Donald Trump and the smarter sister who holds the key to the family secrets

“How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child!” cried King Lear. But what about a thankless niece?

That’s what President Trump must be asking himself after Mary Trump makes some explosive allegations about Uncle Donald in her new memoir, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man.

With a title like that, no wonder the President’s family tried to stop it from being published. But they have failed, so far – and now it’s due to come out next week, subject to further legal attempts to gag it.

In the book, 55-year-old Mary alleges her uncle suffered “child abuse” at the hands of his father, Fred Trump Senior; that “love meant nothing” to his the man who built up the huge family fortune and bailed out his son when he almost went bankrupt. Mary is the daughter of Fred Trump Jr, the President’s older brother, who should have been the heir to the Trump empire, but died in 1981, aged 42, from the effects of alcoholism.

Mary – who, until now, has avoided the public eye and has not spoken publicly about her family in decades – further alleges that, when Donald Trump’s mother fell ill when he was only two, he was left with “total dependence on a caregiver [Fred Sr], who also caused him terror”.

For the notoriously thin-skinned President, these allegations will give him major palpitations. The father he revered is now – according to allegations made by his niece who wasn’t born at the time in question – responsible for turning Trump into a narcissist with “antisocial personality disorder, which in its most severe form is generally considered sociopathy”.

In the allegation that will annoy Trump the most, his niece also claims he paid a friend to take his exams to get into the respected Wharton School of Business in the mid-1960s, of which Trump is keen of boasting about being an alumnus. Sarah Matthews, deputy White House Press Secretary, has since called the suggestion “absurd” and “completely false”.

Mary also claims that, when she was 29, her uncle creepily cried “Holy s---, Mary, you’re stacked!” when he saw her wearing a swimsuit at Mar-a-Lago, his Florida outpost.

If the book is to be believed, there’s no love lost either between Donald and his oldest sister, Maryanne Trump Barry, 83, a retired federal judge. She is said to have mocked his presidential run, dubbing him “a clown”.

When Mary asked her aunt whether anyone could believe Trump was a self-made man, Maryanne allegedly said: “Well, he has had five bankruptcies…”

Maryanne, a Catholic convert, was, it is claimed, particularly angered by Trump being endorsed by leading Christians. “What the f---  is wrong with them?” she allegedly said. “The only time Donald went to church is when the cameras were there. It’s mind-boggling. He has no principles. None!”

She was also said to be incensed by Donald using the death of his brother, Fred, to talk with assumed authority about America’s opioid crisis. Maryanne allegedly said: “He’s using your father’s memory for political purposes, and that’s a sin, especially since Freddy should’ve been the star of the family.”

Whatever the truth of Mary Trump’s allegations, there’s no denying that Maryanne Trump Barry is an extremely sharp cookie. Born in 1937, she is nine years older than the President and is the oldest of the five children of Fred Trump Sr and Mary Anne Trump – the Hebrides-born matriarch after whom she is named.

Mary Anne clearly doted on little Donald. In the Netflix documentary series, Trump: An American Dream, she gleefully recounts the story of him gluing together his brother’s building bricks when they were children. In her new book, Mary Trump alleges that, when Donald was a boy, he hid his baby brother Robert’s adored Tonka trucks and pretended he didn’t know where they were. When Robert had a tantrum over this, Donald threatened to tear them apart. Rather than admonishing little Donald, his mother hid the Tonka trucks in the attic. Robert was punished for his brother’s naughtiness. And so Donald learnt how to get away with outrageous behaviour.

If Maryanne had been born a boy, she would have been groomed by her autocratic father to take over the Trump construction empire. Denied that opportunity, despite having the biggest brain of the siblings, she turned to the law, rising to become a United States Circuit Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, appointed by the then president, Bill Clinton.

Like Donald Trump, she went to Kew-Forest School near the Trump family home in Queens, New York. After that, their educational paths diverged as Maryanne blazed an intellectual trail through top universities: a BA cum laude from Mount Holyoke College, followed by an MA in law from New York’s prestigious Columbia University and a Doctor of Jurisprudence degree from Hofstra University School of Law.

So, while Donald Trump gradually took over the reins at his father’s property business, Maryanne rose steadily through the legal ranks, going from a lawyer in New Jersey to a judge and on to the top of the American legal profession.

If you’re a judge in New Jersey, you come up against scary characters who wouldn’t be out of place on The Sopranos. She bravely presided over the conviction of Louis Manna, one of the most terrifying members of the Genovese mob family. She remained at the top of the legal tree right up until February 2017, when she was almost 80, just as her brother became the most powerful man in the world.

Through the Seventies, she was the most successful of the Trumps. Poor Fred Jr was failing to battle alcoholism. Donald’s other older sister, Elizabeth Trump Grau, born in 1942, worked for Chase Manhattan Bank. The youngest child, Robert Trump (the one with the missing Tonka trucks), born in 1948, has had a quiet life working in property.

And, while Maryanne was making name for herself in legal circles in the Eighties, Donald was faltering. Following the death of Fred Jr, he may have been Number One Son – but he was also in deep trouble. While Fred Sr amassed a mammoth family fortune by building thousands of houses and apartments, Donald was determined, against his father’s instincts, to go into the sexier business of casinos.

In 1987, Donald Trump broke ground on the enormous Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City. But he put way too much money into the project for it to be recouped from the gamblers. Only a year after it opened, in 1990, the Taj Mahal was bankrupt. According to Trump: An American Dream, Fred Trump Sr had to step in personally to subsidise his son’s failed venture to prevent its full implosion. Trump then bought back the Taj Mahal in 1996.

Maryanne has had a few slips along the way. In 1980, she divorced her first husband, David Desmond, by whom she had her son, David Desmond, a psychologist in New York. Her second, John Barry, a New Jersey lawyer like her, died in 2000. She got her own chunky share of the inheritance from her father – enough to give $4m to the Catholic Fairfield Institution in 2016.

We’re shaped by our parents, of course. But we’re also shaped by our siblings. When it comes to the Trump siblings, you can see how Maryanne Trump Barry, the straight-A student and top lawyer, looked down on her bragging, less academic brother. That view only intensified when Donald began to take over the family business, after the tragedy of Fred Jr, and proceeded to sail close to the wind in Atlantic City, only to be bailed out by Daddy.

Relations appear to have only got worse with the death of Fred Trump Sr in 1999, aged 93. Rows over his vast will raged for years. In fact, the new book by Mary Trump grew out of those rows. When her grandfather died, Mary Trump alleges she was given “false valuations” from other family members to work out how much she should get from Fred Sr’s estate. She claims not only that she was short-changed, but also that her brother, Fred Trump III was deprived of the full inheritance that could have done much to alleviate the condition of his son, William Trump, who has cerebral palsy.

It was then, two decades ago, that Mary signed a non-disclosure agreement about the disputes over her grandfather’s estate. By publishing this book, her Trump relations maintain, she has broken that nondisclosure agreement.

As is so often the case, a mega-rich family have fallen out disastrously over the thing they’ve got too much of – money. They say blood is thicker than water. But bad blood is the most powerful – and toxic – fluid of them all.

Harry Mount is editor of The Oldie