Mary Trump:“Cruelty Was a Currency” in Trump Family

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, CHIEF INTERNATIONAL ANCHOR: Now, in this busy week of diplomacy, world leaders are weighing up what a second Trump term could mean for the U.S. and beyond. To the former president’s niece, Mary Trump, it could spell nothing but bad news for American democracy. She sat down with Michelle Martin to discuss her views on the upcoming election and her latest book, “Who Could Ever Love You.”

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MICHEL MARTIN, CONTRIBUTOR: Thanks, Christiane. Mary Trump, thank you so much for speaking with us once again.

MARY L. TRUMP, AUTHOR, “WHO COULD EVER LOVE YOU” AND NIECE OF FORMER PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: It’s really very generous of you to have me back.

MARTIN: Well, let’s talk about the first book in front. I mean, many people will remember that you wrote a book during the Trump presidency. It was called “Too Much and Never Enough.” It was a bestseller for lots of reasons. I think in part because it satisfied a lot of people’s curiosity, about like, who is Donald Trump? What did writing that book do for you? Because it had to have been hard. I mean, the fact is you dug into a lot of really painful episodes in your life, in your family’s life.

TRUMP: You’re absolutely right. I had to think about things, episodes in my family that I had not forgotten about exactly, but had put aside for decades. And the other interesting thing about having to do that at that time, because, you know, we were at a very crucial point in the Trump administration, we were about halfway through it when I started writing the book, we saw how much damage he was doing. We had no idea how much more damage there was to come. But I — in the interval between living the experiences and writing about them, I became a trained clinical psychologist. So, I was able to bring that training to bear on the way I analyze the family, both as a member of it and as an outsider. So, that actually helped in a way. It was extraordinarily important that I got the psychology right in that book.

MARTIN: One of the things that I learned from your memoir, your second book, is that you really had not thought about a lot of these things for years. And I was just intrigued by that. Like, why do you think that is?

TRUMP: Unfortunately, it’s because of how my family spoke about my dad, how they treated my dad. Before I was born, my father was perfectly ready to take over his dad’s empire, Trump management. He went to school and got a business degree. He knew that was the role he was supposed to fulfill. It didn’t go well. My grandfather had determined for various reasons, some of them that are not logical, that my father was not the right person. And when things went south with his dad, he became a professional pilot for TWA at the dawn of the jet age. He went to ROTC. He was a second lieutenant in the National Guard. All of that was over before I was born. So, I never knew that version of Freddie Trump, the man I knew was the man who had been completely dismantled by his father who was in family parlance, the alcoholic loser who did not deserve respect or attention. And as you can imagine, between my dad’s illness and the way my family treated him, it had a huge impact on my ability to have a relationship with my father. And then, he died when I was 16. So, we were never really able to establish a relationship that could survive that at all.

MARTIN: So, why did you write this book?

TRUMP: It’s very complicated. Part of it has to do with the struggles I’ve been having since 2016. I went into lockdown on November 9, 2016, well before COVID. I became very isolated. I took it extremely personally. I watched with horror and helplessly as Donald, you know, dismantled my country and caused great harm to many, many people. The first book actually did help me get out of that. I had agency again. I felt like I had a role, which was a completely unexpected one. I mean, my life took a bizarre turn in 2020. But then, a couple of years later, I found that I wasn’t — I — you know, COVID — people are emerging from COVID, I wasn’t. I was still isolating. I just felt like I had been completely altered by the experiences of the previous four years and I just — I could not take advantage of all of the opportunities that were presenting themselves to me and I couldn’t figure out why. And I realized that it’s because I hadn’t finished doing the work. I have complex post-traumatic stress disorder from trauma that occurred when I was a child that I write about. And now, you can’t cure PTSD, but you can manage it and mitigate it. I’d never done enough work in order to be able to do that. So, trauma, the trauma started piling up. And there was so much that was traumatizing about the four years Donald was in office. And I just — I could just couldn’t get back on my feet. And I realized, in the fall of 2023, that I was essentially killing myself by continuing to isolate. There’s a lot of self-loathing wrapped up in my trauma, and I just couldn’t see my way through. So, I thought it was really important that I tell that story so I could pick up the thread and follow it to a place that’s hopefully better than the place I was in.

MARTIN: I got to tell you that you are a wonderful writer and a very vivid writer, but the book is brutal from the word go. It’s brutal from the title. I mean, who could ever love you? And it, the book opens with you entering a trauma treatment facility. I’m just wondering, you know, why you opened there and what the process of writing this book was for you?

TRUMP: It was important for me to locate myself in the present or, you know, in the last six years, I guess, when the book opened. So, I think part of it was also to acknowledge that we’re all traumatized. Whether we acknowledge it or not, whether we recognize it or not, whether we’ve done anything about it or not, we’re all traumatized. Some of us from the politics starting in 2016, some of us from COVID, some of us from both, some of us from the cruelties and the division that has become just part of our everyday life now. And I think it’s really important to acknowledge. Not just that I recognize that, but that I feel it too, because that’s why we tell these stories, not just to make sense of our traumas and our histories for ourselves, but to help other people gain insight as well, to the extent that that’s possible.

MARTIN: But one of the things I found interesting is that you do clearly feel that the family, the Trump family, it’s almost like a metaphor for the country. How is it that you see the way the Trump family operates really does stand as a larger metaphor for where the country is now and the role that he’s played in making it that way?

