24 The New York Review
outstanding mortgages. He already had
solid political connections, and he won
the contest.
Between then and 1942, using fund-
ing from the newly created Federal
Housing Administration, Fred pro-
duced two thousand single-family
dwellings and became a millionaire.
During and after the war, he worked
his connections to obtain government
loans to build large housing develop-
ments in Queens and Brooklyn (in the
late 1940s, he got roughly $26 million
to build Beach Haven and Shore Haven
Apartments in Brooklyn). He reaped
enormous profits, in part by asking
for more money than he needed and
pocketing the difference. He was inves-
tigated for profiteering but was never
indicted; a New York State Investiga-
tion Commission report called him
“a pretty shrewd character.” Woody
Guthrie, who lived at Beach Haven in
the early 1950s, wrote a song, never
recorded, about Old Man Trump’s
racist rental practices; the feds later in-
vestigated Fred and Donald for racial
discrimination.
In 1936 Fred married twenty- three-
year- old Mary Anne MacLeod, re-
cently arrived from Scotland as a
domestic. A year later Maryanne was
born, followed by Freddy in 1938 and
Elizabeth in 1942. Donald and Robert
were born after the war. Fred worked
constantly. On days off, according to
Blair, he took his kids on rounds of
his apartment buildings. At home he
was strict (no snacks between meals),
proper (he showered after work, then
put on a jacket and tie for dinner), and
so frugal that Maryanne claimed she
didn’t know her family was rich until a
friend told her in high school. He didn’t
drink. He was shy and stiff, even in pri-
vate. Maryanne told Blair that he took
a Dale Carnegie course in the 1950s,
“but it didn’t help.”
Freddy was an awkward fit in a proud,
humorless, abstemious family. Mary
writes about her father with tenderness
and admiration, and with the sadness
of not having known him in his bet-
ter days. In his youth, he was eager to
please. He was also an imp. Once, Don-
ald was taunting Robert during dinner,
and Freddy dumped a bowl of mashed
potatoes on Donald’s head. Freddy
and a friend stole a hearse and, as they
stopped for gas, the friend sat up from
the coffin in view of an astonished cus-
tomer. Freddy often hid such antics
from his father, who already saw him
as frivolous and weak. At Lehigh Uni-
versity, Freddy joined the Air Force
ROTC and, “on a lark,” per Mary, a his-
torically Jewish fraternity. (Fred, who
had no particular respect for soldiery
or Jewry, likely was not pleased.) In the
summers Freddy worked for his father,
and on weekends he took friends fish-
ing and water-skiing off Long Island in
a boat he’d bought in high school.
After college Freddy started work-
ing full-time at Trump Management,
as was expected of the eldest son. At
first, he carried on a fairly happy life
outside work. He married Linda Clapp,
a National Airlines stewardess from
a modest background (this too both-
ered Fred), and they spent evenings at
the Copacabana nightclub and week-
ends in the Bahamas. Soon Fred III
was born, and Freddy bought his first
plane. But his relationship with his fa-
ther was worsening. When Freddy did
something his father considered to be
a mistake—such as installing new win-
dows in a building when old ones were
available—Fred berated him, and if
Freddy apologized, Fred mocked him.
When Freddy did something well, Fred
didn’t mention it. “It never occurred to
him to actually praise Freddy,” Mary-
anne told Blair. After three years, the
heir apparent was relegated to han-
dling tenant complaints and overseeing
maintenance projects. Following a par-
ticularly savage humiliation by Fred, he
announced he was leaving the company
and applying to become a commercial
pilot for TWA. Around this time, he
started drinking heavily.
The next summer, Donald, just out
of high school, visited his brother at
the house he rented in a harbor town
near Logan Airport (he was assigned
to the prestigious Boston–LAX route).
“Dad’s right about you: you’re noth-
ing but a glorified bus driver,” Donald
told Freddy, who understood that his
brother had been sent to deliver this
message. His career as a pilot was hob-
bled by his drinking and lasted only a
few months. He returned to Queens
and asked his father for a job. (By that
point, Linda was pregnant with Mary.)
