Trump's psychologist niece spills about family dynamic that caused 'problems for him'

Donald Trump's obsession with crowd sizes ties into his desire to be complimented 24/7, which stems from unfortunate circumstances during his early childhood, according to the former president's psychologist niece.

Trained psychologist Mary Trump said Sunday that her uncle is a "black hole of need," which is contributing to his latest conspiracy theory about Vice President Kamala Harris' crowd size. The claim was fact checked by CNN, and one lawmaker said it should disqualify Trump from holding office.

Mary Trump says it relates to his need to be "complimented" and "reassured."

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"He constantly needs to be complimented. He constantly needs to be reassured. But the light of those compliments or the reassurances immediately gets sucked in and disappears," she said Sunday. "In order for him to be propped up, the flow would need to be constant. It is never enough. And he needs these external supports because he can't do it himself."

Further, Mary Trump dropped some insider information about what she says caused this behavior.

"When Donald was a young child, his mother, my grandmother, was very ill. For about a year, starting when Donald was two and a half, he didn't have a primary caregiver because she was physically and emotionally unavailable to him. There was nobody there to do the essential parenting that children at that extremely crucial developmental period need," she said. "Toddlers need to be seen; they need to be soothed. He didn't get any of that, not only because my grandmother wasn't there for him, but because the person who replaced her, my grandfather, was a straight up textbook sociopath. My grandfather had absolutely no interest in nurturing children. He only cared about other human beings, including his own children, to the extent that they could be of use to him. Those are the circumstances in which Donald grew up, which as you can imagine, created some serious problems for him. He was never able to construct his own sense of self-worth."

To "get through" this, she said, her uncle "developed very rigid defenses against the world—against his loneliness, against the fact that there was nobody to soothe him."

"As time passed, the only way he could get his father's attention was to be hyperbolic," she added. "He had to be the best, the greatest, the smartest, the toughest—whatever it was his father required of him."

She concluded:

"The problem for Donald was that on an unconscious level, he knew that none of what he presented himself to be was true. He knew that none of what he told people about who he was had any validity. When you see him bragging about his crowd sizes, lying about the polls, undercutting vice President Harris's numbers, it's because when he was a very young child, there was nobody who cared about him telling him that he was worth anything. And that is a tragedy. We should have compassion for that child. But we have to accept that this man is a monster who means all of us harm. Remember, crowd sizes are completely irrelevant unless you're so desperate to prove that you mean something, you're willing to lie about them."