TRUMP: We have changed as a country. The way I think about it is that weak systems bend towards their most dysfunctional member. We have done that. We discussed the debate in terms that are favorable to Donald as if it’s some Wrestlemania episode. We discussed the debate in terms of what Vice President Harris has to do, not what the criminal needs to do to make his case. And in my family, only one person mattered. My grandfather was the one who mattered, and he chose Donald to be the only other one who could matter. Everything was a zero-sum game. Only one person could win. Everybody else had to lose, which is why the rest of us struggled to find meaning, the rest of us struggled to find evidence that we mattered, right. And we see that. Cruelty was a currency in my family. Kindness was considered weakness. That’s where we are now. If you want to be successful, we’re told, you need to be tough and cruel and unyielding. And if you’re kind, then you don’t measure up, but that is where we are as a country. And we need to fight against that, I think. And so, far, we haven’t succeeded.

MARTIN: But sort of looping back to the larger mission of this book. So, what do you want us to draw from this? How do you want us to receive this?

TRUMP: Donald Trump, by virtue of the family he came from, by virtue of the fact that he was raised in a particular way by one person, again, who was a sociopath and my grandfather and my grandmother, who was also deeply, deeply troubled person, Donald is an irreparably broken person. He has never done the work. This is not somebody who will get better. He will only get worse. We’ve seen it happening before our eyes. So, it’s not like he did some questionable things in his younger days and has made reparations. No, he has no insight into himself. And again, we’ve seen this in how he’s governed. We see this and how he’s campaigning. We — it’s very clear that the rhetoric is getting more charged. It’s getting more violent. The people — the number of people and the kinds of people he’s attacking continue to increase. And we just cannot withstand this kind of dysfunction. We barely withstood it the first time around. And, you know, for anybody thinking, well, you know, we voted him out and everything was fine. No, it wasn’t. Things are worse now than they — in terms of our politics, than they were at the end of Donald’s term. President Biden, Vice President Harris have done extraordinary work to try to get us back on our feet, but this race is essentially tied right now. That, to me, is a sign that we have a lot of more — we have a lot more work to do. And a lot of people, either like what Donald is offering, which is a terrifying thought, or just don’t know enough about what’s really going on.

MARTIN: You’ve been writing with some exasperation about your view that the legacy media, for example, is not taking seriously the incoherence of many of the former president’s statements and that you feel that a double standard is being employed where the Democrats are being asked to sort of be coherent and have coherent policies and to, you know, adhere to kind of norms, but that he is not. And could you say more about that?

TRUMP: The push to normalize Donald is breathtaking. And more recently, especially in light of, as you mentioned, the focus, the laser focus on President Biden’s age and mental acuity. The lack of that on — now that Donald is the oldest person ever to run for the presidency is pretty shocking, especially given the fact that much of the time Donald makes no sense at all. So, it’s as if the legacy media has decided that its job is not to report what he’s saying, but to translate it for us. The problem is twofold. One, they’re not telling us that’s what they’re doing. They’re reporting it as if these are the things Donald is saying coherently. And secondly, they’re not really translating him at all because his gibberish, really, is untranslatable. What they’re doing is they’re imbuing meaning upon his words that actually doesn’t exist within those words, which is much more dangerous. And, you know, we saw this in my family, too. Like, Donald was the chosen child. He was the best, the greatest the smartest, and none of that was in evidence. But that’s what we had to buy into. We have existed, since he came onto the scene and gained power, in this very dark place. It feels, especially with COVID, but also with his treatment of the immigrant population, his treatment of the LGBTQ plus community, his treatment of women, that we’ve all been existing on this very narrow band of human experience. It’s all been rage and fear and dissatisfaction. And to see the contradistinction between that and what Vice President Harris offers us, it’s as if we’ve been in a dungeon and she’s opened the door and we can be out in the sunshine again. And that’s not spoken to at all.

MARTIN: I don’t want to make the book sound completely dire because it’s not. There are sort of moments of brightness, of moments of kind of revelation, which feels refreshing. Sort of at the end of it, you do — I guess the question would be, where do you end up? Where are you now?

TRUMP: It’s still a work in progress, but I do hope it ends at a place of hope with the understanding that there is still a lot of work to do. I feel that part of the, again, impetus for writing this book was that I was so stuck. And I would — I had opportunities handed to me because of the first book that I wasn’t able to take advantage of because I was so broken, and I wanted to change that. And part of that was recognizing that by virtue of some of the work I’ve done, by virtue of just where Donald and I ended up, diametrically opposed to each other and as far apart as you could possibly be, both literally and metaphorically, I have some power here, too, and I want to use it to help. I want to make — I want to help change. I want to contribute. And that can be scary, but it’s also a privilege.

MARTIN: Well, it is interesting because I will say, like I said at the beginning, that it — that your expertise, your both professional expertise and your familial relationship came at a time — became public at a time when people really kind of wanted to understand, like, what’s going on here? What do you hope your contribution will be going forward?

TRUMP: Assuming we get through this election in a way that keeps us intact and keeps our democracy intact, I want to be part of a project that strengthens democracy so that we don’t ever have to fight this fight again. It feels like we’ve been fighting this rearguard action against encroaching fascism for years now, and it weakens us. You know, there’s attrition. It leaves us vulnerable. So, we need to strengthen democracy. Actually, I mean, I don’t think America has ever been a true democracy. We need to make it one. We need to make this country representative to all of its people who all have the same rights and make this as a level of playing field as we possibly can. But sort of more immediately, I really hope to be part of the conversation that makes people feel that being a fully realized human being, being the kind of country that I think most of us want this country to be, we need to believe that kindness is a strength. We need to believe that empathy is the thing that unites us, is the thing that makes us better. And I would like to see this fallacious notion that cruelty is what makes us strong in the rearview mirror. It’s unsustainable.

MARTIN: Mary Trump, thank you so much for speaking with us again.

TRUMP: Thank you for having me. This was wonderful.