Mary Trump can now promote tell-all book after judge lifts restraining order

A judge in New York state has ruled that Mary Trump, the niece of Donald Trump, can publicly promote her book about the president's psychological state.

The order blocking Ms Trump dates back to 2001, when she and other family members signed a nondisclosure agreement that the president’s brother Robert said prevented her from discussing the book in public. He has filed multiple lawsuits to try and block the publication of the book, Too Much and Never Enough.

However, on the eve of the book’s release, Poughkeepsie judge Hal B Greenwald decided that the restraining order did not stand, saying it counted as a restraint on protected speech.

“Notwithstanding that the book has been published and distributed in great quantities, to enjoin Mary L Trump at this juncture would be incorrect and serve no purpose,” he wrote. “It would be moot.”

Ms Trump’s lawyer, Theodore Boutrous Jr, said Judge Greenwald “got it right ... in rejecting the Trump family’s effort to squelch Mary Trump’s core political speech on important issues of public concern".

“The First Amendment forbids prior restraints because they are intolerable infringements on the right to participate in democracy. Tomorrow, the American public will be able to read Mary’s important words for themselves,” he added.

Ms Trump’s book is the second critical volume in recent months that Mr Trump and his associates have tried to block. Former adviser John Bolton’s The Room Where it Happened, an account of life inside the Trump White House, was delayed several times before its release.

Too Much and Never Enough, released today, is published by Schuster & Schuster, who also published Mr Bolton’s book. In a statement, the publisher said it was “delighted” by the judge’s decision.

“The unfettered right to publish is a sacred American freedom and a founding principle of our republic, and we applaud the court for affirming well-established precedents against prior restraint and pre-publication injunctions.

“Too Much And Never Enough is a work of great significance, with very real implications for our national discourse, and we look forward to bringing it to a public that is clearly eager to read it.”

Ms Trump, a psychologist, writes in the book that she has “no problem calling Donald a narcissist – he meets all nine criteria as outlined in the Diagnostic And Statistical Manual Of Mental Disorders.”

However, she also disavows any attempt to nail down his psychological problems without full-on clinical assessment. His pathologies and behaviours, she writes, are so bizarre that “coming up with an accurate and comprehensive diagnosis would require a full battery of psychological and neuro-physical tests that he’ll never sit for”.