Mary Trump went back in time to discuss her uncle Donald Trump’s childhood to explain his attacks on others in the latest edition of her Substack newsletter, “The Good In Us.”
The president’s niece, a clinical psychologist and staunch opponent of her relative, spelled out what she believes is the root cause of his “unmistakable” pattern of flipping accusations. She argued it’s not hypocrisy, but projection, because it’s “literally outside of conscious awareness.”
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Donald Trump “learned very early on that vulnerability, dependence, and failure were dangerous,” she wrote.
Mary Trump said that particular lesson came from the president’s father, and her grandfather, Fred Trump, who, she said, “divided the world into winners and losers” and had “deep-seated contempt for people he considered losers.”
“Being kind, empathetic, and sensitive, in addition to being vulnerable, also made you a loser in Fred Trump’s world,” she wrote.
“What matters here is that Donald learned to deny those feelings and bury those characteristics that were intolerable to him,” she added, arguing that “he knew that demonstrating them could get him literally and metaphorically killed.”