Trump Book Bombshell

[_Chap]

This is the 'Trump Book Bombshell' thread, right?

So here is something relevant to that, written on the basis of a copy of the book obtained by the Guardian newspaper:

Mary Trump’s book: eight of its most shocking claims about the president

Trump ‘paid someone to take his exams’
President emotionally ‘scarred’ by abusive father
Trump shaped by ‘sociopath’ father, niece writes in memoir

Mary Trump’s book, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man, contains stunning claims about her uncle, Donald Trump.

Here are eight of the most extraordinary.

Trump allegedly paid someone to take his high school exams
Trump is proud of his attendance at Wharton Business School, at the prestigious University of Pennsylvania. But according to his niece, he got there by cheating – which he “embraces as a way of life”.

Mary Trump writes: “Donald worried that his grade point average, which put him far from the top of the class, would scuttle his efforts to get accepted. To hedge his bets he enlisted Joe Shapiro, a smart kid with a reputation for being a good test taker, to take his SATs for him. That was much easier to pull off in the days before photo IDs and computerised records.”

Trump also had his older brother, Mary Trump’s father Fred Trump Jr, put in a good word for him. As she writes, “all of Donald’s machinations may not even have been necessary. In those days, Penn was much less selective than it is now.”

Trump praised his own niece’s breasts
Mary Trump writes about Donald Trump’s treatment of women, including how – when she was briefly working as his ghostwriter – he provided “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”. She includes Madonna and the ice skater Katarina Witt as two of the women he named.

The author also says that at Donald Trump’s Florida resort Mar-a-Lago in the 1990s her uncle saw her in a swimsuit and said: “Holy crap, Mary. You’re stacked.”

Mary Trump writes that Trump’s then wife, Marla Maples, responded with “mock horror, slapping him lightly on the arm”.

“I was 29 and not easily embarrassed,” she writes. “But my face reddened and I suddenly felt self-conscious. I pulled my towel around my shoulders.”

Donald Trump’s sister appears to be a key source
Maryanne Trump Barry retired as a federal judge in 2019, thereby ending an inquiry into family tax schemes. Mary Trump’s uncle Robert, Maryanne’s brother, has attempted to stop his niece’s book in court but in her acknowledgments, the author thanks her aunt “for all of the enlightening information”.

Mary Trump details a call from the president to his sister, who told him his performance in office was “not that good”. Donald Trump did not take that well, his niece writes, and began to ignore his sister’s advice.

Mary Trump spoke to the New York Times about Trump family taxes

Mary Trump isn’t sure if her aunt, whom she calls “older, smarter and more accomplished” than Donald, spoke to the Times for its reports about Trump family tax affairs which won a Pulitzer prize.

She does write that her aunt “knew where the bodies were buried” because she and her siblings “had buried them together”.

But Mary Trump details how she herself came to help the paper. She had been unwilling. But one of the reporters, she writes, told her she had a chance to help “rewrite the history of the president of the United States”, an offer she decided to take after watching “our democracy disintegrating and people’s lives unravelling because of my uncle’s policies”.

In one riveting passage, Trump describes how she obtained and drove away from the firm Farrell Fritz “19 boxes” of financial information, then handed them over.

“The three reporters were waiting for me,” she writes. “When I showed them the boxes there were hugs all round. It was the happiest I’d felt in months.”

Trump told Melania that Mary Trump took drugs
At a Father’s Day celebration at Trump Tower in 1998, while the president was still married to Maples, Mary Trump met her uncle’s new girlfriend, then known as Melania Knauss.

Struck by her silence, she recalls her uncle Robert Trump telling her the then Melania Knauss, a model from Slovenia, stayed quiet not because her English was bad, but because she “knows what she’s there for”.

Donald Trump, Mary Trump writes, told Melania about how he hired his niece to write The Art of the Comeback (a project from which Mary Trump says she was fired) because she had her own “‘back from the brink’ redemption story”.

“You dropped out of college, right?” she says her uncle asked, adding: “It was really bad for a while – and then she started doing drugs.”

Mary Trump denied that, she said, but she writes that she understands now that her uncle “loved comeback stories, and he understood that the deeper the hole you crawled out of, the better billing your triumphant comeback would get”.

