(CN) — Not even waiting for Chapter 1 to depict her uncle Donald as a sociopath whose family has grown cynical of his public illusions, the clinical psychologist Mary Trump prefaces her memoir with a scene from the 2016 campaign trail.
"Does anybody even believe the bullshit that he's a self-made man?” Mary Trump recalls asking one of the future president’s sisters. “What has he even accomplished on his own?”
The reply from Maryanne Barry, a former federal judge, is cutting: “‘Well,’ Maryanne said, as dry as the Sahara, ‘he has had five bankruptcies.’”
Obtained by Courthouse News one week before publication, an advance copy of “Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man” unveils author Mary Trump as the source behind a Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times investigation that accused President Trump two years ago of using complicated tax frauds as the foundation for the fictional portrait of himself as a self-made success.
When the story first broke in 2018, the Times exposé credited the breakthrough into the murky Trump fortune to tax records sent anonymously by mail, but Mary Trump narrates a far more hands-on relationship with journalists and their source.
As the president’s niece tells it, investigative reporter Susanne Craig landed unwelcome at her doorstep months after Trump’s inauguration and was turned away. The Times journalist persisted a few weeks later with a letter asserting that the documents that she was seeking could help “rewrite the history of the President of the United States.”
Mary Trump recalls being laid up in her house with a foot fracture watching what she describes as “democracy disintegrating and people’s lives unraveling because of my uncle’s policies,” before agreeing to share records from an old inheritance dispute and communicating with the three reporters who shared the Times bylines in person and via a “burner phone.”
“Through the extraordinary reporting of the Times team, I learned more about my family’s finances than I’d ever known,” she recounts, rattling off the findings of the nearly 14,000-word report.
For Mary Trump, one of the investigation’s most “mind boggling” revelations revealed her grandfather’s fortune to be up to four times the size asserted by her aunt and uncles, whom she claims gave an “absurdly low” valuation to defraud her into her settlement.
The book posits “cheating as a way of life” for Donald Trump, tracing the time he paid a friend to take his SATs to a lifetime of tax swindling and a thwarted attempt to rip off his siblings.
One of two children of president’s late elder brother, Fred Trump Jr., Mary Trump says Donald Trump tried to pull off a brazen inheritance “scheme” over the fortune of his father, Fred Trump Sr., that would have left his surviving siblings, Maryanne, Elizabeth and Robert, at his financial mercy.
“We would have been penniless,” Maryanne is quoted as saying years later. “Elizabeth would have been begging on a street corner. We would have had to beg Donald for a cup of coffee.”
In a more lucid moment of Fred Trump Sr.’s struggle with Alzheimer’s, according to the book, the family patriarch refused to sign a codicil that would have legitimized the power grabs. When he died in 1999, that act ensured that three of his children remained co-executors of the estate.
“In 1992, only two years after Donald’s attempt to attach the codicil to my grandfather’s will, effectively cutting his siblings out, the four of them suddenly needed one another: after a lifetime of their father’s playing them off one another, they finally had a common purpose — to protect their inheritance from the government,” the book claims.