with his mother Maryanne and father Fred Snr in the early Nineties
Credit: Judie Burstein/Globe Photos/REX/Shutterstock
Does she think he will remain in Florida, where he has set up home post-presidency, or return to New York, where he was born, raised, and made his millions in property?
“The thing about Donald is that it doesn’t matter where he is,” Ms Trump says. “He doesn’t actually know New York because he went everywhere in a limousine, he’s always inside somewhere. It’s not like he’s walking the streets and going to the new restaurants or Broadway shows. He’s most at home on the golf course.
“Besides, we hate him in New York, and he knows he’s not welcome back — I mean 90 per cent of people in his own zipcode voted against him.”
Ms Trump believes the former president has few people left from his inner circle whom he can still rely on. “I mean there’s Donnie (Donald Trump Jnr), but that’s about it now."
Wife Melania, she predicts, will stick with him for now. "She went into it eyes wide open," she says.
She sees today’s Republican Party as the “anti-democratic” party which has become more like a cult of personality.
“Republicans failed at every single opportunity to hold him (Trump) accountable and because they refused to distance themselves from him he continues to remain relevant,” she says. “He is basically still in control of the party.”
The GOP is caught in something of a catch-22 conundrum, she believes, unable to win without him at the top of the ticket, but unable to win with him either.
Former President Donald Trump speaks at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Orlando last month
Credit: Reuters
Ms Trump thinks, ultimately, he will be a one-term president, pointing to a poll conducted at last month’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). “It was heartening to see only 55 per cent of attendees saying they would vote for him again,” he says. “CPAC is the basiest of his base, so he really should have got 95 per cent.”
She sees two reasons for this, the first being that even some of the most loyal Trump voters grew weary of the daily drama that came to characterise his presidency, and the second being his handling of the pandemic. "Joe Biden has reminded people what good governance looks like, and his work on Covid has shown them what happened the last year wasn’t inevitable,” she says.
She goes so far as to call Mr Trump a “mass murderer”, saying he is responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans to the virus. “He shouldn’t have even been allowed to run after what happened. He should be tried at The Hague,” she says, her voice hoarse — an unexpected reaction to her first dose of the Covid-19 vaccine.
She also casts blame on the media for their coverage of her uncle’s candidacy in the run up to the 2016 election.
“It was horrifying how the American media sought to normalise him,” she says. “They desperately needed this thoroughly repugnant and unqualified person to be presidential, believing that somehow he could — or would — change after 50 years of being a completely disgraceful human being.”
Legacy newspapers like the New York Times and Washington Post came under sharp criticism for failing to foresee Mr Trump’s win, which many saw as a symptom of the myopic view of the largely liberal, white, middle class newsroom.
“They then did this thing of tracking down voters in diners across the Midwest to check in," she says. "They bent over backwards to create this myth that they voted for him out on some economic insecurity, which is simply code for white supremacy."
She thinks pundits did not appreciate the lengths he would go to stay in power and that the storming of the Capitol on January 6 was entirely predictable. “It’s taken years and years for most outlets to realise what I’ve known for quite some time,” she says with a fatigue in her voice.
She says she has always failed to see his appeal, and cannot understand why 74 million people voted for him last year: “I’ve tried to think of one redeeming characteristic and I just can’t. I don’t understand it at all."
For now, Ms Trump is busy writing her second book, The Reckoning, which will “examine America’s national trauma” and the mental health crisis she says Mr Trump’s administration induced following the onset of the pandemic.
“We’re going to be in very bad shape for a while,” she predicts. “People could experience trauma and depression, both from Covid and from the politically fraught environment in America.
“It has been very difficult to write about trauma while traumatised,” she says, joking she has suffered from both PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) and Post Trump Stress Disorder.
Meanwhile, her legal suit rumbles on. A New York judge is currently assessing whether her claim is within the statute of limitations, which is two years from the time a victim “discovered the fraud, or could with reasonable diligence have discovered it.”
Mr Trump and his siblings argue she could have sued much earlier based on documents they handed over in other legal disputes.
The ex-president has denied the accusations, accusing Mary of trying to cash in on the family name and sink him with lawsuits.
Ms Trump believes if it does reach court, she has a “very strong case”. And even if her lawsuit comes to nothing, Ms Trump says she has “old tax documents” that could help prosecutors in the criminal case.
“I have the documentation that will help them — documents that show patterns of his financial behaviour,” she says.
Mr Trump is also facing more serious criminal charges of bank and tax fraud, as well as a civil lawsuit over historic allegations of rape.
He has denied both the rape and tax fraud allegations, calling the latter "fake news".
“My philosophy on this is that it is not going to be one thing that brings him down,” says Ms Trump. “It’s going to be many things and they can’t happen sequentially. They have to happen at the same time.
“It’s hard not to see it as poetic justice.”
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