By Miriam R. Kramer
“This is the most important presidential election of our lifetime.” This is the third time in ten years we have heard this statement, and it has always been true. President Joe Biden decided to step down as the 2024 Democratic nominee and endorse Vice President Kamala Harris in July. In so doing, he upended the dynamic of the 2024 presidential campaigns. The country now faces a stark choice between two very different tickets. Fred Trump III (Fritz)’s chronicle, All in the Family: The Trumps and How We Got This Way, and his estranged sister Mary’s book, Who Could Ever Love You: A Family Memoir, may help undecided voters better evaluate current presidential candidate and former President Donald J. Trump. It offers fascinating perspectives on the behaviors of real estate builder Fred Trump Sr. and his family dynasty. Icy-veined patriarch Fred Sr. created and exacerbated a web of extreme psychological dysfunction that permanently affected the behavior of Freddy, Donald, their siblings, and everyone else in their families.
Until now, almost no one has written about the dynamic of the Trump family from an intimate family perspective. Mary Trump’s first such book, a 2020 dissection of the former president, Too Much and Never Enough, offered a licensed clinical psychologist’s view of Donald Trump’s mental instabilities and pathologies. I reviewed it in the Old Town Crier four years ago ( https://oldtowncrier.com/2020/08/01/books-for-an-uncertain-summer/ ). That account is a more detached, cutting analysis which is also very worth reading. This memoir, however, is a personal account of the keen pain and isolation Mary experienced growing up within a wealthy family driven by ruthlessness, greed, and dysfunction.
Freddy (Fred Jr.), Mary and Fritz’s father, tried to escape his tightly controlled, airless family structure by attending TWA’s highly competitive flight school as one of only two students without a military pilot’s background. He was then assigned a prestigious route between Boston and Los Angeles. Scoffed at by Fred Sr. and Donald, both of whom indicated that being a pilot was a step up from being a bus driver, Freddy finally abandoned his dreams to support the Trump empire.
Taking their cue from Fred Sr. and his wife Mary Ann, the other Trumps also disapproved of Freddy’s wife, Linda Clapp Trump, a flight attendant who gave up her job to marry Freddy. Over the years Linda became very depressed, helpless, and angry, disgusted with her inability to get out of the Trump trap with no job skills and two children to raise.
Fred Sr. and Mary Ann Trump lived in the House, an unwieldy, unfashionable Queens mansion where their children, children’s spouses, and grandchildren came together for Sunday lunches, if not warmth. Mary recounts how her Aunt Elizabeth would put her hand on her grandfather, looking for affection, only to have him whirl away from her grasp. The shrewd, intelligent Maryanne Trump Barry, their firstborn child, ended up with an impressive career as a judge, yet still could not get her father and mother’s love and attention.
By fastening on to Donald and Fred Sr.’s political and social connections, Maryanne leveraged power and managed to gain prominence. Such gains were the substitute for any loving ties. Backbiting and alienating other members in pursuit of money or power was common. With Fred Sr., all interactions were transactional, even with Donald, his favorite. Younger brother Robert, superficially more acceptable, was cruel towards Freddy’s second-tier branch of the family upon multiple occasions. The vulgar expression “Sh*t runs downhill” is apt in representing the way Trump siblings other than Freddy learned from their father to bully those less able to fight back.
Mary Ann Trump was too continually sick, ill-suited to be a mother, and chilly to compensate for her husband’s sociopathy. She was often unable to provide her children with support, instead donating to the auxiliary at the hospital she frequented. Donald quickly learned that to gain attention and feed his self-esteem, he would need to be the shameless bully, callous cheat, and attention-hogging liar that his sociopathic father required for the business. To get his father’s attention, if not love, it was necessary to be like him. To admit vulnerability would be an intolerable act of weakness. He quickly became so frustrated, unruly, and hard to control that his father packed him off to military school while focusing his attentions and ambitions on Freddy.
Yet Donald would be a mirror to reflect interests that Freddy could never further. An outdoorsy, friendly man who loved boating and flying, Freddy was ill-suited for representing all ventures Trump. Deeply unhappy, he was incapable of winning his father and mother’s approval or taking the reins as Fred’s heir. Smoking and turning to alcohol to drown his misery and self-loathing, he gradually became very unreliable, flying his personal plane inebriated and getting so blackout drunk once that a young Mary saw him threaten her mother with a shotgun. Her mother, frustrated and bitter about her treatment by the Trumps and unable to live with her incapacitated husband, eventually divorced him. After the divorce, he might fail to show up to his kids’ events, cancel plans, or disappear on their scheduled weekends to sleep off a bender.
Over the years, Freddy went to rehab repeatedly, only to go back to the depths of hopelessness. His father gave Freddy and Linda modest housing for a discount in his rundown buildings but did nothing to support them. Over the years, he demoted Freddy from running major operations, eventually putting him on a Trump building maintenance crew while calling him a poor slob behind his back.
