Mary L. Trump

"To make it worse... for Donald, when he was very young, 2 1/2 to 3 1/2 approximately... his mother, who was really his only source of human connection and comfort... got very ill and was, to all intents and purposes, absent from his life. So he suddenly found himself, so young, basically alone in the world because my grandfather was incapable of filling the void left by my grandmother's absence. ...Because of the very vulnerable age he was [at] when she became sick, I think on some level he experienced that as a betrayal. She didn't have the capacity to heal the rift, even after she was [physically] able to, and I think that stuck with him..."

"[P]erhaps the final betrayal was when he was sent to the military academy because he was behaving so horribly and nobody could control him... [[w:Mary Anne MacLeod Trump|[M]y grandmother]] told me much later that she was relieved when he left."

"I can't speak to whether he hates women, but what I can say because I grew up with it, is that women were... considered second class citizens. ...[I]t explains his casual cruelty to women and... the ease with which he objectifies them. ...[H]e certainly doesn't seem to ever have had any real deep emotional connection with wom[en], or well I guess with anybody, quite honestly. But he objectifies women and uses them in a way he certainly doesn't do with men."

"My Dad was incapable of being what my grandfather wanted and needed him to be. So that was... a lesson that Donald took to heart. He understood on a deep level that to be like Freddy, my Dad, to be kind, to admit to mistakes, to have interests outside of the business and making money, was essentially to be destroyed."

"Donald learned that you could never admit you're wrong. That was considered a weakness and we've seen that, starkly, with the Covid 19 situation. He didn't do anything right away, and then when it was almost past time to do the right thing that would have meant admitting that he hadn't done the right thing in the first place. ...[T]hat wasn't going to happen, so the situation got worse and worse... [C]losely related to that was this idea of the power of positive thinking, which my grandfather really bought into... [E]ssentially, he took it to such an extreme that it became a kind of toxic positivity."

"Donald learned that in order to be, not just protected from his father but favored by his father, he needed to be this larger than life, great, fantastic... Part of it was the toxic positivity, and part of it was just... having to convince Fred Trump Sr. that... Donald belonged on the planet and... should survive, and should succeed, and he needed to make it clear to Fred that Donald could be of use to him."

"Money is the only currency in the family. ...It literally stands in for everything else: love, affection, respect. It's understandable that... my family members would cling to it so desperately, and want to acquire it."

"Once my Dad was out of the family business and was branded a failure, he and anyone connected to him (which would have been me) no longer mattered. So there was this level of thoughtlessness around us. So luckily we were able to laugh about it, because it's really not very funny, although some of the presents were quite hysterical... to have your uncle and his wife, who were extraordinarily wealthy, give you a 3-pack of underwear for Christmas... was a bit beyond the pale... My mom... was even lower on the totem pole than I was... Donald didn't even recognize that they were presents that he had given me."

"I do feel that I have to do whatever I can to make sure that people are informed and understand exactly what's going on with this man."

"I was actually a bit surprised at how surprised people were by the SAT story when... the book first came out, just as I was surprised at the reaction to... his use of racist and antisemitic language because, look what he does... It shouldn't surprise anybody that it started that long ago,.. especially since my grandfather also believed that you do whatever you need to do to succeed: cheat, lie, work with the mafia, whatever."

"This is a man who bankrupted casinos, which is a hard thing to do, and then was given a TV show in the early 2000s that portrayed him as this real estate mastermind. So... every failure along the way has been met with more money thrown at him by the banks, more glowing media coverage about what a brash, brilliant guy he is. ...It's taken a lot of people to help him fail upward. ...[H]e may be useless, but he's got a lot of power. They're willing to put up with, or overlook, or ignore entirely his behavior, his crassness and his incompetence."

"It boils down, really, to a simple message. Donald isn't going to get better... he's going to get worse. That should make people think long and hard about how they cast their next vote."

"I knew this simply because of my family knowledge, and as a . There is no bottom... to... how bad this can get, to how egregious his behavior can be."

"[W]e've already seen... that he's capable of... either acting badly or refusing to act in a way that would be appropriate to protecting the country, and the people in this country. So... as we go, and maybe the worse he's doing in the polls or the more threatened he feels, and the more stress he's under... There are going to be consequences to that, unfortunately. I don't know what they are, but we need to be prepared."

"There's a big difference between having compassion and understanding for what somebody went through as a child, but that changes once you become an adult human being. Plenty of people have had horrible childhoods, and grow up to have empathy for other people and to care about doing good in the world. Donald is not one of those people, and he needs to be held accountable."

"In administration after administration and across centuries and decades, crimes- against decency, against democracy, and against humanity- have been committed by presidents, legislators at all levels of government, the judiciary, and ordinary Americans without punishment, reprisal, or justice for the victims. Then Donald came along and left them all in the dust."

"Donald was incompetent, but others in Donald's administration were anything but. What they built was a lean and ruthless machine for advancing fascism. With the help of some luck, complicit institutions, an unprepared media, and a party of willing converts, that machine largely succeeded."

"Ms. Trump, who at 55 has long been estranged from President Trump, is the first member of the Trump clan to break ranks with her relatives by writing a book about their secrets."

"Mary Trump’s father, Fred Jr.... died of an alcohol-related illness in 1981, when she was 16 years old. ...[S]he infuses the volume with her background as a clinical psychologist to analyze her uncle. ...Decades ago ...Trump asked her to help write his book The Art of the Comeback. She says she did research ...but ...the publisher eventually sought someone with more experience ...Mary Trump says, she was told that she was told that her grandfather’s estate was worth $30 million. But after being contacted by a reporter for the New York Times in 2017, she retrieved boxes of financial papers that she says showed the estate was actually worth $1 billion. She writes that she became a key source for the newspaper’s 2018 investigation of the family finances, which won a Pulitzer Prize."