Mary L. Trump, the niece of President Donald Trump and daughter of Mr. Trump’s late brother, Fred Trump Jr., revealed this week what she argued had shaped her uncle into “a destroyed human being.”
Trump’s father, Fred Trump, a successful real estate developer, gave his son and current U.S. president “at least $413 million in today’s dollars,” and “much of it through tax dodges in the 1990s,” The New York Times reported in 2018. That enormous sum of money, Mary Trump told former MSNBC host Joy Reid in an interview published this week, played an outsized role in shaping “the controversial president’s upbringing and future outlook,” The Mirror reported Saturday.
“I think the greatest indictment of my grandparents is that they had five children, and in very different ways, every single one of them was a destroyed human being,” Mary Trump told Reid, according to The Mirror. “Now, my grandmother is a separate issue, but my grandfather was the one with all of the power in the family. He was a sociopath. So that's a real big disadvantage to start your life at.”
Mary Trump also argued that Fred Trump's apparent favoritism toward Donald Trump over his siblings only deepened what she characterized as the president's obsession with money.
“And the only thing literally that he...that mattered to him was money. And he taught his other children that lesson, too,” Mary Trump said.
“Thankfully, my dad wasn't like that, but Donald certainly was. And he turned my entire family into a zero-sum game. There could only be one person. And my grandfather, for reasons that I still don't completely understand, picked Donald. And over the course of my grandfather's life, he threw $410 million at Donald, all of which he squandered."