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Trump's niece spills 'creepy' family secret: 'He was obsessed with my hair'
November 8, 2026 12:18PM ET
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Mary Trump says her grandfather, Fred Trump Sr., offered her $100 for her hair nearly every time he saw her, from her childhood until she was “well into my 20s.”
Mary Trump, a clinical psychologist and outspoken critic of her uncle Donald, shared the story in the latest installment of her “Trump Family Horror” series on her Substack, “The Good in Us.” She also shared a separate story about how her uncle, now the president, would "leer" as his father showed her inappropriate photos when she was a child.
She described her grandfather as a man who “cared about two things, his business and money.” She called him a “sociopath” who “was cruel, and he loved humiliating people, especially those who were weaker and dependent upon him.” He also had “weird, weird obsessions,” she wrote, and one of them was “directly related to me.”
“He was obsessed with my hair. Does that sound eerily familiar? Yes. Well, it should,” she wrote, a nod to her uncle’s famous preoccupation with his own hair.
As a child, she explained, she had “very long, very thick, and very blonde hair.” Her grandfather, meanwhile, had a receding hairline “from the time he was like 11” and “was still very self conscious about it.”
She said she visited her grandparents’ house every weekend, sometimes twice, and every visit followed the same routine: a handshake, a quick kiss on the cheek, and a couple of questions.
“How’s school? Fine. Getting A’s? Yes. That was it,” she wrote. “That was the sum total of our riveting, in depth, profound philosophical disquisitions about my life.”
Then came the offer.
“He would take out that billfold of his that was this thick with a massive wad of hundred dollar bills, and he would take out a hundred dollar bill and ask me if he could buy my hair every single time I saw him until I was well into my 20s,” she wrote.
She said she always turned him down. “I don’t think it works that way, grandpa,” she would tell him, or, “Sorry, grandpa, I need to hang onto it.”
“Even if he was willing to part with $100, because trust me, that was not an easy thing for my grandfather to do,” she added. “Unless there was some kind of surgery that could have, I don’t know, grafted my hair onto his skull. This is getting creepier by the minute.”
She suspected the offer was partly because “my grandfather literally had nothing else to say to me,” and said it may have felt like “a way we were bonding.” But she called it “creepy and objectifying.”
“It was pretty clear that the only worth I had to him was my hair, which, by the way, wasn’t for sale,” she wrote. “It turns out that the only thing he really wanted from me was one thing I couldn’t give him.”
Fred Trump Sr. died in 1999.