Mary L. Trump Quotes

[P]erhaps the final betrayal was when he was sent to the military academy because he was behaving so horribly and nobody could control him... [M]y grandmother told me much later that she was relieved when he left.

To make it worse... for Donald, when he was very young, 2 1/2 to 3 1/2 approximately... his mother, who was really his only source of human connection and comfort... got very ill and was, to all intents and purposes, absent from his life. So he suddenly found himself, so young, basically alone in the world because my grandfather was incapable of filling the void left by my grandmother's absence. ...Because of the very vulnerable age he was [at] when she became sick, I think on some level he experienced that as a betrayal. She didn't have the capacity to heal the rift, even after she was [physically] able to, and I think that stuck with him...

<nowiki>[</nowiki>] is the origin... the ground zero of all of the family dysfunction... I believe that he was a sociopath. ...He had no real human feeling for anybody, including his children, and was quite adept at using people to his own ends; and if he found them not to be of use, he had no compunction about discarding them. ...[H]e enjoyed humiliating other weaker people a great deal.

We're talking about a man who has control of the largest nuclear arsenal in the world. That makes him more dangerous than... other people, because he has the nuclear codes.

He's dangerous because of the power that attaches to the office he holds... because he's so susceptible to powerful, smarter... people. It's very easy to get him to do your bidding. ...[W]e've seen a lot of evidence of that. You need just flatter him, and... whether you're Kim Jong-un or Vladimir Putin, he'll... stop the sanctions or he'll look the other way when you start building more nuclear missiles. It's quite terrifying, and in addition to that, we're talking about somebody who's quite unstable... [T]he more pressure he's under (because he's completely out of his depth here)... the more cornered he's going to feel and the more he's going to lash out... [T]hat's what we need to watch out for in the next few months.

It's forcing the media to have a conversation that they've never wanted to have, and never have had, which is about Donald's psychological health.

I needed to tell the [origin] story of the family because there's so much at stake.

Everything's about money in this family, but I'm also different... [M]oney stood in for everything else; it was literally the only currency the family trafficked in... I knew that it was also about love, and to be disinherited... shut out entirely... was to be told quite explicitly that you don't count, and you are not loved.

[M]y grandmother who was [often] sick.. and broke bones more times than I can count because of her , was in agony much of the time. ...She'd come home from the hospital... and just moving was extraordinarily painful for her; and my grandfather could not tolerate it. ...[I]t impinged on this idea... that everything had to be great at all times... [T]he only people who suffered for that were the people who were actually in pain... anybody... in the family who showed the weakness of being human.

My grandfather was an adherent to Norman Vincent Peale's doctrine of positive thinking. ...It allowed room for nothing else, and there are times in our lives when we are legitimately distressed... sad... in pain. ...[T]o be prevented to feel those feelings honestly and openly is a form of torture.

Donald tried his very best not to be destroyed in the way my dad was... so he ended up with a very narrow range in which he could safely operate as a human being; so it's created this quite dangerous situation.

[M]y dad couldn't change who he was, so he was... dismantled over time.

One of the unforgivable things that my grandfather did to Donald... he severely restricted the range of human emotion that was accessible to him. ...[C]ertain feelings were not allowed: sadness... the impulse to be kind... generous... Those things that my grandfather found superfluous, unmanly... a stupid waste of time... were punished; ruthlessly punished.

He's utterly incapable of leading this country, and it's dangerous to allow him to do so.

How do we gauge this man's ability to function in the real world, as he's never really had to. ...[T]hat ... is quite terrifying.