At that point Freddy lived back and forth between the House, in his childhood bedroom, or in small, dingy apartments with foldout beds and a small black-and-white TV which he would watch on the weekends with his kids. Fred Senior gradually reduced his goodhearted, attractive son to a squeaking, alcohol-soaked gerbil before Freddy’s premature 1981 death from a heart attack caused by alcoholism.
Fritz’s memoir, while it correlates with Mary’s in all important respects, is simpler. It is strangely difficult to get a read on his motivations, but he seems like a man with decent values who loves his family and advocates for those with disabilities. While revealing anger and hurt, his writing is less introspective than Mary’s. He describes going back and forth between alienation from and fraternization with his aunt and uncles after legal battles that many would consider unforgivable. Perhaps he is more naïve than Mary, or maybe he maintains a level of denial necessary to stave off pain. Perhaps he simply wants to maintain good relations for personal reasons, such as protecting William, his severely disabled son who needs round-the-clock care. He still has to swim in a Trump shark tank that contains vengeful Donald, his cousins, and his uncle’s attack dogs. Fritz’s personal account of growing up Trump feels necessary for illuminating Trump family practices, but it sometimes seemed opaque.
Near the time Fritz and his wife found themselves rearranging their lives to support their permanently disabled son, he and Mary discovered after Fred Sr.’s death that the executors of Fred Sr.’s will, Maryanne, Robert, and Donald, had conspired to cut them out as their father’s heirs when Fred Sr. was suffering cognitive decline in 1991. When they went to court to win back their inheritance, their uncles and aunt decided to cut off their Trump company health insurance. Donald told the New York Daily News that after being sued, he asked himself “Why should we give [William] medical coverage?” That kind of cruelty towards a young disabled child does not sprout naturally in most people, but it could easily come from someone schooled in the arts of Fred Trump Sr.’s malignant narcissism.
Fritz and Mary came to a settlement finally and signed a nondisclosure agreement in 2000. Reconnecting with his aunts and uncles afterwards, Fritz capably convinced his father’s siblings, who had swindled him and Mary out of their inheritance, to set up a joint medical fund for William. Yet later on, after a meeting with the Department of Health and Human Services to advocate making investments to support disabled people and caretakers, Donald pulled Fritz aside and said, “Those people…The shape they’re in, all the expenses, maybe those kinds of people should just die.”
Along with her descriptions of the older Trumps in the dynasty, Mary’s intelligent memoir is clear-eyed, insightful, and sometimes excruciatingly sad. As she describes growing up with a miserable, alcoholic father and a depressed, neglectful mother, her feelings of increasing alienation, pain, and anger bubble to the surface, along with the self-loathing she inherited from them and other family members who neglected her needs. When she developed asthma as a child and went to wake her mother up at night, the enervated Linda would motion “Get in” and have her lie in bed, wheezing until morning, when she would finally take Mary to the hospital. When she realized she was gay, Mary turned to her mother, who suggested that she see a psychiatrist while doing nothing to help her.
Her father would often cancel plans with her and Fritz and sometimes disappear to rehab or elsewhere. Her respite was going to camp every year, where she excelled in sports and became a counselor, and then at boarding school, which she attended to get away from her needy mother. She developed a shell that separated her from others, a reserve based on feeling unloved by anyone.
Mary was devastated and re-traumatized when her uncle was elected to the White House in 2016. With her assistance a team from the NY Times helped expose his family’s dubious wealth and tax practices in an article that won a Pulitzer Prize. Already a PhD in psychology, she attended a counseling retreat to address her self-flagellation and the feelings of worthlessness and depression that had hijacked her life. She found herself competent and focused when doing interviews on Zoom during the pandemic, only to regress after turning off the computer camera.
Who Could Ever Love You is worth reading on its own merits regardless of whether you are interested in a family named Trump. It is valuable as a young woman’s coming of age in a toxic, materialistic American family, one in which the fulfilled American dream of achieving wealth and fame is more like a nightmare despite gilt trappings.
To this day Mary works to keep herself stable to support her daughter and fight her uncle’s policies to support her values and regain power against her past. In November 2022, her next lawsuit accusing her uncles and aunt of defrauding her out of a multi-million-dollar inheritance was dismissed. This year Donald Trump’s lawsuit regarding her revealing secrets to the New York Times was allowed to go forward. Her courage in continuing to battle while revealing her tremendous pain, insecurities, and vulnerabilities in a national spotlight is formidable, particularly since she keeps going up against a president who cudgels his less-powerful opponents in any way possible.
Both siblings have stated their plans to vote for Vice President Kamala Harris and support her in other ways. There are few to no contradictions between Mary and Fritz’s stories of their upbringing, which makes these accounts feel truthful. Their current estrangement merely underscores their stories’ validity. While there may be multiple reasons for their alienation from one another—neither would go into detail, and neither denigrated the other in any real way—their fissure may be the legacy of the top-down destructive trauma passed down to them from their parents and other relatives. Read these absorbing memoirs so you can judge for yourself.
Any opinions stated in this article are mine and do not represent those of the Old Town Crier.
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