Top 33 Mary L. Trump Quotes

Donald, following the lead of my grandfather and with the complicity, silence and inaction of his siblings, destroyed my father. I can’t let him destroy my country.

Donald learned that you can never admit you’re wrong. That was considered a weakness… it’s a kind of toxic positivity, there was no admitting pain, there was no admitting weakness.

A lot of people who end up being horrible criminals when they are adults had very abusive childhoods. You can have sympathy for that child. It does not at all, under any circumstances, diminish their responsibility for what they do.

The name Joe Shapiro is not uncommon in New York City.

From a fairly young age, Donald had a really hard time reading social cues. You know, the rules in the house, my grandparents’ house were very different from the rules in school. So, he had a difficult time adjusting to that.

Casual dehumanization of people was commonplace at the Trump dinner table.

My grandfather, I don’t think was really, had real positive feelings towards anybody except perhaps Donald.

Bill Barr has gutted the Justice Department. Mike Pompeo has gutted the State Department. We are in serious danger here.

My grandfather didn’t have any patience for little kids or their needs.

Media failed to notice that not one member of Donald’s family, apart from his children, his son-in-law and his current wife said a word of support of him during the entire campaign.

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.

The divisive environment my grandfather created in the family is the water that Donald has always swum in, and that division continues to benefit him at the expense of everyone else.

Donald’s ego has been and is a fragile and inadequate barrier between him and the real world, which, thanks to his father’s money and power, he never had to negotiate by himself.

Growing up, I never known anybody in my family actually to interact with a person of color.

The fact is, Donald’s pathologies are so complex and his behaviors so often inexplicable that coming up with an accurate and comprehensive diagnosis would require a full battery of psychological and neurophysical tests that he’ll never sit for.

I had to take down Donald Trump.

I have no problem calling Donald a narcissist – he meets all nine criteria as outlined in the ‘Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders’ (DSM-5) – but the label gets us only so far.

For the first forty years of his real estate career, my grandfather never acquired debt. In the 1970s and ’80s, however, all of that changed as Donald’s ambition grew larger and his missteps became more frequent.

You know, I think it was very important that my grandmother be perceived a very particular way in terms of being charitable or generous. I don’t think Donald cares about those two things necessarily. He has his own version of what he wants the world to see.

The worst thing my grandfather did, starting from very early on, was just not accept my father for who he is. As soon as he realized that my dad wasn’t the ‘right kind of person’ – he wasn’t ‘a killer’, he wasn’t ‘tough’ – he dismissed him out of hand and quickly found a replacement in Donald.

No one knows how Donald came to be who he is better than his own family. Unfortunately, almost all of them remain silent out of loyalty or fear. I’m not hindered by either of those.

It’s impossible to know who Donald might have been under different circumstances and with different parents.

You know, when my grandfather died, we were told that his estate was worth about $30 million. And it turns out it was closer to a billion. So that’s hardly a rounding error.

I, along with everybody else, had bought into the myth of Donald being a self-made man and being a brilliant developer. I had no idea that none of that was true because everybody acted like it was true.

All the kids – well, I don’t know about the girls in the family, but all the boys – worked in my grandfather’s office in the summers and maybe on weekends once in a while, so they saw how he operated. They saw how he treated people. They saw the kinds of people he rubbed elbows with.

And how can you be happy if you don’t laugh or appreciate humor?

At home – where my grandmother certainly had to deal with Donald more than my grandfather did because he was at work all the time – he was incredibly disrespectful to her. He didn’t listen to her. He was a slob. He tormented – in one way or another, I think he tormented all of his siblings.

My grandfather couldn’t stand either one of my parents.

I blame my grandfather 100 percent for his oldest son’s death. I don’t think there’s any ambiguity there.

Donald began to realize that there was nothing he could do wrong, so he stopped trying to do anything ‘right.’ He became bolder and more aggressive because he was rarely challenged or held to account by the only person in the world who mattered – his father.

Donald has been institutionalized for most of his adult life, so there is no way to know how he would thrive, or even survive, on his own in the real world.

This is far beyond garden-variety narcissism; Donald is not simply weak, his ego is a fragile thing that must be bolstered every moment because he knows deep down that he is nothing of what he claims to be.

My dad had a great sense of humor; he was a very funny guy and did know how to laugh.