Mary Trump knows a few things about trauma – what it is, what causes it and what it feels like living with it. And not just because she holds a Ph.D. in clinical psychology, but because she has been diagnosed with complex post-traumatic stress disorder.
In her first book, last year’s bestselling “Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man,” she detailed the history of what she called her “malignantly dysfunctional” family shaped by her late grandfather and Trump patriarch Fred Trump, whom she went as far as to diagnose a high-functioning sociopath. It drove eldest son and Mary Trump’s father, Freddy Trump, to alcoholism and an early death, she wrote.
That was all before her uncle, a man she deems unfit for the office, became president of the United States. In her new book, “The Reckoning: Our Nation’s Trauma and Finding a Way to Heal,” she writes of learning he’d won: “On the gloomy morning following Election Night 2016, I wrote down the following: ‘demeaned, diminished, debased.’” Shortly after her uncle took office, Mary Trump writes she spent a few weeks at a treatment center in Tucson, Arizona, “trying to figure out why my uncle Donald’s elevation to the White House had so undone me.”
In “The Reckoning,” it’s not her own personal trauma Mary Trump is unpacking, but the entire country’s – trauma, she says, we need to sort through if democracy is to survive.
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Though both of Mary Trump’s books published in the space of a single pandemic, much has changed since her first hit shelves: Donald Trump lost his reelection bid to Joe Biden; the House and Senate flipped to Democratic control; Trump’s long-sought-after tax returns are being released to Congress; and the Trump Organization is in the crosshairs of a New York criminal investigation that has led to the indictment of its chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg.
And yet she still notes a stubborn strain of hopelessness among the Left. “I too despair, but it is not over yet,” Mary Trump said in an interview with USA TODAY, calling despair “a luxury we don’t have.”
“We just need to grow the (expletive) up and take a lesson out of the page book of people of color who have suffered exponentially,” she said. “We need to follow their lead and get a grip.”
So, how does a politically divided, pandemic-weary nation get a handle on its trauma?
Confronting uncomfortable truths: ‘Only remembering will heal us’
Mary Trump lays bare the nation’s trauma back to its founding in “The Reckoning,” making a case that much of our current discord is built on America’s original sin of slavery and the perseverance of racism and white supremacy.
Never one to mince words, Mary Trump writes, “Ours is an ugly history full of depraved, barbaric, and inhumane behavior carried out by everyday people and encouraged or at least condoned by leaders at the highest levels of government. A denial of that history is a denial of our trauma.”
“Only remembering will heal us,” she writes. “Maybe it will even set us free.”
Healing trauma begins with acknowledging truth in unvarnished language, however uncomfortable. She is quick to use the terms “fascist” and “racist” on Republican lawmakers. Recently on Twitter, she called Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis a “homicidal sociopath” because of how he’s dealt with COVID-19 – by threatening to withhold the salaries of school officials who try to enforce mask mandates, for example. Cases are soaring in Florida, at least four times higher than a year ago, according to a USA TODAY Network analysis of Johns Hopkins University data.
“If it’s accurate, the language isn’t ugly,” Mary Trump says. “What else do you call a governor who knows that his policies are going to get people, including children, killed, but he doesn’t care? That sounds like a homicidal sociopath to me. I could have said that he’s a mass murderer, which is also true. And Donald is, in fact, a mass murderer. What’s ugly is that he is that, not calling him that.” (“Gov. DeSantis is not going to respond to juvenile name-calling,” said his press secretary Christina Pushaw when asked for comment.)
Mary Trump places much of the blame for America’s current COVID-19 situation – over 600,000 people dead and only about half the population fully vaccinated – squarely on her uncle’s shoulders.
“Everything he did made it worse,” she says, especially politicizing the pandemic.
“Pandemics and wars are when societies come together. Especially in pandemics when we’re isolated from each other, having a sense of connection would have been really helpful in getting people through the really, really tough times,” Mary Trump says. “There would have been a sense that we’re all in this together. By dividing us along political lines, I think that got a lot more people killed and it injected a level of anger and hostility that wouldn’t have existed otherwise.”
USA TODAY has reached out to former President Trump for comment.
Easier access to mental health care essential to healing nation
“When we think of trauma, we typically imagine dramatic, violent, singular events – rape, a car accident, a mortar shell exploding,” Mary Trump writes. “Trauma can be quiet and slow, too, occurring over time in a tense drama of sameness, of hopelessness, of unbearable isolation and loneliness, of helplessness.”
Sound familiar?
When asked how she’s doing now, 18 months into the pandemic, Mary Trump says, “I’m doing OK. Like everybody, I’m definitely feeling the stress of the last year and a half, especially as things needlessly seem to be getting worse again. So that’s tough. I have a kid who’s going to be a junior, and if she gets aced out of another year of college, I’m going to feel very angry. Because she really has not had a college experience.”
On the other hand, despite going into a pandemic with PTSD, she says she’s extraordinarily lucky.
More:A bizarre White House dinner with Donald Trump and more cringeworthy moments from Mary Trump’s book
“I can afford to do what I need to do to get better,” Mary Trump says. “I can afford trauma therapy and EMDR (eye movement desensitization and reprocessing) and acupuncture and the bodywork that’s required when dealing with something like complex PTSD.”
She thinks there should be a cabinet position in the Biden administration that deals solely with the unfolding mental health crisis to help give people the tools they need to cope. “I just think about the probably millions of people who are going to be newly diagnosed with PTSD because of the last 18 months and how such things won’t be available to them,” she says.
As for Mary Trump, part of her self-care is moving on from her uncle who, now that he’s out of office, is no longer relevant beyond the need to hold him accountable, she says.
“I don’t really see that I’m condemned to be defined by my relationship to him at all,” she says. “My last name is Trump, that’s my decision.” Then she quips, “I wish he would change his name because then I would have a lot of cool flags.”
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