The new tell-all book by Donald Trump’s niece will hit store shelves next Tuesday with an explosive inside glimpse into the early life of the sitting president.
In “Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man,” Mary Trump, a clinical psychologist, accuses the president of “cheating as a way of life” and chronicles decades of family dysfunction that shaped her uncle Donald Trump into the man he is today.
The following is a compilation of the book’s 10 most scathing claims:
1. Cheated on college entrance test
In one of the more explosive claims in the book, Mary Trump reveals that Donald Trump paid another student to take his SAT college entrance exam when he was in high school. The resulting high score got him admitted to the prestigious Wharton School of business at the University of Pennsylvania, which Trump has been known to brag about.
2. Went to movie as brother died
Fred Trump Jr., Donald Trump’s oldest sibling who died of a heart attack in 1981 at age 42, was known as the black sheep of the family. Freddy was an alcoholic who worked in the family real estate business with his dad Fred Trump Sr. before leaving abruptly to become a pilot for Trans World Airlines.
The father didn’t get along well with Fred Jr., which Donald sometimes played to his advantage, the book claims.
The elder Trump once told Freddy, “Donald is worth ten of you,” in front of a group of employees, Mary Trump writes.
Trump has admitted in the past that his brother’s departure opened the door for him to be closer to his father.
“For me, it worked very well,” Donald Trump told The New York Times during his presidential campaign about serving under his father. “For Fred, it wasn’t something that was going to work.”
Mary Trump writes that her father Freddy died alone at the hospital after the family sent him there by himself. Donald, she said, went to see a movie.
3. ‘No principles,’ sister says
Maryanne Trump Barry, a retired federal appeals court judge and Donald Trump’s sister, has a strained relationship with the president, the book reveals.
Mary Trump writes that Maryanne expressed deep reservations about Trump’s ability to run the country soon after he became a candidate in 2015.
“He’s a clown — this will never happen,” the writer quotes Maryanne Trump from a lunch they shared at the time.
Maryanne was flummoxed that Trump had found early support among evangelical Christians, Mary Trump writes.
“The only time Donald went to church was when the cameras were there,” Mary Trump quotes her aunt as saying. “It’s mind boggling. But that’s all about his base. He has no principles. None!”
4. Accusations of narcissism
Mary Trump, who holds a Ph.D. in psychology, cites all nine clinical criteria that would qualify Donald Trump as a narcissist, but she adds that her analysis does not paint a full picture of the president’s entire psychological profile.
“The fact is,” she writes, “Donald’s pathologies are so complex and his behaviors so often inexplicable that coming up with an accurate and comprehensive diagnosis would require a full battery of psychological and neurophysical tests that he’ll never sit for,” according to an excerpt published by The New York Times.
“Donald has been institutionalized for most of his adult life, so there is no way to know how he would thrive, or even survive, on his own in the real world.”
She goes on to describe the president as disorganized with very little if any ability to think strategically.
“Donald’s ego has been and is a fragile and inadequate barrier between him and the real world, which, thanks to his father’s money and power, he never had to negotiate by himself.”
5. ‘Barely knew’ son’s wife
At a White House dinner in April 2017, only months after Trump’s election, Mary Trump recounts how the new president gestured toward his daughter-in-law, Eric Trump’s wife, and said, “Lara, there. I barely even knew who the f--- she was, honestly, but then she gave a great speech during the campaign in Georgia supporting me.”
6. Growing up Trump
Fred Trump by all accounts was an overbearing father, and young Donald sought to win his approval as a means of “self-aggrandizement” but more importantly to set himself apart from Fred Jr., whom the elder Trump saw as weaker than Donald.
“By limiting Donald’s access to his own feelings and rendering many of them unacceptable, Fred perverted his son’s perception of the world and damaged his ability to live in it,” Mary Trump writes, according to published excerpts.
She gave an early example of Trump’s bullying, sharing an anecdote about the future president’s relationship with his younger brother, Robert, saying young Donald would often hide his brother’s toys and threatened to destroy them if he cried about it.
7. Legal fight over elder Trump’s will
Mary Trump, Fred Trump Jr.’s daughter, details the family’s legal battle over the elder Trump’s will, and suggests his children lied about the size of the estate to cheat her and her brother out of their fair share. She alleges her settlement was “based on suspect numbers,” and that her attorneys forced her hand, saying “We know they’re lying ... Besides, your grandfather’s estate is only worth around thirty million dollars” when in actuality “That was only a tenth of the estimate Robert had given The New York Times in 1999, which itself would turn out to be only 25 percent of the estate’s actual value,” she wrote.
8. An uncomfortable encounter
Mary recounts an uncomfortable encounter with her uncle as she visited his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida when she was 29.
She said she was going to have lunch, wearing a bathing suit and a pair of shorts when she bumped into Donald Trump, who looked her up and down and said, “Holy s---, Mary. You’re stacked,” Mary Trump writes. Marla Maples, Trump’s second wife at the time, scolded Donald by slapping him on the arm and screaming “Donald!”
“I was twenty-nine and not easily embarrassed, but my face reddened, and I suddenly felt self-conscious,” Mary writes. “I pulled my towel around my shoulders. It occurred to me that nobody in my family, outside of my parents and brother, had ever seen me in a bathing suit.”
9. Feud with sister
Mary Trump shares details about a phone call Maryanne Trump once had with her brother Donald not long after the election.
Donald Trump, apparently seeking his older sister’s adoration, asked her how she felt about his victory over Hillary Clinton, Mary Trump writes.
“When she said, ‘Not that good,’ Donald immediately went on offense,” she writes.
“‘That’s nasty,’ he said. She could see the sneer on his face. Then, seemingly apropos of nothing, he asked her, ‘Maryanne, where would you be without me?’” Donald Trump said, which was “a smug reference to the fact that Maryanne owed her first federal judgeship to Donald because Roy Cohn had done him (and her) a favor all those years ago.”
Mary Trump then reveals: “My aunt has always insisted that she’d earned her position on the bench entirely on her own merits, and she shot back at him, ‘If you say that one more time, I will level you.’”
10. An unwritten book
Donald Trump once hired Mary to ghost-write a book for him, she reveals.
He didn’t want to be interviewed but instead offered transcripts of personal recordings in which Trump listed “an aggrieved compendium of women he had expected to date, but who, having refused him, were suddenly the worst, ugliest, and fattest slobs he’d ever met,” the book claims. Two of the women Trump complained about, according to the book, were Madonna, who Trump said chewed gum unattractively, and figure skater Katarina Witt, who he said had oversized calves.
The book will hit store shelves next Tuesday.
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