“He probably believed his version of events,” she writes.

Trump Christmases could be tough
One year, Donald and his first wife, Ivana Trump, gave the young Mary a single gold lamé shoe, its heel filled with hard candy.

“Where had this thing come from?” Mary writes. “Had it been a door prize or a party favour from a luncheon?

“Donald came through the pantry from the kitchen. As he passed me, he asked, ‘What’s that?’

“It’s a present from you.”

Mary Trump also says that in 1977, when she was 12, her Christmas present from Donald and Ivana was a $12 pack of underwear. Her brother got a leather-bound journal, two years out of date. Later, Mary received a Cellophaned gift basket, “an obvious regift” containing olives and a salami but not one evidently removed item, which a cousin said was “probably caviar”.

Family Christmases were fraught with tension, she says, including Donald and Robert berating their mother, Mary MacLeod Trump, for cooking beef instead of turkey.

“Gam,” she writes, “spent the whole meal with her head bowed, hands in her lap.”

Jared Kushner’s father didn’t think Ivanka was good enough
In 2009, Mary Trump attended the wedding at Trump’s Bedminster golf course in New Jersey of her cousin Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner. Kushner is Jewish, and Donald Trump stood “awkwardly in a yarmulke”, she writes. The groom’s father, Charles, gave a speech in which he said Ivanka had only made herself worthy of inclusion in his family by committing to convert to Judaism.

Mary Trump was unimpressed: “Considering that Charles had been convicted of hiring a prostitute to seduce his brother-in-law, taping their illicit encounter, and then sending the recording to his sister at his nephew’s engagement party, I found his condescension a bit out of line.”

Trump’s character was shaped by ‘child abuse’
Too Much and Never Enough deals extensively with the emotional abuse of a household topped by an absent father and an ill, neglected mother. Mary Trump contends that Fred Trump Sr’s many failings – ultimately, his being a “high-functioning sociopath” – weighed heavily on all his children, including her father Fred Trump Jr, who died from illness arising from alcoholism in 1981.

“Having been abandoned by his mother for at least a year,” she writes, “and having his father fail not only to meet his needs but to make him feel safe or loved, valued or mirrored, Donald suffered deprivations that would scar him for life [and acquired] personality traits [including] displays of narcissism, bullying, [and] grandiosity”.

[_Chap]

This one concentrates on the influence of Trump's father.

It is, perhaps, more revealing than the previous article.


Inside the 'dysfunctional family' that gave us Trump, according to his niece
The president’s father fueled division and detested weakness, says Mary Trump. Now the country is paying the price

Happy families are all alike, Leo Tolstoy observed, while every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Then there are the Trump's, 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 Trump's 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.”

[_Jersey Girl]

Trump’s character was shaped by ‘child abuse’
Too Much and Never Enough deals extensively with the emotional abuse of a household topped by an absent father and an ill, neglected mother. Mary Trump contends that Fred Trump Sr’s many failings – ultimately, his being a “high-functioning sociopath” – weighed heavily on all his children, including her father Fred Trump Jr, who died from illness arising from alcoholism in 1981.

“Having been abandoned by his mother for at least a year,” she writes, “and having his father fail not only to meet his needs but to make him feel safe or loved, valued or mirrored, Donald suffered deprivations that would scar him for life [and acquired] personality traits [including] displays of narcissism, bullying, [and] grandiosity”.

This is what interests me most because if Trump is a narc (and he is) whatever thwarted his development happened in early childhood.

I did some checking and came across statements about Mary Trump's emergency surgery in 1948, 9 months after his brother Robert's birth. I'd read about this previously but never did the math. I had to figure out DT's age at the time which would put him at something like between ages 2 - 3.5+ years old because I can't come up with a birth date for Robert that isn't simply stated as "1948". If anyone finds his date of birth, I'd like to know what it is.

Is that enough to produce a narcissist? Hell yes. Particularly if the report is true and accurate, that his mother was essentially unavailable to him during that period of time and he was left with a father who was a high functioning sociopathic narc and likewise emotionally unavailable to him.

No question about it. None whatsoever. His bonding and attachment process was in progress and then abruptly interrupted just as he was acquiring language skills with which to express himself--with no one to express himself to.

