Donald Trump's niece Mary Trump laid much of the blame for her uncle's pathologies on her grandparents, especially her "sociopath" grandfather — the ex-president's dad.
She appeared Tuesday on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" to discuss her new book, “Who Could Ever Love You," that details the dynamics within her deeply dysfunctional family.
"Fred Trump, as I say, was a straight-up sociopath, and I mean that diagnostically, not colloquially," said Trump, a clinical psychologist.
"He and my grandmother had five children, and I think you could describe every single one of them as a destroyed human being. We see this with Donald, with the results of growing up in a family that didn't have any love, that had no real affection, and a family in which honestly money was the only currency, so the ethos in the family was the more you have, the more you're worth in every sense of the word."
Although she gained new insight into her family while working toward a doctorate degree in psychology, Trump said she didn't understand how different her upbringing was from other children at the time.
"Families are closed systems," she said. "It's difficult to see what goes on in other people's families or to compare so, yes, it wasn't until I sat down and wrote my first book that I started thinking about my family through the lens of a clinician, and it was very revelatory. I don't think it helped me in any particular way, but it helped, I think, other people make sense of what was going on."
Mary's dad, Fred Trump Jr., eschewed the family's real estate business and became an airline pilot, but he died from a heart attack at 42 as a result of alcoholism. Mary Trump said her father was never close to her uncle.
"Honestly, they were so many years apart that they didn't really grow up together," she said. "My dad was almost eight years older, and because he was the oldest son and the namesake, the burden was on him, so for many years, the younger children in my family and my aunt Maryanne, who was the oldest but a girl, were essentially ignored by my grandfather.
"So Donald has a benefit of watching how my grandfather placed all of the onus on my dad to become the killer, to become the man who would take over the empire, and fail. So he saw how my dad got dismantled, as soon as my grandfather realized that Freddie was not going to cut it, whatever that meant in my grandfather's point of view."
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"So it wasn't until much later when Donald sort of leapfrogged my dad to become the president of Trump Management after my dad had worked there for 11 years, and my dad sort of fell away because of his illness and because of his perceived failures that Donald took over the mantel, and their relationship actually became more of the conquered and the conqueror," she added.
"There was never any competition, my dad didn't see Donald as competition, he was so much younger and he knew what his role was supposed to be. It wasn't until the end of my dad's life it became obvious that he was completely cast off and the only person in the family who mattered was Donald."
Trump said her uncle had not changed much over the years and had never been a person who showed kindness to other people.
"I mean, he just never seemed interested in other people," she said. "It was all about what he was doing, his accomplishments, his successes, or his perceived accomplishments, I should say, and it was – he was very much the same person then as he is now."
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