Happy families are all alike, Leo Tolstoy observed, while every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Then there are the Trumps, who sound like they were incapable of getting through a Thanksgiving or Christmas without blood on the walls.
In a tell-all memoir Mary L Trump, psychologist and niece of Donald Trump, portrays the US president’s father, Fred, as the domineering, stone-hearted patriarch of a “malignantly dysfunctional family” that she says explains much about Donald’s empathy issues.
“The atmosphere of division my grandfather created in the Trump family is the water in which Donald has always swum, and division continues to benefit him at the expense of everybody else,” she writes in Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created The World’s Most Dangerous Man, to be published later this month.
“It’s wearing the country down, just as it did my father, changing us even as it leaves Donald unaltered. It’s weakening our ability to be kind or believe in forgiveness, concepts that have never had any meaning for him.”
Mary L Trump, 55, is the daughter of Trump’s older brother, Freddy, who died in 1981 aged 42 after a struggle with alcoholism. The president has identified his brother’s experience as one of the reasons he does not drink.
The Trumps took sibling rivalry to a new level, the president’s niece writes. “Even for the 1950s, the family was deeply split along gender lines,” she says, noting that Fred and his wife Mary were “never partners” and “the girls were her purview, the boys his”.
Source: US Politics - theguardian.com
