Trump has been compared to a mob boss, regarding family as a means to enforcing his will and expanding his power.
By David Smith
The Guardian (6/21/20)
It was election night 2016 and Donald Trump, having stunned the world by winning the American presidency, paraded beaming family members in the ballroom of a New York hotel.
But at least one relative was not celebrating.
“This is one of the worst nights of my life,” the president-elect’s niece, Mary Lea Trump, wrote on Twitter. “What is wrong with this country? I fear the American experiment has failed.”
She has presumably had many more bad nights since. It emerged this week that Mary, a clinical psychologist from Long Island, is to publish an unflattering memoir about her uncle entitled Too Much And Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man.
“I think he’s freaking out.”
There have been many damning insider accounts about Trump, most recently by his former national security adviser John Bolton, but perhaps no perceived betrayal will sting like the one that springs from his own flesh and blood.
“I think he’s freaking out,” said Michael D’Antonio, author of Never Enough: Donald Trump and the Pursuit of Success. “He will treat her savagely.”
For Trump, life has always been a family business, and it is impossible to tell where family ends and business begins. Framed photos of his late parents loom over his shoulder in the Oval Office; the death of his elder brother casts a long shadow; his children, perhaps the only people beyond suspicion of disloyalty, work for his company or his campaign or in the White House.
Mary, 55, is the daughter of Fred Trump Jr, the president’s older brother, who died in 1981 at the age of 42 from a heart attack linked to alcoholism. She has bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English literature, as well as a PhD in clinical psychology from Adelphi University in New York, according to Forbes.
D’Antonio commented: “It makes her someone that Donald would fear on a very elemental level. She thinks for herself, she’s analytical when it comes to humans and she can express herself, so this is a nightmare for him.” …