[imagesource: Tasos Katopodis / Getty]

Time and time again, those who have worked closely with Donald Trump talk about the kind of person he is.

Past employees and government members, dismissed by Trump as disgruntled, the man who ghostwrote The Art of the Deal, and countless others have spoken out about the man with tiny hands and the most fragile of egos.

Most recently, John Bolton, the US National Security Advisor from 2018 to 2019, wrote a tell-all book about his time alongside POTUS, who couldn’t be bothered to pay attention in national security briefings.

If you want insight into just how Trump came to be the person that he is today, however, you can’t do much better than Mary Trump (pictured above), his niece and a trained clinical psychologist, who will release her book, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man, shortly.

The Daily Beast has a copy, and here are some snippets of what’s in the book:

In one particularly disturbing scene from a trip to Mar-a-Lago, Mary recounts how when she was 29 and wearing a bathing suit and a pair of shorts to lunch at the resort, her uncle looked up at her and remarked, “Holy shit, Mary. You’re stacked.”

“Donald!” Marla Maples said to her then-husband, slapping him on the arm.

“I was twenty-nine and not easily embarrassed, but my face reddened, and I suddenly felt self-conscious,” Mary recounts. “I pulled my towel around my shoulders. It occurred to me that nobody in my family, outside of my parents and brother, had ever seen me in a bathing suit.”

That’s creepy uncle territory there, although the more than 25 women who have accused Trump of sexual misconduct would say it points to a situation far worse than that.

Donnie is big on family:

At the dinner, just a few months after her uncle had moved into the White House, Mary recounts how Donald gestured towards Eric Trump’s wife, his daughter-in-law. “Lara, there,” he said. “I barely even knew who the fuck she was, honestly, but then she gave a great speech during the campaign in Georgia supporting me.” The couple had been together for eight years.

Mary claims that when Trump’s sister, retired federal court judge Maryanne Trump Barry, was asked about her brother’s chances of becoming president when he announced his candidacy, she said “He’s a clown. This will never happen.”

Maryanne also reportedly said “The only time Donald went to church was when the cameras were there. It’s mind-boggling. He has no principles. None!”

The Daily Beast’s report on the book is long and in-depth – read it in full here – but let’s get some key snippets from the Guardian and their list of the most shocking claims:

Trump allegedly paid someone to take his high school exams

Trump is proud of his attendance at Wharton Business School, at the prestigious University of Pennsylvania. But according to his niece, he got there by cheating – which he “embraces as a way of life”.

Mary Trump writes: “Donald worried that his grade point average, which put him far from the top of the class, would scuttle his efforts to get accepted. To hedge his bets he enlisted Joe Shapiro, a smart kid with a reputation for being a good test taker, to take his SATs for him. That was much easier to pull off in the days before photo IDs and computerised records.”

Trump Christmases could be tough

One year, Donald and his first wife, Ivana Trump, gave the young Mary a single gold lamé shoe, its heel filled with hard candy.

“Where had this thing come from?” Mary writes. “Had it been a door prize or a party favour from a luncheon?

“Donald came through the pantry from the kitchen. As he passed me, he asked, ‘What’s that?’

“It’s a present from you.”

Mary Trump also says that in 1977, when she was 12, her Christmas present from Donald and Ivana was a $12 pack of underwear. Her brother got a leather-bound journal, two years out of date. Later, Mary received a Cellophaned gift basket, “an obvious regift” containing olives and a salami but not one evidently removed item, which a cousin said was “probably caviar”.

The greatest insight the book offers is a look at how Trump’s childhood, and his relationship with his parents, created the man he is today.

Mary says his character was shaped by ‘child abuse’:

Too Much and Never Enough deals extensively with the emotional abuse of a household topped by an absent father and an ill, neglected mother. Mary Trump contends that Fred Trump Sr’s many failings – ultimately, his being a “high-functioning sociopath” – weighed heavily on all his children, including her father Fred Trump Jr, who died from illness arising from alcoholism in 1981.

“Having been abandoned by his mother for at least a year,” she writes, “and having his father fail not only to meet his needs but to make him feel safe or loved, valued or mirrored, Donald suffered deprivations that would scar him for life [and acquired] personality traits [including] displays of narcissism, bullying, [and] grandiosity”.

If you examine the relationship between Trump and his own son, Don Jr., you’ll see many of the same patterns playing out.

Another zinger:

“Honest work was never demanded of him, and no matter how badly he failed, he was rewarded in ways that are almost unfathomable.”

…“Donald’s ego has been and is a fragile and inadequate barrier between him and the real world, which, thanks to his father’s [above right] money and power, he never had to negotiate by himself.”

One more for the road? This from the Axios summary:

On the night that Donald Trump’s older brother, Freddy, died from an alcohol-induced heart attack in 1981, Mary Trump alleges the family sent him to the hospital alone. She claims Donald Trump went to see a movie instead of staying by his brother’s bedside.

Mary has remained mostly silent over the years, aside from a flurry of tweets on the night Trump won the presidential election, where she said it was “the worst night of my life”, a “horrific wrong”, and that she grieved for the country.

Whilst there is obviously great financial gain in publishing a book about your uncle, the American president, Mary says there is another, more powerful, reason she is speaking out:

 “If he is afforded a second term, it would be the end of American democracy. Donald, following the lead of my grandfather and with complicity, silence, and inaction from his siblings, destroyed my father. I can’t let him destroy my country.”

As you can imagine, the Trump family isn’t too keen on the book, and have tried multiple times to block its publication.

On June 30, a New York judge issued a temporary block, but that has since been lifted, and the book has already become a bestseller from presales.

[sources:dailybeast&guardian&axios]