First published 2024
Mary Trump watches her family destroy itself from the inside. Her grandfather Fred Trump rules his real estate empire like a battlefield where only one child can win. He chose her father Freddy as his heir, then systematically broke him down for being too gentle, too caring, too human. When Freddy fails to meet his father's brutal standards, Fred turns to Donald, finding in him the ruthless killer he always wanted. Freddy retreats into alcohol and sickness while Mary's mother Linda struggles alone after their divorce, cut off from the Trump fortune but still expected to serve the family. Mary grows up caught between a father she loves but barely knows and a mother abandoned by the very people who demand her loyalty. She watches Fred's zero sum philosophy poison everything it touches, turning siblings against each other and leaving emotional wreckage in its wake. This is the story of how one man's relentless hunger for money and power consumed his own children and shaped the cold cruelty that would eventually reach far beyond their family walls.
Genres: american-fiction, abuse, non-fiction, biography-memoir, 21st-century, family-drama
Vibes: emotional-atmospheric, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: dysfunctional-family, unreliable-narrator
Setting: New York
Period: 20th-century, 21st-century
288 pages · Hardcover · St. Martin's Press
Content warnings: abuse, emotional-abuse