Mary Trump memoir: this tale of young Donald reads like a politically-motivated hatchet job

We face a choice: either Donald Trump is the most wicked man to hold the presidency or he’s the most maligned. Various books have accused him of fraud, treason, ignorance and incompetence – and to this list Mary Trump, his niece and a clinical psychiatrist by training, now adds exam cheat and the product of “child abuse”.

She claims that the President’s father, Frederick Christ Trump, was a “sociopath” who bullied his children and turned his middle son, Donald, into an “institutionalised” narcissist who might well have an “anti-social personality disorder.” He can’t be all bad, however. Mary admits Donald once gave her $100 to get her car out of impound.

The thing is, there’s little about this Freudian nightmare we didn’t already know: several writers have mined this stuff, and most of us have worked out that the President is a rogue. Mary takes us much closer to the family drama than ever before, with an amusing glimpse into a family birthday party at the White House in 2017, a painfully bourgeois affair at which Wagyu beef was washed down with wine and passive aggression. The President, who wanted people to know he’d had his teeth whitened, knocked back Diet Coke, which prompts the speculation that this might be the cause of his alleged insomnia.

Mary over-eggs the pudding by wondering if he also has a learning disability, and while this is a engrossing book, it often comes across as spiteful. It is undeniably subjective, which the publishers must know, because the word “alleged” does so much heavy lifting.

Mary Trump is the daughter of Frederick’s first son, Fred Jnr, who was meant to take over the family’s real-estate business in suburban New York but walked away to become a pilot instead. According to Mary, Frederick gave him hell for the decision, called him a “glorified bus driver” and piled on the pressure to win him back. Fred Jnr, emotionally tortured, gave up on flying and sank into alcoholism. He died of a heart attack in 1981, aged just 42.

Mary, who was at boarding school at the time, was pulled out of class and advised to call her grandparents; Frederick told her that her father was in hospital but it was “nothing to worry about”. She asked if it was serious. “Yes, I would say it’s serious,” he answered. Mary then called her mother, who broke the news that her father was in fact dead.

It’s a harrowing story but not unheard of. My grandparents kept the details of my uncle’s death a secret from the family for years – they were, like the Trumps, part of a generation that witnessed great suffering and tended to repress it. Frederick’s own father died from Spanish flu, forcing a twelve-year-old to become the head of the family. His wife (another Mary) came from a tiny island off Scotland that lost much of its male population when a boat sank on return from the First World War; over 200 boys drowned in one night. Neither was going to receive a “parent of the year” award, but the description of Frederick as “indifferent” doesn’t fit with the author’s account of the attention he lavished on Donald, who was more than happy to replace Fred Jnr as the heir apparent.

It’s odd that Frederick the authoritarian relished his younger son’s hatred of authority, and when Donald was finally sent off to a military school to straighten him out, Mary writes that he visited him “almost every weekend” between enrolment and graduation. That’s not indifference. We could infer that Frederick was not a completely absent father, he simply had a favourite – that he preferred Donald to Fred Jnr, that this had tragic consequences for poor Fred, and that Mary, as his daughter, remains understandably aggrieved. I don’t think we can assume that her story is the whole story.

Indeed, one has to ask where Mary gets her inside information. Her father died when she was young; his death apparently damaged her link with the Trumps. By her own admission, Donald was “the only member of my family… who included me in anything”. One suspicion is that a key source is Donald’s sister Maryanne Trump (all these Marys!), the most intellectually accomplished of the siblings, a federal judge and convert to Catholicism who, according to Mary, was surprised that so many evangelicals backed her brother given that “the only time Donald went to church was when the cameras were there”.

Another question is, why publish now? Why not in 2016, when the book might have contributed to better public understanding of the presidential candidate? The author says that “the events of the last three years... have forced my hand” and that she is “overwhelmed” by seeing “the horror of Donald’s cruelty… magnified by the fact that his acts were now official US policy”. Okay. But these horrors became obvious within weeks (if not hours) of Trump’s inauguration so, why not publish much sooner?

The White House says Mary is motivated by financial self-interest, but the book also feels timed to do maximum damage in the run-up to an election, written by a woman who is totally opposed to the Trump political project. Mary speculates that Vladimir Putin reassured Donald that he would help him win in 2016; she describes Hillary Clinton as “arguably the most qualified presidential candidate in the history of the country”, which is absurd.

And if Mary found the idea of Trump in the White House so appalling, why did she attend that party at the White House in 2017, why did she have her photo taken with him and why, in her own words, did she say to him “Don’t let them get you down”? Something doesn’t fit.

Too Much and Never Enough by Mary L Trump is published by Simon & Schuster at £20 (ebook £11.99). To order your copy for £16.99, call 0844 871 1514 or visit the Telegraph Bookshop