PREVIEW - Who Could Ever Love You: Mary Trump’s Family Memoir
The bruising Trump family life that tormented Mary and deformed her uncle Donald
“I started writing this book because I realized I was killing myself — with stress, with self - loathing, but above all with isolation that started on November 9, 2016 (Donald Trump’s election speech). But I don’t want to die. I want to live .”
So Mary Trump, niece to former president Donald Trump, starts her book about the family environment that led to the crippling of her character and the malignant formation of her uncle Donald’s mind. Mary takes us inside the cocoon of the family of Fred Trump, the dynasty founder, and shows us the desert environment that crippled her own father and yet showered benefits on his brother Donald.
Mary’s father Freddy had trouble understanding what his father expected of him — not because he didn’t have the capacity for understanding , but because the expectations were either ambiguous, self-contradictory, or ridiculous.
Why, in a company that ran like a well-oiled machine, did this enormously wealthy man feel it necessary to recycle nails he picked up at his building sites?
Fred Trump couldn’t stand delegating responsibility — especially to somebody he considered his inferior, which, increasingly, is how he thought of his oldest son.
Freddy, in Fred’s mind at least, needed to be a killer; in order to create that drive in him, Fred had tried deprivation, punishment, and unrelenting criticism.
In both her grandfather’s house and in his business, Mary’s Dad was never rewarded for anything he did, because he was simply expected to do everything according to specification. There was no such thing as exceeding expectations because they could never be met — a shell game Fred would never play with his middle son, Donald.
Mary was born in the spring of 1965 to parents who were struggling to regain their equilibrium both as a couple and as individuals with their own problems — Her mother Linda with her loneliness and lack of support, Freddy with his fall from grace and his drinking.
Although Freddy became a certified pilot and could fly a 160-ton aircraft and keep all 180 passengers safe, he could not earn the respect of his father.
Feddy tried to withstand the pressure his father was putting on him to return to Trump Management from his job as an aviator. “ You’re a goddamned chauffeur in the sky,” said Fred.
“Dad’s embarrassed by you,” his much younger brother, Donald, informed him.
By the end of 1964 he was back at Trump Management working for Fred again. This time it was clear he had no future there. His father had never respected him; after the betrayal of leaving Trump Management, Fred would never trust his namesake again. His life had come to consist of the menial and meaningless grind of working at my grandfather’s office on Avenue Z, sporadic attempts to get sober, and long stretches when he couldn’t even try.
In a year, Fred would make Donald, then only twenty-four years old, president of the company, effectively ending any possibility for her father’s advancement. By 1970, none of that mattered ; Freddy had given up .
Perhaps the main reason Freddy had fallen so far was not Fred’s obvious preference for his much younger, much less worthy son, but his equally obvious disdain for and cruelty toward his namesake. There was literally nothing Freddy could do to change his father’s feelings toward him, which only made it worse.
When Mary first encountered her uncle Donald, he was a cocky, rude teenager who was intensely jealous of his older brother. Donald didn’t have any friends, so she felt sorry for him, but whenever they included him, they regretted it. Nobody in Freddy’s circle could bear to be around this arrogant, self-important, humorless kid. Over the years, they watched Donald evolve into an even more arrogant adult with a widening cruel streak. Everything got worse for Freddy when Donald joined Trump Management after graduating from college in 1968. Fred, who’d frozen Freddy out even before he left the company to join TWA, gave Donald a salary that far surpassed anything he’d ever paid his oldest son, along with perks — a car, a driver bonuses, credit for work he didn’t even do — he’d never considered giving Freddy.
Mary had to learn how to walk on the eggshells of her mother’s quiet despair. She developed an asthma condition, and sometimes woke in the night unable to breathe. She would walk unsteadily to her mother’s room. When she reached her bedside, she didn’t have the ability to speak. She would tap her on the shoulder and wait for her to open her eyes. When she did, Mary stood there, bent over, her shoulders pulled forward, barely able to keep her head up, and waited. Her mother would take one look at her and say “OK, get in.”
In the morning her mother would take Mary to a clinic owned by Fred.
The seed of the knowledge had been planted: the worst way to be alone is to be alone in the presence of the one person who is supposed to love you most, protect you most, but who decides instead to turn her back on you and fall asleep.
Her brother started to pull away from her as well. Once, returning from camp, she spotted him with a few other boys, loping along, tall and skinny like my father. She wanted to run over and throw myself in his arms. With the exception of her first night in Cabin 1, she hadn’t been homesick until she saw his shock of white-blond hair in the distance. “Hey,” he said when Mary finally reached him. She waited for permission to hug him, but he didn’t move any closer to her.
“Hey,” Mary said back to him. It took her a few seconds to realize that that was going to be it. Her eyes stung with tears as he walked away with his friends, tossing a casual “See ya” over his shoulder. But she didn’t cry. And she was never homesick again…
Thank you for following Barry’s Substack, focusing on the meaning behind the headlines. To join our community, please support our work by becoming a paid subscriber; your comments and thoughts could be included in future articles.
Your sub headline reads: “The bruising Trump family life that tormented Mary and deformed her brother Donald”
Note: Mary’s brother’s name is Fred III
I think you mean “her Uncle Donald”?