President Donald Trump grew up in a “dysfunctional” family who believed that “money substituted” for acts of love and one whose patriarch used his own relatives as “pawns”, creating a “rather dangerous situation” for the United States decades later, Commander The chief’s niece warned in an exclusive interview with ABC News.
“He is completely incapable of leading this country, and it is dangerous to allow him to do so,” Mary Trump told ABC News chief anchor George Stephanopoulos.
She said “it is impossible to know who Donald might have been” if he had been born into a different family, but his father, Fred Trump, was a “sociopath” who pushed his children to “succeed at all costs”, to see people like “Expendable” and “doing anything to get attention, financial rewards and to ‘win’”.
Mary Trump’s own father, Fred Trump Jr., the President’s older brother, did not conform to those family standards and was “punished for being kind, for being generous … [and] for having interests outside of what my grandfather thought was acceptable, “he said.
But Donald Trump “clearly learned the lesson by seeing his [older] brother “and seeing how badly his brother was treated by the family patriarch in return, he said.
Donald Trump’s father “was incredibly driven in a way that converted other people, including his children [and] wife, into pawns to be used for their own purposes, “said Mary Trump.
The exclusive interview with ABC News came on Tuesday when Simon & Schuster released their highly anticipated book, “Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the Most Dangerous Man in the World.”
The book features a scathing depiction of the incumbent president, largely drawing, Mary Trump says, from the author’s memories, conversations with family members, and legal, financial and family documents.
The book’s 210 pages are peppered with potentially embarrassing personal anecdotes, including a disputed allegation that Donald Trump paid a childhood friend named Joe Shapiro to take the SAT exam, helping him transfer from Fordham to Wharton School.
The White House has denied the claim and rejected the book as a job full of “falsehoods” and “absurd accusations.” But in her ABC News interview, Mary Trump said she is “absolutely certain” that someone else took her uncle’s SAT test, insisting that although she never met Shapiro and didn’t know if he was still alive, she knew what it happened. from “a source very close to Donald”.
As reports of the indictment increased last week, Pam Shriver, an ESPN analyst and former tennis star, publicly said that if the book refers to her late husband Joe Shapiro, who was a friend of Trump, it may not be true because her Husband said he only met Trump after Trump had already transferred to Wharton School.
In the Tuesday interview, Mary Trump said that Joe Shapiro she was talking about is not Shriver’s late husband.
“It was not Joe Shapiro that people have focused on,” he said, adding that he feels “terrible” that Shriver was “subdued” as a result of his indictment.
Mary Trump’s uncle Robert, the president’s younger brother, unsuccessfully urged a court to block publication of the book. And another legal effort by Robert Trump to stop Mary Trump from publicly promoting the new book also failed, and a New York judge ruled Monday that he was free to speak in public.
“I saw firsthand what focuses on the wrong things, elevating the wrong people they can do: the collateral damage that can be created by allowing someone to live their lives without responsibility,” he said in his interview with ABC News. “And it is surprising to see that this continues now on a much larger scale.”
According to Mary Trump’s account, tensions within the family reached a boiling point in 1999, after her grandfather died and she learned that he had essentially excluded her and her brother from her will. When she and her brother filed a lawsuit, the rest of the family sought to “cause us more pain and make us more desperate,” ending the health insurance they had always received through their grandfather’s company, Mary Trump wrote.
They eventually struck a deal, but in her interview with ABC News, she described the deal as unfair.
“I am a Trump. It’s all about money in this family, ”he said, while insisting that he is different from them. “Money replaced everything else. It was literally the only currency the family trafficked. ”
Mary Trump’s own father died in 1981.
The White House on Tuesday referred to ABC News on its previous statements about the book. The White House previously said: “Mary Trump and the publisher of her book may claim to be acting in the public interest, but this book is clearly in the author’s own financial interest.”
“President Trump has been in office for more than three years working on behalf of the American people, why speak now? The president describes the relationship he had with his father as warm and said that his father was very good to him. He said his father was loving and not hard on him as a child, “the statement continued.
Lucien Bruggeman, Nadine Shubailat and John Santucci of ABC News contributed to this report.
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