Mary Trump has been a thorn in her uncle’s side, but she explained in an interview that she’s contemplating changing her name to make it clear she no longer has any association with Donald Trump or the Trump family.
“The damage Donald has done to this country is incalculable,” she said in a wide-ranging interview with the Telegraph. “We’re just waiting to find out how much is irreparable.”
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Mary, 55, is so done with being associated with the former President that “I am prepared to change my name if need be,” she states.
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She explains that his failures as President are due to the nature of his upbringing. “With COVID, for example, he would only have had to show some empathy, and wear a mask. That’s it,” she says of his handling of the coronavirus pandemic over the last year that has taken hundreds of thousands of lives.
Instead, he committed to “a refusal to acknowledge the seriousness of something that was bad, negative, a disease. Donald didn’t want to be associated with those things,” Mary says, because, “I don’t believe he understands affection or intimacy.”
“As I was writing [my book] I realized that I felt enormous amounts of compassion for those children,” she said, referring to the family patriarch Fred Trump’s children, including Donald and Mary’s late father, Fred Jr. “They had a horrible childhood and suffered enormously. But do I feel compassion for my uncle now? No.”
Mary, a clinical psychologist by trade, also noted that she doesn’t think that much has changed in the relationship between Donald and former first lady Melania, as rumors arise that she’s contemplating divorce.
On Inauguration Day, Mary told CNN’s Anderson Cooper that it had become “probably the worst day of his life, because the clock is ticking and he’s running out of time” as the leader of the country. Donald has since retreated to his club in Florida.
She said that she doubts that her uncle will run for election again in 2024 because he “will never put himself in a position where he can lose like this again, first of all.” She added that waiting to run again “would mean for four years that he is playing essentially a supporting role, which will be very difficult for him to sustain.”
Mary has been in the news throughout the last year for denouncing her uncle. She wrote and published her tell-all book Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man, where she explains how toxic family relationships and bigotry led to making Donald Trump what he is today.
Her late uncle Robert Trump, Donald’s brother, tried to sue her to stop the publication of the book, but failed.
In the book, Mary explains that by the 1990s she was already living with a woman and planning to marry her. She said in her book that the whole family got together while her grandfather was sick and dying and that she thought about coming out then.
“It’s a disgrace they’re letting that little fa***t Elton John sing at [Princess Diana’s] service,” Mary said her grandmother — Donald’s mother, Mary Ann Trump — said at the gathering.
“I’d realized it was better that she didn’t know I was living with… a woman,” Mary wrote. She decided against coming out.
Currently, Mary is suing Donald. She alleges that he, along with his sister Maryanne Trump Barry and his late brother Robert, falsified documents to undervalue the share of the family business that she inherited when Fred, Jr. passed away in 1981. Mary was only 16 years old at the time.
She says her aunt and uncles “forced her to sign” fraudulent valuations in order to settle Fred Trump Sr.’s will. She has previously said that she agreed to the settlement because she believed that the family estate was worth $30 million, but years later she found out it was worth almost one billion dollars.
Now, she seems prepared to erase any connection with Donald in any way possible. In response to being asked what she would say to him if they could talk again, Mary said “there are just two things I’d like to say.”
“The first, a question: ‘Donald, what movie did you go and see while my dad was dying alone in the hospital?’ And then I’d say: ‘Your father would be horrified by what a loser you turned out to be.’ Because for him that would be worse than anything.”
