WASHINGTON -- A tell-all book by President Donald Trump's niece describes a family riven by a series of traumas, exacerbated by a daunting patriarch who "destroyed" Donald Trump by short-circuiting his "ability to develop and experience the entire spectrum of human emotion," according to a copy of the forthcoming memoir obtained by The Washington Post.
Trump's view of the world was shaped by his desire during childhood to avoid his father's disapproval, according to the niece, Mary L. Trump, whose book is by turns a family history and a psychological analysis of her uncle.
But she writes that as Donald matured, his father came to envy his son's "confidence and brazenness," as well as his seemingly insatiable desire to flout rules and conventions, traits that brought them closer together as Donald became the right-hand man in the family real estate business.
Mary Trump's father, Fred Jr. -- the president's older brother -- died of an alcohol-related illness when she was 16 years old in 1981. President Trump told the Post last year that he and his father both pushed Fred Jr. to go into the family business, which Trump said he now regrets.
The memoir chronicles Fred Jr.'s fruitless efforts to earn his father's respect as an employee, and how his younger brother Donald ridiculed him as a failure who spent too much time following his passion, aviation, and not enough on the family business.
Donald escaped his father's contempt, Mary Trump writes, because "his personality served his father's purpose. That's what sociopaths do: they co-opt others and use them toward their own ends -- ruthlessly and efficiently, with no tolerance for dissent or resistance."
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The book, "Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man," became an instant bestseller based on advance orders. Mary Trump, 55, has a doctoral degree in clinical psychology.
Kellyanne Conway, White House counselor, told reporters Tuesday that President Trump loved his late brother and always speaks favorably of him. Of the president and his niece, Conway said, "He's not her patient, he's her uncle. ... As for books generally, obviously they're not fact-checked, nobody's under oath."
The president, Mary Trump says, is a product of his domineering father and was acutely aware of avoiding the scorn that Fred Sr. heaped on the older brother, called Freddy. "By limiting Donald's access to his own feelings and rendering many of them unacceptable, Fred perverted his son's perception of the world and damaged his ability to live in it."
From an early age, Mary Trump writes, the future president demonstrated a willingness to cheat and a penchant for ridicule, once telling a neighborhood girl how "disappointed" he was by where she attended boarding school.
According to the book, Donald delighted in tormenting his younger brother, Robert, whom he perceived as weaker. Donald repeatedly hid his brother's favorite toys, a set of Tonka trucks he received for Christmas, and pretended he didn't know where they were. When Robert threw a tantrum, "Donald threatened to dismantle the trucks in front of him if he didn't stop crying."
"Fred [Sr.] hated it when his oldest son screwed up or failed to intuit what was required of him, but he hated it even more when, after being taken to task, Freddy apologized. 'Sorry, Dad,'" Mary says of the way her grandfather treated her father. Fred Sr. "would mock him. Fred wanted his oldest son to be a 'killer.'"
Mary Trump writes that this is not her first effort to write about her uncle. Decades ago, she wrote, Donald Trump asked her to help write his book "The Art of the Comeback."
The relationship fell apart when she learned that Donald and his siblings were trying to prevent her and her brother Fred III from receiving most of what they believed they would inherit from Fred Sr. If her father had lived, he would have expected to get 20% of the estate, she wrote. Instead, she said, the Trump family intended to give her "less than a tenth of one percent of what my aunts and uncles inherited."
While Mary Trump says she and her brother challenged the will, she does not say how much she eventually received, which is covered under a confidentiality agreement.
Robert Trump, the president's younger brother, filed a petition seeking to stop publication of the book by citing that agreement, but the New York Supreme Court last week lifted a temporary restraining order against publisher Simon & Schuster.