Underneath the outward bravado, Donald Trump was “afraid” during his White House appearance shortly after being treated for COVID-19, reveals a new book by his estranged niece, Mary Trump, cited by The Guardian.
The American psychologist and author claims to have recognized the “pained” expression on the face of the then-US president, which resembled that of her grandmother. However, the former POTUS refused to admit his vulnerability even to himself, according to The Reckoning, Our Nation's Trauma and Finding a Way to Heal, penned by the daughter of Fred Trump Jr., who died from a heart attack in 1981.
In October 2020 Donald Trump was discharged from a military hospital after three days of treatment for COVID-19. Trump landed on the south lawn and climbed up the exterior staircase to the Truman balcony, “doing his best Mussolini imitation”, writes Mary Trump.
“… he took off his mask in a macho display of invulnerability… He clenched his teeth and jutted out his jaw, just as my grandmother did when she was biting back anger or clamping down on her pain. In Donald, I saw the latter.”
Mary Trump, who according to a LinkedIn profile since disabled worked as a certified professional life coach, added:
“I have asthma, so I am acutely aware of what it looks like when somebody is struggling to breathe. He was in pain, he was afraid, but he would never admit that to anybody – not even himself. Because, as always, the consequences of admitting vulnerability were much more frightening to him than being honest.”
The book feeds into speculations that Donald Trump was more severely ill than the White House admitted at the time.
A February report in the New York Time claimed that the-then POTUS had depressed blood oxygen levels and a lung problem linked with coronavirus-triggered pneumonia. Concerns had reportedly been voiced that Trump would need to be put on a ventilator.
Donald Trump’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic is slammed in the book, while the uptick of violence across the nation is blamed on his “unrestrained antisemitism and homophobia”.
The scathing new tell-all, set to be released on August 17, argues that the US is suffering a “national trauma” of rage and hatred that has been aggravated by Donald Trump’s “assault on democracy”.
The writer makes the case that others in Trump’s administration had created a “lean and ruthless machine for advancing fascism”.
The new tome comes in the wake of the 2020 memoir, Too Much and Never Enough, where Mary Trump, 56, insisted that her “aunt and uncles should be ashamed of themselves” for their handling of the division of assets of their late grandfather’s real estate empire in his will.
Her bestseller sold nearly one million copies on the day of its release, and portrayed Trump as the product of a “dysfunctional family”. One of her uncle’s most vehement critics, who voted for Democrat Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election rather than Trump, painted a morbid portrait of her uncle’s “sociopath” father, Fred Trump.
With Too Much and Never Enough, Mary Trump became the first member of the family to publish a Donald Trump biography.
In The Reckoning, Mary Trump warns:
“From increasing levels of rage and hatred on the one side to increasing levels of helplessness, stress, and despair on the other, we are heading toward an even darker period in our nation’s history.”