Donald Trump’s niece has dished on how her family’s warped dynamics led to the president being “so needy.”
Mary L. Trump, 60, discussed “why Donald is the way he is, why he is so enamored with authoritarian dictatorial monsters, why he’s so damaged and so needy and so grasping” on the Monday edition of her show, Mary Trump Live.
The psychologist and anti-Trump commentator pointed to Trump’s giddy reaction to being handed a “completely made-up” peace prize by FIFA on Friday as proof of “how thirsty he is for recognition.”
“Why does Donald need meaningless gestures like that to make him feel better about himself?” she asked, before identifying Trump’s father, Fred Trump—her grandfather—as the main cause.
“My grandfather was a patriarchal authoritarian sociopath. You know, that has an impact,” she said. “The one thing Donald most desperately needs and has never gotten and will never get, because of how damaged and depraved his own father made him, is love.”
Mary, whose father was Trump’s older brother, suggested that Trump seeks out “more money, more power, a bigger ballroom, more fake medals and fake prizes and fake honors,” in an attempt to fill the “void” left by the love he was denied.
Trump thinks “more compliments and more a-- kissing, and more people degrading themselves and debasing themselves for him will finally make him feel whole,” Mary argued.
She suggested that “on some very dark level, he knows that that’s impossible.”
When reached for comment, White House Communications Director Steven Cheung told the Daily Beast in a statement, “Mary Trump is a stone-old loser who doesn’t have a clue about anything.”
Mary previously argued on her show that Trump is reenacting the family dynamic—where his father controlled everyone in his orbit—in his presidency. She noted that “the arrogance was always there. The insecure defensiveness was always there. The bullying was always there.”
In an interview on The Daily Beast Podcast last month, Mary said her uncle is exhibiting the same signs of cognitive decline she once saw in his father, who had Alzheimer’s “for a very, very long time.”
“There are times I look at him and I see my grandfather,” Mary said. “I see that same look of confusion. I see that he does not always seem to be oriented to time and place. His short-term memory seems to be deteriorating.”
Trump’s lifelong impulse-control problems, she added, are “deteriorating as well.”
Fred was diagnosed with “mild senile dementia” in 1991. He died at age 93 on June 25, 1999.
