When Donald Trump was a bratty seven-year-old, his older brother Freddy dumped a bowl of mashed potato on his head during a particularly fractious dinner. The story became a family legend, retold at many a Trump gathering – not so much to tease the man who to many had gone on to become an even bigger brat in adulthood, as to remember and honour Freddy Trump, who died of a heart attack brought on by alcoholism at 42.
The night of April 4th 2017 was no different, writes Freddy’s daughter Mary in her bestselling book, Too Much And Never Enough: How My Family Created The World’s Most Dangerous Man. Except that this family supper was the first to take place at the White House, and that boy was now President of the United States. Nevertheless when Mary’s aunt Maryanne brought up the story again, Donald was as furious as ever, listening “with his arms tightly crossed and a scowl on his face.” Even though he had made the highest office in the land, it still “upset him, as if he were that seven-year-old boy,” she says. “It was extraordinary to see what happened to him when that story was told. He clearly still felt the sting.”
Ask Mary Trump what her uncle will have felt on Biden’s inauguration day, and the 55-year-old psychologist and author is in no doubt. “As though America was dumping a great pile of mashed potato on his head,” she tells me this on a Zoom call from her New York apartment. As “the only Trump who is willing to tell the world about the kind of man he is” Wednesday, she says, was “a day for me to break out the champagne.”
It’s hard to believe they share the same DNA. Engaging and eloquent, Mary Trump is a fantastic interview and an accomplished writer, with an ability to see humor in the darkest of hours. Yet all levity disappears when she tells me how “the damage Donald has done to this country is incalculable. We’re just waiting to find out how much is irreparable.” And having described the horror she felt at sharing a name with the man responsible for that damage in the book, Mary Trump has come to a decision: “I am prepared to change my name if need be”, so worried she is about the connotations it may have in the future.
Of all the revelatory anecdotes in her book – detailing everything from the destructive family relationships that she believes shaped Trump to the casual manner in which her uncle would allegedly dismiss women as “ugly fat slobs” and men as “losers” – the mashed potato story is perhaps the most telling. That he is probably the most famous man in the world right now won’t matter to him, “because ‘losing’ in Donald’s mind is the worst thing.”
The single mother lived in fear of reprisals after publishing the book that made headlines all over the world in July. Some refused to believe her accounts, insisting she was powered by malice or ‘cashing in’, but after a temporary blocking of the book’s publication, the courts ruled that Mary Trump had the right to tell her version of events. “I hired around the clock security for a month,” she explains. “I wasn’t going to take any chances.” But nothing worse came her way beyond ‘When are your 15 minutes going to be up?’, and ‘How dare you be so disloyal to your family’”.
Talk of family loyalty prompts a bemused laugh. For Mary, who supported Hillary Clinton in 2016, the greater loyalty was to her countrymen. “My agenda was simply to help people understand who he is. I wanted people who genuinely thought he was a successful guy before becoming president to know the truth.” Because as his niece “it never occurred to me that anybody would take him seriously. I didn’t realise how thoroughly the truth about Donald was buried outside of New York city.”
To those who kept hoping her uncle would miraculously “become presidential” over the past four years, Mary Trump wanted to stress “how incapable of change” she believes he is.
“With Covid, for example, he would only have had to show some empathy, and wear a mask. That’s it.” Was that refusal to wear a mask pure vanity? “Oh there’s no doubt. But also about a refusal to acknowledge the seriousness of something that was bad, negative, a disease. Donald didn’t want to be associated with those things. And whilst I wasn’t surprised by anything he did – not the building of walls and cages – even I still can’t quite believe that Donald decided to politicize mask wearing.”
This week the US Covid death-toll surpassed 400,000 – that’s “as many lives in one year as America lost in all of World War II”, Biden pointed out in his inauguration speech. Trying to make sense of her uncle’s behaviours takes her readers back to his upbringing. It is both enlightening and sad. Plagued by a series of health problems, Trump’s mother “remained a bystander”, and became “increasingly distant” as her five children grew up, while his father, Fred, refused to punish him for the “selfishness, obstinacy, or cruelty” he displayed as a child, encouraging “a killer instinct” while discouraging qualities “like kindness and empathy.” “As I was writing I realised that I felt enormous amounts of compassion for those children,” she tells me. “They had a horrible childhood and suffered enormously. But do I feel compassion for my uncle now? No.”
That lack of compassion extends to Trump’s inner circle, a circle she was never a part of but has now definitively alienated herself from. “While I blame Donald for a lot of things, I blame his enablers even more, just like I blame my grandfather even more.” Ivanka Trump, whose lavish New Jersey wedding she attended in 2009 “has got where she’s got because of who she’s related to,” says Mary, who believes the U-turn Ivanka was credited with forcing her father to make after the Capitol riots was more likely "down to a team of lawyers stressing the potential legal consequences if he didn't do it." Any hope of her forging a political career now is “just adorable.”
And what of Melania? A video of the stony-faced former First Lady refusing to pose for the cameras in her Kardashian-style Gucci kaftan after touching down in Palm Beach this week has gone viral, with many speculating that it wasn’t just presidential duties she was striding away from, but their marriage. Mary Trump isn’t convinced that’s the case. Does she think he loves her though? “I don’t believe he understands affection or intimacy.”
The reality TV world that was clearly her uncle’s ‘happy place’ – and a world he should have remained confined to – may beckon him back, but not says Mary “if there is any justice in the world.”
Ask the author what she would say to Trump if he suddenly appeared before her now, and she shouts: “‘Help!’ Because he wouldn’t be wearing a mask,” before growing serious again. “No, there are just two things I’d like to say. The first, a question: ‘Donald, what movie did you go and see while my dad was dying alone in the hospital?’ And then I’d say: ‘Your father would be horrified by what a loser you turned out to be. Because for him that would be worse than anything.”
Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man is out now, published by Simon & Schuster, £20.