I've said more than once here that Trump can't help who he is and in that regard I pity him. But, to have him in a position of power and authority over the most powerful nation on earth is a danger to the U.S. and ultimately the world. He needs to go. He needs to go back to Mar a Lago and live in his little Trump bubble and enjoy whatever familial and professional relationships remain intact. He'll never know true happiness except in those situations which make him feel strong and superior, stroke his ego and provide him with the narc supply that he requires to feel that he even exists and that he matters. It's a damn shame.

He was a healthy child with potential and he was robbed of that potential. He was a healthy, robust, and handsome young man, destined to live a life of manipulation, corruption, and a perpetual search for conquest. He could have been successful on multiple levels, but he will never experience the depth of success that he might have, because those parts of him were shut down in early childhood.

The man is 74 years old which means he's lived at first, as a developing and then a completed narcissist for something like 72 years. What a horrible waste of human potential.

I do pity him. I feel compassion for him. I wish him no harm even though at the present time I think I actively hate him. I try to separate the behavior from the damaged child that he was and I have no real problem doing that but seriously, he needs to leave the White House and go back into whatever civilian life he can manage for himself and his family and live it as best he can in spite of what limits him from experiencing the real fullness of life.

My god this really tears at me in a way that is hard to describe except to say that I have seen and worked with children who were shut down, through no fault of their own (mainly foreign adoptees, but not all) and who I knew had little to no chance to experience a full and rewarding life including relationships. Some ended up incarcerated on account of their behavior or further alienated from their family.

But they weren't elected President of the United States and I'm afraid what we're seeing is the destruction that is possible when narcs without conscience are given more power than they should have.

I better yank my heart off my sleeve now before I spill all over the place. Dear Jesus I feel sick thinking about these things. An emotional cripple for 72 years. Years!

[_Some Schmo]

I don't pity him at all. Most people grow up with hardships, but not everyone whines and let's them control the rest of their lives.

Perhaps I'll find room for pity when he's no longer a threat to humanity, but there's no fu-cking way I will ever regard him a victim. He's a whiny little bit-ch.

[_EAllusion]

I don't think there's a lot of evidence for the hypothesis that NPD is caused by cold or inattentive parenting and it is more than a little reminiscent of other discredited theories of other mental health issues caused by refrigerator parenting.

[_moksha]

It seems clear that Trump is as guilty as SeN. Wait... can we get that fixed?

[_huckelberry]

I listened to Rachael Maddox read from and speak of the book last night. It sounded like Trump was described as the unpleasant fellow he has publicaly appeared to be and acts like. I mean he wears his character proudly like a red tie. American voters have proven they are perfectly capable of accepting him as he is however.

Of those people who are not going to vote for him the book is at best a curiosity. For others it will be dismissed. It may gather sympathy for whom they see as a poor persecuted fellows who is standing up for their version of America.

[_Jersey Girl]

What do we think about his judge sister? Did she knowingly contribute to the book and why? Is the whole family corrupt and how deep does it go? What about Robert? Is he likewise a corrupt sociopath?

[_Jersey Girl]

I don't pity him at all. Most people grow up with hardships, but not everyone whines and let's them control the rest of their lives.

Perhaps I'll find room for pity when he's no longer a threat to humanity, but there's no fu-cking way I will ever regard him a victim. He's a whiny little bit-ch.

Remember when I used to pray for his success as President? I still pray for him but not in the same way. Now every day when I decide to get online I usually think well, let's see what that dirty little bastard did today. He never disappoints!

[_Jersey Girl]

I listened to Rachael Maddox read from and speak of the book last night. It sounded like Trump was described as the unpleasant fellow he has publicaly appeared to be and acts like. I mean he wears his character proudly like a red tie. American voters have proven they are perfectly capable of accepting him as he is however.

Of those people who are not going to vote for him the book is at best a curiosity. For others it will be dismissed. It may gather sympathy for whom they see as a poor persecuted fellows who is standing up for their version of America.

Saw your post and am listening to it right now. I want to get my hands on this book so bad but I don't really want to contribute to the Trump family regardless of who is profiting from it. Thanks to his high visibility warped behavior, I trust no Trump at all. Not even her.