US President Donald Trump said on Sunday that what “hurts” him the most, more than the personal remarks against him contained within his niece Mary Trump’s family memoir released earlier this week, is her attack on his father, Fred Trump,
During an interview with Fox News’s Chris Wallace, in response to a question of whether he has been “hurt ... at all” to be “attacked in such personal terms” by a member of his own family, the daughter of his late elder brother, Fred Trump Jr., Trump said, “It hurts me more about attacking my father, not being kind to my mother. I have a mother who was like a saint.”
“Let me just tell you, my father was — I think he was the most solid person I’ve ever met. And he was a very good person. He was a very, very good person. He was strong but he was good. For her to say the kind of things, a psychopath, that he was a psychopath, anybody that knew Fred Trump would call him a psychopath?” the president questioned.
In her top-selling new book ‘Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man’, which sold over one million copies on the day of release Tuesday, the president’s niece claimed that Trump’s father was a “high-functioning sociopath” who fostered an “atmosphere of division” among his children and that Trump had “learned the lesson” from him.
She claimed during a Tuesday interview, the day of her memoir's publication, that Trump’s father damaged the family by doing everything to “get attention, financial reward and to win”.
“He was incredibly driven in a way that turned other people, including his children [and] wife, into pawns to be used to his own ends,” Mary Trump said on Tuesday during an interview with ABC News. “It’s impossible to know who Donald might have been under different circumstances and with different parents. But clearly he learned the lesson.”
Trump defended his father, saying, “he liked to win” and was strong, and was “tough on me, he was tough on all of the kids. But tough in a solid sense, in a really good sense.”
The president said, “It’s disgraceful that she said that”, and stated that she has never been a “family favorite”.
Speaking about the president’s personality, Mary Trump, a licensed clinical psychologist, wrote in her book that Trump’s “pathologies are so complex and his behaviors so often inexplicable that coming up with an accurate and comprehensive diagnosis would require a full battery of psychological and neuropsychological tests that he’ll never sit for.”
On Saturday, Trump tweeted that he had become “the ultimate member of The Book of the Month Club”, because he has been the subject of two best-selling recent books, Mary Trump’s book and a book ‘The Room Where It Happened’ by his former national security advisor appointee, John Bolton,
I am the ultimate member of The Book of the Month Club. First I have lowlife dummy John Bolton, a war mongering fool, violating the law (he released massive amounts of Classified Information) and an NDA in order to build badly needed credibility and make a few dollars, which
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 17, 2020
Trump slammed his niece as “a seldom seen niece who knows little about me, says untruthful things about my wonderful parents (who couldn’t stand her!) and me”. The US president also declared that his niece had violated a nondisclosure agreement (NDA) and had broken “the Law by givng [sic] out my Tax Returns”.
....Tax Returns. She’s a mess! Many books have been written about me, some good, some bad. Both happily and sadly, there will be more to come!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 17, 2020
“She’s a mess!” Trump tweeted. “Many books have been written about me, some good, some bad. Both happily and sadly, there will be more to come!”
