Frontlist | ‘America’s national trauma’ to be released by Mary Trump

on Dec 03, 2020

Donald Trump’s niece Mary Trump will follow her bestselling exposé of her dysfunctional family life with a new book on “America’s national trauma”, her publisher has announced.

The Reckoning will be published by St Martin’s Press in July 2021. According to St Martin’s, it “will examine America’s national trauma, rooted in our history but dramatically exacerbated by the impact of current events and the Trump administration’s corrupt and immoral policies”.

Mary Trump is the daughter of Fred Trump Jr, the president’s older brother who died aged 42 in 1981, from illness relating to alcoholism. Much of Mary Trump’s first book, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man, was informed by her father’s treatment by his siblings and parents.

The Trump family sought to block publication but the book, published by Simon & Schuster, became an enormous hit, selling 1.35m copies in its first week alone.

The president’s niece, a trained psychologist, has since emerged as a prominent critic.

“I don’t think he has any political ideology,” she told in an interaction with a media person. “I would say he behaves like a white supremacist, certainly.”

In a statement on Tuesday, Mary Trump said: “For four years, Donald Trump has inflicted a series of traumas upon the American people, targeting anyone he perceived as the ‘other’ as an enemy.

“Women were discounted and derided, the sick were dismissed as weak and unworthy of help, immigrants and minorities were demonized and discriminated against, and money was elevated above all else.

“Finally, he demonstrated his stunning lack of concern for the American people with his willful mishandling of the pandemic and the ensuing economic collapse. In short, he transformed our country into a macro version of my malignantly dysfunctional family.”

Trump is currently refusing to concede defeat to Joe Biden, while making baseless claims of electoral fraud, pursuing long-shot lawsuits and encouraging rumors that he may run for president again in four years’ time.

Jennifer Enderlin, St Martin’s president and publisher, said Mary Trump was “uniquely positioned … to make sense of the consequences of our living through what could be the greatest mental health crisis we have ever experienced as a nation.”

St Martin’s Press said: “America is suffering from PTSD – a new leader alone cannot fix us.”