President Donald Trump put his name on the Kennedy Center because he desperately wants to be loved—something he didn’t feel enough as a child, his niece says.
Mary Trump, a psychologist and the author of Too Much and Never Enough, told the Daily Beast Podcast that her uncle’s renaming of the memorial to John F. Kennedy is an “absolutely obscene” attempt to do the impossible: “fill a black hole.”
“I’m trying to contain my contempt,” Trump, 60, told host Joanna Coles about Trump’s action, which ignores the role Congress must play in officially changing the name of the building.
“He wants to turn every public space in America into some version of WWE or Ultimate Fighting, and it is just grotesque that he thinks that somehow this legitimizes him or gives him the same stature and standing as somebody like President Kennedy. But that’s partially why he’s doing it,” she explained.
Renaming the Kennedy Center and the U.S. Institute of Peace, as well as building a massive ballroom where the East Wing once stood and drawing up plans for an “Arc de Trump” across from the Lincoln Memorial, Mary Trump said, is “never going to be enough—ever." The reason? The president’s upbringing.
“He is constantly trying to fill a void that cannot be filled, and the reason is actually pretty simple: even though Donald was the preferred child of my grandfather—and by preferred I mean most useful to him, the most useful in advancing his own agenda—my grandfather and my grandmother rendered Donald unlovable,“ Mary said. ”The only thing, the thing he most desperately wants in his life, is to be loved. He never has been sufficiently. He never will be. That is an impossible thing for him to achieve."
All the branding that Trump has done throughout his adult life, from real estate to Bibles, “is all in service to filling a black hole that is unfillable.”
“Because his needs will never be met, and he can never grapple with them in a real way because he is just a terrified little boy who cannot face the truth about himself, all of us are suffering,” she claimed.
“He doesn’t have any conscious awareness of that, but he certainly understands it on a deep, unconscious level,” she said of the 79-year-old. “And that’s why so much of his psychic and emotional energy is spent protecting himself from that knowledge. It’s a full-time job.”
Trump added that her uncle putting himself on the memorial to his late predecessor seems “very jarring" for several reasons.
“If you look at some of the things that President Kennedy had to say about the importance of the arts and what we should aspire to as a country—many of those quotes etched on the façade of that building—it just underscores how egregious this is,” she said. “Donald cares nothing for the arts. He and his administration have underfunded or defunded them.”
Additionally, Trump said her family didn’t emphasize the arts or literature.
“Such things weren’t valued in my family,” she said. “There were no books in the library. My grandfather read the New York newspapers, and that was it. Culture wasn’t valued. We never, ever went to museums together.”
“My mom took us to museums and Broadway shows and stuff like that. But the Trump family,” she emphasized, “no museums, no libraries, no bookstores, nothing. There was no cultural life in my family at all. And that’s another sense in which it was a brutal household and it was devoid of comfort. There was no music in that house.”
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but previously has doubted Mary Trump’s credibility: “Mary Trump is a stone-old loser who doesn’t have a clue about anything.”
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