Trump threatens to sue niece Mary over tell-all book on their 'dysfunctional family' as she signed NDA in 2001
President Donald J. Trump has always tried to show the world that his family is united against all challenges. The first family is seen together even when the president faces attacks over his words and action. But this time, the story has seen an exception. Mary Trump, the president’s niece and a clinical psychologist, has announced her plan to publish a tell-all memoir on the family and it has rattled the commander-in-chief.
Trump, 74, has now threatened to take legal action amid reports that Mary, 55, had signed a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) in 2001 that stops her from talking about her relationship with her controversial uncle, a report in The Daily Beast said. Mary’s ‘Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man’ is set to release on July 28, according to its publisher Simon & Schuster. It is also the publisher of former NSA John Bolton’s controversial upcoming White House memoir ‘The Room Where It Happened’ which has also pushed the president towards taking legal steps.
Mary’s upcoming book is the first instance where a member of Trump’s family will reveal unflattering stories about the Republican president who is seeking re-election this year. Mary is the daughter of Fred Trump Jr, the older brother of the president who died in 1981 at the age of 42 because of health complications caused by alcoholism.
The 240-page book will bring to light the detailed events she witnessed as a child while living at her grandparents’ house in New York’s Queens Borough. Trump and his four siblings also grew up there. “She (Mary) describes a nightmare of traumas, destructive relationships and a tragic combination of neglect and abuse,” a statement from Simon & Schuster read.
The upcoming book will be released just weeks before the Republican National Convention. While Trump has already clinched the candidacy, he would definitely not like to see a series of revelations from his past life come to light.
The Beast report cited a couple of sources familiar with the situation to say that the president has told his close aides that he is getting his lawyers to look into Mary’s matter to see what could be done legally or at least through a threat, in the form of a cease and desist letter.
According to the report, it is still not clear what kind of response the president or his legal team will take against Mary. “His administration and his outside counsel have been busy during this tumultuous election year — one already ravaged by a cratered economy, a mass protest movement against police brutality and institutional racism, the coronavirus pandemic, and now, combating other new manuscripts and memoirs authored by top Trump associates turned bitter enemies,” it said.
It was only on Tuesday, June 16, that the Trump administration sued Bolton after accusing him of breaching a contract and claiming that the publication of his book next week would publicize classified information. Bolton had a tumultuous relation with Trump and was removed in September last year after he served for around a year-and-a-half. A lawsuit, filed by an attorney in Washington, D.C., follows up on a threat leveled by Trump that his former NSA would experience “criminal problems” if he published his no-holds-barred White House memoir. The book reportedly claimed that Trump was not averse to endangering or weakening the US for the sake of his own re-election.
Trump will be more upset with Mary's book than Bolton's, says a former aide
The president, as close sources have said, would be more upset with Mary’s book than Bolton’s. Sam Nunberg, a former political adviser to Trump, told the Beast: “Based on my previous experiences, if you’re asking me which book the president would be more upset about, the Mary Trump one or the John Bolton one, it would be Mary Trump’s.”
“It's about family, it's a personal betrayal. The president has dealt with disgruntled past employees saying things and criticizing him. But in all my research — and I'm very well-read on the Trumps — I've never seen something like this.”
The book by Mary will reportedly reveal how Trump “dismissed and derided” his father Fred despite being his favorite son, Daily Mail reported. Fred, who was a businessman, suffered from Alzheimer’s and died in 1999 at the age of 93. According to the publisher, Mary’s book says “how specific events and general family patterns created the damaged man who currently occupies the Oval Office.” It will also say “the strange and harmful relationship between Fred Trump and his two oldest sons, Fred Jr. and Donald,” the blurb added.
“She alone can recount this fascinating, unnerving saga, not just because of her insider's perspective but also because she is the only Trump willing to tell the truth about one of the world's most powerful and dysfunctional families,” it said.
Elizabeth Trump Grau, Trump’s 78-year-old sister, refused to make any comment on the upcoming book by a Trump family insider.