We'll Soon Know How Much It Sucks to Be Donald Trump's Niece

Politics
We'll Soon Know How Much It Sucks to Be Donald Trump's Niece
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Has a president ever inspired as many tell-all books as Donald Trump? There was Stormy Daniels’s Full Disclosure, Omarosa Manigualt Newman’s Unhinged, and John Bolton’s soon-to-be-released The Room Where It Happened. And now the book is coming from inside the house, so to speak: Trump’s 55-year-old niece, Mary Trump, is planning on giving us all of the good goss about the Trump family in her upcoming tell-all, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man, out on July 28.

Trump, naturally, is not happy about this brazen display of disloyalty at all, threatening to sue his niece for violating a *checks notes* non-disclosure agreement she supposedly signed decades ago, the existence of which certainly points to the Trumps being a very normal and loving family.

That NDA was the result of a bitterly fought lawsuit, filed by Mary and her brother, Fred Trump III, after their grandfather died and they believed they were cut out of his will by Donald and his other siblings. More details, from the Washington Post, emphasis my own:

The future president’s older brother, Fred Jr., went to TWA’s training facility in Kansas City, Mo., and flew briefly as a secondary pilot. He died of alcoholism in 1981 at 42 years old. His children, Fred III and Mary, thought they would one day receive what they believed was their father’s fair share of the family wealth.
But 18 years later, when Fred Sr. died, Donald Trump and his siblings fought to keep most of the money for themselves, according to court records.
Fred III and Mary sued other members of the Trump family in 2000, alleging that their relatives had persuaded Donald Trump’s father to change the will.
Donald Trump responded harshly: He cut off family company payments that had been used to care for Fred III’s son, William, who had cerebral palsy.

The New York Daily News reported on this family drama at the time, and surprise, surprise, Donald comes off as a huge dick. “When [Fred III] sued us, we said, ‘Why should we give him medical coverage?’” Trump said of Fred’s son William. Fred, meanwhile, had some harsh words for his uncle, telling the Daily News, “These are not warm and fuzzy people. They never even came to see William in the hospital. Our family puts the ‘fun’ in dysfunctional.”

As for Mary, she had equally scathing words at the time: “Given this family, it would be utterly naive to say it has nothing to do with money. But for both me and my brother, it has much more to do with that our father be recognized. He existed, he lived, he was their oldest son. And William is my father’s grandson. He is as much a part of that family as anybody else. He desperately needs extra care.” She added, “My aunt and uncles should be ashamed of themselves. I’m sure they are not.”

Almost two decades later, when her uncle won the election, Mary (or at the very least, a Twitter account bearing her name, which now has #blacklivesmatter in its bio), tweeted out, “This is one of the worst nights of my life. What is wrong with this country? I fear the American experiment has failed.”

As her author bio states, Mary is a clinical psychologist and has a doctorate from Adelphi University’s Derner Institute of Advanced Psychological Studies, and has “taught graduate courses in trauma, psychopathology, and developmental psychology,” which certainly makes sense as a profession if you grew up in a dysfunctional family like the Trumps.

According to the New York Times, Mary has already been spilling the beans behind the scenes—she was reportedly one of the main sources for the publication’s investigation into her uncle’s shady taxes and finances, and provided the Times with “confidential tax documents.” And as the description of her book states, Too Much and Never Enough will share “a nightmare of traumas, destructive relationships, and a tragic combination of neglect and abuse” that created her uncle, and will recount “in unsparing detail everything from her uncle Donald’s place in the family spotlight and Ivana’s penchant for regifting to her grandmother’s frequent injuries and illnesses and the appalling way Donald, Fred Trump’s favorite son, dismissed and derided him when he began to succumb to Alzheimer’s.”

While Too Much and Never Enough certainly promises to be full of revelations about the Trump family’s dynamics, what I really want to know is—what will she spill about her cousins, Don Jr., Eric, and Ivanka?

 
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