Mary Trump, the niece of the current president of the United States and member of the larger Trump family, has a new memoir coming out, and apparently, she's going to be telling quite the tale. Too Much and Never Enough, which is due out on August 11, is on track to make major waves this fall.
In the book, Mary is reportedly set to discuss how she contributed to a New York Times piece about her family's finances. The Times piece exploded online in 2018, as revelation after revelation about the inner workings of one of America's more famous families emerged.
The Daily Beast says, "One of the most explosive revelations Mary will detail in the book, according to people familiar with the matter, is how she played a critical role helping The New York Times print startling revelations about Trump's taxes, including how he was involved in 'fraudulent' tax schemes and had received more than $400 million in today's dollars from his father's real-estate empire."
Mary's father, Fred Trump Jr., was the oldest and was considered the heir-apparent to the family's fame and fortune. However, it was well-known that he wasn't particularly interested in following in his father's footsteps, and Fred died from complications related to alcoholism.
The president has even noted that putting pressure on his older brother wasn't a good move. "I do regret having put pressure on him. [The family business] was just not his thing … I think the mistake that we made was we assumed that everybody would like it. That would be the biggest mistake. … There was sort of a double pressure put on him."
After Fred Trump Jr. died, Fred Sr. revised his estate to divide among only his remaining children, with a token amount for his grandchildren. He was reportedly advised, "Given the size of your estate, this is tantamount to disinheriting [Fred Jr.'s children]. You may wish to increase their participation in your estate to avoid ill will in the future." However, it seems that the family declined to extend fair portions of Fred Trump Sr.'s estate to Mary and her brother.
Whatever the disagreements were, it seems that this issue didn't really come to a head until Mary's brother, Fred III, had a son who was born with a seizure disorder that eventually caused severe cerebral palsy. The Trump family stepped in, reassuring the parents that the family's health plan would cover the round-the-clock care that the son, William, needed.
However, in March 2000, Mary and her brother filed an objection to their grandfather's will. The Trump family — Donald, Maryanne, and their brother Robert — retaliated by canceling the health insurance for William Trump. Mary and her brother then filed a lawsuit to have the health coverage reinstated, and they won their suit.
This court case is also what helped Mary get access to the family's extensive financial records. She was even the person who leaked the records to The New York Times as the piece about her family was being researched.
The move to release this information in her upcoming book caught many by surprise, as Mary Trump tends to eschew the spotlight. However, it may be part of her ongoing quest to simply be treated as an equal member of the family. In 2000, she spoke about the legal battle. "Given this family, it would be utterly naive to say it has nothing to do with money. But for both me and my brother, it has much more to do with that our father [Fred Jr.] be recognized."
The piece published in the Times was part of a rogue project directed by journalist David Barstow. As The Daily Beast writes, the team was "aggressively pursuing a source of their groundbreaking investigation to ghostwrite a book and secure a six-figure payday — a move explicitly forbidden by the Times' ethics rules."
David Barstow reportedly pursued the source of his information so aggressively that he almost scared her off. At one point, he showed up outside Mary's home.
"The source was freaked out. The source felt invaded. They ended up hiding until he left the residence."
In a 2000 interview, Mary commented, "My aunt and uncles should be ashamed of themselves. I'm sure they are not."
The book will undoubtedly attract a lot of attention when it is published by Simon & Schuster this fall. So far, the publishers have not commented on the book or its subject matter.