Freddy, at twenty-eight, was given a
chance to redeem himself by taking
charge of a new acquisition, the site
of Steeplechase Park in Coney Island.
Fred, his clout with city government
at an ebb, couldn’t get the rezoning he
was seeking. He insisted that Freddy
hold press conferences, including one
ill-conceived event involving swimsuit
models and guests throwing bricks
through windows. It was a disaster, and
Fred blamed Freddy. Freddy, Mary
writes, “eventually blamed himself.”
Mary further observes that Donald,
who was almost eight years younger
than Freddy, learned a clear lesson:
“That it was wrong to be like Freddy,”
that he should instead be the “killer”
Fred wanted. Donald had been aggres-
sive from an early age, throwing cake
and gluing together Robert’s building
blocks, according to a 1990 Va ni t y Fa ir
profile by Marie Brenner. Robert, who
had a slighter build and a milder man-
ner than Donald, two years his senior,
“usually ended up doing things Don-
ald’s way,” Blair observed, though he
apparently indulged a few idiosyncra-
sies: Mary once witnessed him eat an
entire block of cream cheese “as if it
were a candy bar.” (When Robert died
this August, Donald said, “We’ve had a
great relationship for a long time, from
day one,” and he praised his brother,
who also worked for the family busi-
ness, for showing “no jealousy” over his
success. In fact, they were reportedly
estranged for twenty-five years, until
Donald decided to run for president.)
By the time Donald was twelve, Freddy
had dubbed him “the Great I-Am,” after
the God of Exodus. Donald’s behavior
as a teenager was so unruly that his par-
ents sent him to the New York Military
Academy, where Fred, sometimes bear-
ing arm candy for his son, visited him al-
most every weekend. Donald enrolled at
Fordham University, then transferred to
the University of Pennsylvania (paying
a smart acquaintance to take the SAT
for him, according to Mary’s most click-
baity anecdote), and upon graduation
assumed Freddy’s still warm seat at
Trump Management. Within three
years, he was made president.
Ten years later, Freddy was divorced
and living with his parents. He had aheart condition and was still drinking
too much, and had become gravely ill.
For three weeks as Freddy got worse
neither Fred nor Gam sought medical
help for him. They finally called an am-
bulance but didn’t go with him to the
hospital. Donald came to the house to
wait for news, but after a while went to
the movies with his sister Elizabeth.
Freddy died alone that night. When
Mary, who was sixteen and at boarding
school at the time, was told to call her
family, she spoke first to her grandfa-
ther, who said her father was in serious
condition, and then to her mother, who
told her the truth.Mary is both a witness and an expert.
She rarely reflects on her position as the
former—notwithstanding her warning
that “it’s difficult to understand what
goes on in any family—perhaps hard-
est of all for the people in it”—and
she is vague about her methods and
her aims as the latter. This makes for
a disorienting narrative approach, in
which the personal and the profes-
sional, the colloquial and the clinical,
are commingled.
She proceeds from the premise
that her grandparents’ pathologies,
in particular Fred’s “sociopathy,”
had “extreme” effects on their chil-
dren, especially Freddy and Donald.
For Freddy, she concludes, “protect-
ing his love for his father was more
important than protecting himself
from his father’s abuse”—hence his
self- destructive behavior as an adult.
Donald, for his part, developed a “com-
bative, rigid persona” in order to shield
himself from “the terror of his early
abandonment” by his distant mother
and from his domineering father, as
well as from the trauma of witnessing
his older brother’s humiliation. That
he supplanted Freddy in their father’s
favor did not abate his insecurity; his
need for attention and his sense of
being “unlovable” only grew, as did
his compensatory arrogance. Even
Donald’s attempt in middle age to gain
control of Fred’s estate is explained as
“the logical outcome of Fred’s leading
his son to believe that he was the only
person who mattered.”
