MARY TRUMP: Thank you. It's so great to be here.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, you have said that your uncle, President Trump, should face criminal charges for his response to the pandemic. Explain.
MARY TRUMP: It's hard at this point to give him any slack for not having acted. You know, we now know what to do to mitigate the spread of this very infectious disease, and he's not only not doing those things, he's actively advocating against them still and continuing to claim that it's just going to disappear, it's still some kind of hoax, using the racist term "China virus" to get himself off the hook. And with over 160,000 Americans dead and rising, how can we not assume that there's some kind of culpability here? And, you know, he is able to make steps to fix this problem, and since he's not doing it, that, to me, also suggests criminal culpability.
AMY GOODMAN: So, you say so much in this book, give us a kind of deep background on the Trump family and Donald Trump himself, that we've ever read or seen. If you can talk about why you wrote Too Much and Never Enough?
MARY TRUMP: I wrote this book primarily to give people the kind of information they did not have access to in 2016. And there are reasons I wasn't able to do that in 2016, having to do partially with, you know, nothing he did or said seemed to turn anybody off anyway, so I'm not entirely sure that my saying anything would matter. So, in 2020, there is such more at stake than there ever has been. I believe that this country is on the knife's edge, and I don't want anybody going to cast their vote in November being able to claim that they just don't know who they're voting for.
AMY GOODMAN: So, tell us about your family. You're the daughter of Donald Trump's older brother, Freddy Trump, who died at a young age. Take us back to your family, as you talk about and quote, oh, Victor Hugo, of Les Mise'rables, talking about deep darkness. I wanted to share that quote, if you want to talk a little about it.
MARY TRUMP: Sure.
AMY GOODMAN: The book opening with that quote that says, "If the soul is left in darkness, sins will be committed. The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but the one who causes the darkness," the epigraph clearly a reference to what Fred Trump, your grandfather, you say, did to Donald Trump.
MARY TRUMP: Yeah, I chose that quote specifically for that reason, but also because I think it works in the present day. You know, I think a lot of people in this country are purposely left in the dark and making bad decisions and self-defeating decisions because they are not given access to information that would help them make better choices.
But as far as my grandfather, he was basically the only person in the family whose opinion mattered. He had all of the power. You know, it was a very patriarchal system I grew up in. There was a lot of misogyny, so being a girl in that family was an automatic strike against you.
And my grandfather was the kind of man who believed in dynasty, in a way. I mean, he wouldn't have put it in those terms, but, you know, he had his real estate empire, and his oldest son and namesake, my father, was going to be his successor, and his empire was going to last in perpetuity. Unfortunately for my father's sake, he wasn't the right kind of person in my grandfather's eyes. My grandfather needed somebody who was a killer, who was a tough guy, somebody who would win at all costs and was not weak in any way. In my family, being kind was considered being weak. Admitting your mistakes and apologizing for them was equated with weakness, as well. So, I don't know exactly when it happened, but at some point, certainly, I would imagine by the time my dad was in college, my grandfather already knew that he was probably not going to cut it as his heir apparent.
So, Donald, who was seven-and-a-half years younger, learned from my grandfather's psychological and emotional abuse of my dad. And the message was, essentially, "Don't be like Freddy." And since my grandfather ran my family as a zero-sum game, and there could only be one winner and everybody else was a loser, Donald was determined to win. And he in my grandfather's eyes, at least did and, you know, successfully auditioned as my dad's replacement.
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to ask you about a New York Times report, long ago, in 1927, that your grandfather, Donald Trump's father, Fred Trump, was arrested at a Ku Klux Klan riot in Queens, New York. The article is subtitled "Klan Assails Policemen." It reports that a thousand Klansmen and 100 policemen staged a free-for-all battle. It lists Fred Trump, with his address, as one of seven men who were arrested and arraigned for the assault. Charges against him were dropped. New York Police Commissioner Warren is quoted in the article saying, "The Klan not only wore gowns, but had hoods over their faces almost completely hiding their identity." The report was found and published in 2015 by the website BoingBoing.
In a New York Times interview about the discovery, your uncle, Donald Trump, said, "I saw that it was one little website that said it. It never happened. And they said there were no charges, no nothing. It's unfair to mention it, to be honest, because there were no charges. They said there were charges against other people, but there were absolutely no charges, totally false," he said.
But we're going back to that 2017 report in The New York Times. Do you know about this, Mary Trump? Did you hear about it as you were growing up?
MARY TRUMP: No, I didn't, although my family wasn't great at telling stories. But, you know, unlike Donald, I don't doubt the validity of the report. It would be kind of a random thing to make up 60 years ago or 80 years ago, whenever it was. The only thing that surprises me, because, you know, my family was quite anti-Semitic, along with other things so the only thing that surprises me is that my grandfather would take time away from his business to go do anything, honestly. But it wouldn't surprise me that he shared the sentiments.
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