Inside the 'dysfunctional family' that gave us Trump, according to his niece

Happy families are all alike, Leo Tolstoy observed, while every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Then there are the Trumps, who sound like they were incapable of getting through a Thanksgiving or Christmas without blood on the walls.

In a tell-all memoir Mary L Trump, psychologist and niece of Donald Trump, portrays the US president’s father, Fred, as the domineering, stone-hearted patriarch of a “malignantly dysfunctional family” that she says explains much about Donald’s empathy issues.

“The atmosphere of division my grandfather created in the Trump family is the water in which Donald has always swum, and division continues to benefit him at the expense of everybody else,” she writes in Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created The World’s Most Dangerous Man, to be published later this month.

“It’s wearing the country down, just as it did my father, changing us even as it leaves Donald unaltered. It’s weakening our ability to be kind or believe in forgiveness, concepts that have never had any meaning for him.”

Mary L Trump, 55, is the daughter of Trump’s older brother, Freddy, who died in 1981 aged 42 after a struggle with alcoholism. The president has identified his brother’s experience as one of the reasons he does not drink.

The Trumps took sibling rivalry to a new level, the president’s niece writes. “Even for the 1950s, the family was deeply split along gender lines,” she says, noting that Fred and his wife Mary were “never partners” and “the girls were her purview, the boys his”.

Donald saw his younger brother, Robert, as weaker and relished tormenting him. He repeatedly hid Robert’s favourite toys, a set of trucks that were a Christmas gift, and pretended he had no idea where they were.

The author writes: “The last time it happened, when Robert’s tantrum spiraled out of control, Donald threatened to dismantle the trucks in front of him if he didn’t stop crying. Desperate to save them, Robert ran to his mother.

“Mary’s solution was to hide the trucks in the attic, effectively punishing Robert, who’d done nothing wrong, and leaving Donald feeling invincible. He wasn’t yet being rewarded for selfishness, obstinacy or cruelty, but he wasn’t being punished for those flaws, either.”

At one point Donald, who was tormenting Robert again, was given a taste of his own medicine, according to the book. “When Freddy, at fourteen, dumped a bowl of mashed potatoes on his then seven-year-old brother’s head, it wounded Donald’s pride so deeply that he’d still be bothered by it when [their sister] Maryanne brought it up in her toast at the White House birthday dinner in 2017.”

Family dinners were often an awkward affair with certain subjects – such as where babies come from – taboo. “Table etiquette at my grandparents’ house was strict, and there were certain things Fred did not tolerate. ‘Keep your elbows off the table, this is not a horse’s stable’ was a frequent refrain, and Fred, knife in hand, would tap its handle against the forearm of any transgressor.”

Fred, “a high-functioning sociopath”, lived by rules of “never show weakness” and “never apologize”, his granddaughter writes. If Freddy ever did say, “Sorry, Dad,” his father “would mock him. Fred wanted his oldest son to be a ‘killer’.”

Donald took the lesson to heart, Mary L Trump continues. “The lesson he learned, at its simplest, was that it was wrong to be like Freddy: Fred didn’t respect his oldest son, so neither would Donald.”

Fred’s sons frequently lied to him. For Freddy, “lying was defensive – not simply a way to circumvent his father’s disapproval or to avoid punishment, as it was for the others, but a way to survive”; for Donald, “lying was primarily a mode of self-aggrandizement meant to convince other people he was better than he actually was”.

Things hardly improved when the siblings reached adulthood. Freddy hated working for his father’s property business and eventually quit to become an airline pilot. Fred Trump had little compassion for his son. As employees look on, he once shouted at Freddy: “Donald is worth ten of you.”

Donald did not endure similar scorn because “his personality served his father’s purpose”, Mary L Trump writes. “That’s what sociopaths do: they co-opt others and use them toward their own ends – ruthlessly and efficiently, with no tolerance for dissent or resistance.”

When Freddy went to hospital in 1981 on what would be the night of his death, no family members accompanied him, according to the book. Indeed, Donald, for his part, went to a cinema.

Asked to comment on the book on behalf of the president, the White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said Tuesday: “I have yet to see the book, but it is a book of falsehoods.”

Even the genesis of the book has exposed a family riven by factions at each other’s throats, however. Robert Trump, the president’s younger brother, sued Mary L Trump to block its publication, citing a 20-year-old agreement between family members that emerged from another dispute over Fred Trump’s inheritance. A New York appellate court cleared the way for the book’s publication.

When Donald ran for president, his sister, Maryanne, who used to do his homework for him, took the view: “He’s a clown – this will never happen.” Mary L Trump writes that she turned down an invitation to attend her uncle’s election night party in New York in 2016, convinced she “wouldn’t be able to contain my euphoria when [Hillary] Clinton’s victory was announced”.

But in fact she found herself wandering about her house a few hours after Trump’s victory was announced, fearful that voters “had chosen to turn this country into a macro version of my malignantly dysfunctional family”. Or as the poet Philip Larkin warned: “Man hands on misery to man./ It deepens like a coastal shelf./ Get out as early as you can,/ And don’t have any kids yourself.”