Mary L. Trump

Mary L. Trump (born in New York in 1965) is an American psychologist and writer best known for her books about her own family and, in particular, her uncle, former president Donald Trump. Her work sits at the crossroads of clinical psychology, personal memory and political criticism, and she uses her training to read family behaviour through the tools of her discipline.

She was born to Fred Trump Jr., a commercial airline pilot, and Linda Lee Clapp, a flight attendant. She grew up under the long shadow of her grandfather, the real-estate developer Fred Trump Sr. When she was sixteen, her father died of a heart attack linked to alcoholism. She studied English literature at Tufts University and earned a master's degree at Columbia, where she examined William Faulkner and his fictional, dysfunctional Compson family. She later took a PhD in clinical psychology at Adelphi University. After a year at the Manhattan Psychiatric Center, she taught graduate courses on developmental psychology, trauma and psychopathology, and she runs a personal coaching business.

Her first book, Too Much and Never Enough, published in 2020, reconstructs the family history and offers a psychological portrait of Donald Trump. She argues that childhood dynamics, favouritism and fear of failure go a long way toward explaining his character, and she suggested traits of sociopathy that, in her view, did not operate at the high-functioning level she saw in her father. The book sold nearly a million copies on its release day. She followed it with The Reckoning (2021), which reads American history as a series of national traumas tied to systemic racism and white supremacy, and with Who Could Ever Love You (2024), a memoir about her relationship with her father.

Her influence lies between popular psychology and political debate. Her books have been widely read and widely disputed, and the legal battles that surrounded them, including countersuits with her uncle, have kept her name in the news.