Bestselling author and niece of former President Donald Trump, Dr. Mary L. Trump, discusses her newest book, Who Could Ever Love You. With searching insight, poignant detail, and unsparing prose, Mary Trump reveals the cold, selfish cruelty that drove her family dynamics from one generation to the next. The book is a profoundly moving story of survival, stolen inheritance, and resilience. This program is generously funded by the Baldwin Babcock fund.

Mary grew up in a family divided by its patriarch’s relentless drive for money and power. The daughter of Freddy Trump, the accomplished, dashing eldest son of wealthy real estate developer Fred Trump, and Linda Clapp, a flight attendant from a working-class family, Mary lived in the shadow of Freddy’s humiliation at the hands of his father. Fred Trump embodied the ethos of the zero-sum game—and among his five children, there could only be one winner. That was supposed to be Freddy, his namesake, but Fred found him wanting: too sensitive, too kind, too interested in pursuits beyond the realm of the real estate empire he was meant to inherit. In Donald, Fred found a kindred spirit, a “killer,” who would stop at nothing to get his own way. In Who Could Ever Love You, Mary Trump brings us inside the twisted family whose patriarch ignored, froze out, and eventually destroyed his own.

Mary L. Trump is the author of the #1 international bestseller, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man. She holds a PhD from the Derner Institute of Advanced Psychological Studies at Adelphi University, and has taught graduate courses in trauma, psychopathology, and developmental psychology.