Donald Trump’s niece has shared a story about how her mother was pushed out of Trump family holidays. She says what happened next explains a lot about the president and his motives.
In the latest installment of her “Trump Family Horror” series on her Substack, “The Good in Us,” Mary Trump said her mother, Linda, stayed a fixture at Trump family gatherings for decades. That lasted long after she divorced Mary’s father, Fred Trump Jr., and even after he died in 1981.
“For reasons I don’t understand, after my parents got divorced, my mother was required to show up to all of the Trump family holidays,” Mary Trump wrote. “She went to Mother’s Day, she went to my grandfather’s birthday, and she attended any other holidays that required her presence.”
Her mother wasn’t welcome, she added.
“It didn’t help, of course, that nobody in my father’s family liked my mother very much, and they didn’t treat her well,” she wrote. “In fact, most of the time she was completely ignored, especially by the wives of my uncles Robert and Donald.”
Then, she said, two of those wives decided they’d had enough. According to Mary Trump, her grandmother told her that Ivana Trump, who was then married to Donald, and Blaine Trump, then married to Robert, came to her before one Thanksgiving with a demand.
“We don’t want Linda at the holidays anymore,” Mary Trump recalled them saying. “She’s difficult. She’s depressing. She doesn’t have anything to say.”
“Whatever their rationale was, the thing is, they never made an effort with her either,” Mary Trump wrote. She noted that her mother had been part of the family since 1960, longer than either woman.
Her grandmother’s response was simple: “Okay.”
“Even after 30 years in that family, as you can imagine, my mother didn’t take this well,” Mary Trump wrote. “Personally, I was relieved.”
She and her brother were still expected to show up for Thanksgiving and Christmas. That Christmas brought the family’s annual gift checks from her grandparents. They gave each family member the maximum amount allowed tax-free, a common way for wealthy people to shrink their estates.
“Now, I consider it hazard pay,” Mary Trump wrote.
Even though she’d been banned, Linda got her checks too. She sent them back.
“She rejected the gift of money, and she never got another thing from these extremely wealthy people again,” Mary Trump wrote.
The story, she explained, illustrates a rule her grandmother, Mary Anne Trump, once passed along to her directly. Mary Trump had mentioned that her apartment had been burglarized while she was a Columbia graduate student, and that her typewriter had been stolen. Her grandmother offered to write her a check. When Mary said no, she got some advice.
“She said very seriously, in her little Scottish brogue, ‘Mary, never reject a gift of money,’” Mary Trump wrote. “That philosophy, if that’s what you want to call it, had been drilled into Donald and pretty much everybody else in the family forever.”
Not everyone got the same treatment, she added. Her aunts Maryanne and Elizabeth and her father “didn’t get any gifts of money, unlike their younger brothers.”
Mary Trump tied the family lesson to her uncle’s acceptance of a $400 million luxury 747 from Qatar’s royal family. She blamed her grandfather, Fred Trump Sr., whom she called “a straight up sociopath” for whom “money was the only currency.”
“It actually stood in for frivolous things like love, kindness, and affection, effectively replacing them,” she wrote.
“Can we blame Donald for accepting gifts of value, even if they’re actually bribes? Yes. Yes, we can,” she added. “I think we should demand that our leaders, whether they want to or not, must also reject gifts of money. Otherwise, as has become increasingly clear, we are going to continue to live in a situation in which America is for sale to the highest bidder, or perhaps I should say Donald Trump is.”