Once again, Mary Trump strafes her family, with her third book in four years. Who Could Ever Love You presents the Trump name as both cocoon and nightmare. Dysfunction reigns. Think of it as a burn book. All get singed.
“I exhaled as the needle slid into my arm,” Trump writes in her prologue, looking back to a stay at a medical facility in 2021.
“Ketamine flowing through my body felt like an act of desperation – it was an act of desperation.
“I’m here because five years ago, I lost control of my life. I’m here because the world has fallen away and I don’t know how to find my way back.
“I’m here because Donald Trump is my uncle.”
Personal awareness, high. Personal agency, not so clear. At times, Trump wishes Trump was not her surname. But she won’t abandon the legacy.
She has delivered two bestsellers – Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man and The Reckoning: America’s Trauma and Finding a Way to Heal. Her third book also follows All in the Family: The Trumps and How We Got This Way, a recent memoir by Fred C Trump III, Mary’s older brother, now estranged.
Their home life sounds brutal – Linda Clapp, their mother, straight out of Mommy Dearest. Mary portrays her as cruelly oblivious. She repeatedly refused to bring young Mary to the hospital during late-night asthma attacks. Instead, she plunked Mary into her own bed.
“Next to me, she slept, her breathing shallow, steady, and rhythmic,” Mary writes. “It was the loneliest sound.”
Later when Clapp had cancer, she continued to alienate and casually belittle her daughter. When the two women spoke by phone, Clapp conveniently claimed Mary was inaudible. As an adult, though, Mary no longer needed to feign caring.
“I’d spent enough of my life thinking I was going to suffocate to death with her lying next to me doing nothing,” she recalls. “I couldn’t feel fear – either hers or mine – anymore. Just incandescent rage.” Clapp died in 2001.
Mary’s father, Fred Trump Jr, neglected his kids. When he was around, he wasn’t present. He hit the bottle, divorced Clapp and died young. Mary and Fritz loved him anyway. But his own father, Fred Trump Sr, repeatedly trampled his son, despising him for who he was and what he wasn’t. The elder Trump came to disinherit Fred Jr and his “issue”, at the urging of his surviving children, the next oldest boy, Donald Trump, among them. Think The Apprentice or Family Feud, crossed with Lord of the Flies.
Mary and her brother Fred III, AKA Fritz, took the matter to court. Shared adversity did not draw them closer. He expressed disapproval of Mary’s life choices, including becoming a mother later in life, in a same-sex relationship.
“He emailed to say that we were not welcome at his house for Thanksgiving, where we’d been celebrating for years … and that was it.” Casting off family came with the DNA.
Predictably, Mary dishes on Uncle Donald. Her animus runs long and deep, back to grade school days. He bullied her, equating cruelty with attention. Little has changed.
Mary writes: “It didn’t take me long to realize that Donald couldn’t do much more than throw a baseball, which he did, as hard as he could at his nieces and nephews, who were all under ten.”
Trump pitched hard and wild, she writes, rarely meeting the strike zone. On the rare occasions when he connected with her mitt, her eight-year-old hand shuddered.
Robert Trump, Donald’s now deceased younger brother, also tormented his niece. A college athlete, Robert kicked a soccer ball at her already bruised eye, then failed to apologize. Instead, he called her “honeybunch” and joked about her pain.
“Robert was 26 years old,” she writes. “After that, whenever either of my uncles was around, I kept to myself.”
She also remembers Robert’s silence as Fred Trump Sr trashed her dad.
“I heard my grandfather say, ‘That poor slob.’ Rob just shook his head.”
Mary’s pain is palpable.
A coda. In June 2020, Robert sued to block publication of Too Much and Never Enough. He lost. Weeks later, he died. At his funeral, at the White House, Donald Trump eulogized his “best friend”. For what it’s worth, even their relationship was tortured.
The epilogue to Who Could Ever Love You is more upbeat. New York bathes Mary in its glow. She describes a winter evening earlier this year. Undeterred by the cold, she ventures out and inhales the night.
“The lights of the city – my city – shone behind me. There is no way to know if a chance for redemption or even forgiveness exists anymore, but in that moment, I felt the world opening up again. I leaned my head back, breathed deeply, and took it all in.”
For Mary Trump, there will be a tomorrow. Here, she echoes the spirit of Bright Lights, Big City, Jay McInerney’s semi-autobiographical breakout novel, a 1984 tale of divorce, drugs and desperation that ends in the harsh early-morning glare of lower Manhattan, mere blocks from where Trump now closes her book.
For McInerney, fresh-baked rolls consumed on a sidewalk provide a path toward salvation. “You get down on your knees and tear open the bag. The smell of warm dough envelops you. The first bite sticks in your throat and you almost gag. You will have to go slowly. You will have to learn everything all over again.”
By that measure, Mary Trump has endured a lifetime of lessons.
Who Could Ever Love You: A Family Memoir is published in the US by Macmillan