Generally absent from Mary’s analy-
sis is Gam, a footnote to the twinned
presumption of Fred’s total power and
of the idea that psychological influence
flows tidily from an old-fashioned fam-
ily structure in which the boys were the
father’s wards and the girls the moth-
er’s. Mary mentions that Gam had an
emergency hysterectomy when Robert
was an infant, which resulted in com-
plications requiring further surgeries.
(Fred told Maryanne, then twelve, that
her mother was not expected to live
and that he would call her at school if
anything changed.) Gam was thereaf-
ter beset by osteoporosis and insomnia,
as well as “psychological problems.”
The book does not venture to name
these, and the descriptions are scant.
All we learn is that Gam was emotion-
ally distant, particularly toward her
younger sons, and that the children
would come upon her painting walls in
the middle of the night or sleeping in
unexpected places in the morning. No
matter this gothic figure, this “sound-
less wraith”: Fred apparently acted al-
most single-handedly, “snuffing out”
Freddy and “short-circuit[ing] Don-
ald’s ability to develop and experience
the entire spectrum of human emo-tion.” (Wholly absent from any discus-
sion is the substantial evidence for the
heritability of personality traits; Don-
ald might have wound up with a similar
psychological profile even if he’d been
given up for adoption.)
Many of Mary’s speculations about
motives and feelings become, in an in-
stant, the basis of causal inferences. In
describing Fred’s habit of putting down
Freddy in front of others, she asserts
that Donald “felt increasingly confi-
dent that Freddy’s continuing loss of
their father’s esteem would be to his
benefit, so he often watched silently or
joined in.” The sequence here is tell-
ing: rather than observe what Donald
did and then consider why he might
have done it, she assuredly posits the
motivation as primary and presents the
action as its manifestation. Elsewhere,
she asserts that Gam stopped inviting
Linda to holidays “without factoring in
how the decision might affect me and
my brother,” and that “the main pur-
pose” of Fred’s promoting the twenty-
four-year-old Donald to a job without
clearly defined responsibilities “was to
punish and shame Freddy.”
It’s possible that these claims are
sourced, but she presents them as em-
pirical facts, not possible explanations.
Is it not equally plausible that Fred
was trying to firm up his succession
and didn’t think about, or particularly
care, how it would make Freddy feel?
Fred was born in 1905, thrust into early
manhood and furious industry, and
thought that children’s names ought to
come from the preceding generations.
Likewise, Mary’s account of her fa-
ther’s alcoholism is oddly reductive, es-
pecially for someone who once treated
addiction patients at a community
clinic. She allows that Freddy could be
a bad husband and a bad father, and
reports that she once witnessed him,
drunk and laughing, point a gun at
her mother. After his divorce Freddy
avoided spending much time with his
children, and took to collecting sundry
reptiles. But Mary traces her father’s
decline to Fred’s sustained browbeat-
ing and condescension. She even im-
plicates Donald in having helped to
“destroy” Freddy by pressuring and
insulting him. Is this a term of clinical
art? (Mary’s vindication of Freddy is
an ongoing project: twenty years ago,
she told the Daily News that her law-
suit was about getting her father recog-
nized—“He existed, he lived, he was
their eldest son”; her next book, she
recently told the Financial Times, will
be about him.)
Mary’s unaccountable narrative om-
niscience about the mental states of
her main characters—at one point she
suggests that Donald wishes he had
personally killed George Floyd—has a
certain parallel in her handling of fac-
tual niceties. A substantial portion of
the book concerns events of which she
has no firsthand knowledge; some of
these stories are new, and the most sa-
lacious ones made their way onto listi-
cles as soon as the book was released.
(The Washington Post recently con-
firmed that Maryanne was the source
of the SAT story, among other details.)
But many are recycled from material
that is already public. Curiously, when
her stories are at variance with previ-
ously published versions, she does not
note or explain the differences.
In December 1990, she writes, Fred
sent his chauffeur with more than $
million in cash to purchase chips at