As I wrote at the beginning of the week Ronda Cress, my wife (!) started a Substack recently called The Little Girl with the Big Voice. Two days ago, she launched a new interview series called “Big Voice Wednesdays.” I had the great pleasure of being her first guest. It was a little odd sitting in separate rooms speaking to each other via Zoom, but talking to her is one of my favorite things to do regardless of the circumstances so we soon settled in. As the conversation unfolded, I learned something new about Ronda—she’s an excellent interviewer. I can’t wait to see who she interviews next Wednesday.
In the meantime, I hope you enjoy this!
[Transcript edited for clarity, flow, and length.]
Ronda:
Hello everyone, and welcome to the very first Big Voice Wednesday here on The Little Girl with The Big Voice. This is going to be a regular segment to help break up the unrelenting news cycles and inject some inspiration and hope, and maybe even a little humor, to help you get through the rest of the week.
Big Voice Wednesday will showcase ordinary individuals who are doing extraordinary things and using their voices in unexpected ways. And to kick us off, I have a very special guest. She’s the author of three bestselling books, the Proprietor of The Good in Us Substack, and founder of Mary Trump Media on YouTube. But best of all, she’s my wife. So welcome in, Mary.
Mary:
Thank you. I am so excited to be here, and I have to confess to you I’m a little nervous.
Ronda:
Well, you’re not the only one!
Mary:
I know. Millie’s nervous too.
Ronda:
Millie’s always nervous. She’s just a high anxiety puppy.
Mary:
She’s preparing for her cameo hopefully.
Ronda:
It’s so good to have you here. One of the goals of my newsletter, The Little Girl with the Big Voice, is to help people to find and use their voices so that they can make their lives and the world around them better. So I want to talk to you about the process of finding your voice and what that was like for you. I think the best place to start is with the origin story of your public life. You described this a bit in your first book, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man, about the decision to finally talk to reporters, namely Suzanne Craig, and a couple others from The New York Times, and to provide information about the family’s finances. But I’m hoping you could go a little deeper about what that felt like, and especially at that point in your life where you had been living in relative obscurity.
Mary:
Well, total obscurity, actually.
Ronda:
I was trying to be generous!
Mary:
Back in 2016 or before the 2016 election, I had strongly considered doing something. I didn’t know what it was going to be, but I was so horrified at the prospect of Donald getting into the Oval Office that I felt I needed to try. But despite the fact that in New York, where we didn’t believe for a second that 62 [million] people would be ridiculous enough to vote for him, Donald kept gaining traction. There were various reasons for that, but it seemed like what he had to sell--the racism, the misogyny, the corruption, the grift, etc.-- really appealed to a lot of people. So the closer he got to getting the nomination, and then of course the closer he got to the election, I really struggled. I talked to friends and my daughter about it because I knew it could present certain problems. But then I realized something. Donald was getting away with absolutely everything, and I had nothing on my side. I had no proof of anything, as far as I was aware. I knew that if I stepped out, I would be perceived and painted as an aggrieved, disinherited niece who either just wanted attention or just wanted to make a buck. So I came to the conclusion that it would not have made any sense. And as depressing as that was, it turns out to have been the right decision.
A few months later Suzanne Craig, an investigative journalist for the New York Times, knocked on my door in, I think it was May or June of 2017. I was not doing well, and it took a while for this to get through to me. But she was trying to tell me that I actually did have solid proof of financial wrongdoing in my family in the form of 40,000 pages of documents that I had received in discovery back in 1999 and 2000, when I sued my grandfather’s estate after he had completely disinherited me. I eventually became comfortable stepping into a larger role, first through writing my first book, and then other projects because I had proof in black and white. It was no longer my word against his.
Ronda:
I think one thing that’s really interesting about that, or that I’m curious about, is whether you had any difficulty. Before in 2016 when he was running, you thought about speaking out then, and you explained for various reasons why you didn’t, and that ended up being the right decision. But I imagine part of making that decision then wasn’t just the concern about whether you would be believed or how you would be perceived, it was probably also the fact that you had this messaging kind of drilled into you through your family, that you don’t speak to reporters. You keep everything very private and you don’t share family matters. I wonder in 2020 whether that way of thinking presented a barrier? Because I think a lot of times when we’re trying to figure out what we can do or whether we can make a difference, we often have a lot of our own thought patterns and history that limits us. Did that play a role or were things too bad after his first term and you had all of these documents to back you up this time?
Mary:
No, actually they did. It’s a really good point that I hadn’t really thought about much. It’s what you often refer to as my fixed narratives--there was absolutely a fixed narrative. And there was another component to all of this too at the time, that defies explanation. I had developed a close relationship with my Aunt Maryanne over the years leading up to the 2016 election. We were in quite frequent touch. I visited her. We had lunch together. We had very long conversations. She was one of the main proponents of the “never speak to the press” ethos. Donald was the exception, because he could speak to whomever he wished. So that definitely had been drilled into me for a very, very long time.
And then The New York Times piece came out. Now, of course, I worked with the team at The Times and provided them a lot of background material. But it wasn’t until the piece was published on October 2nd, 2018, that I saw the scope, not just of the potential criminality and fraud that my family engaged in, but the extent to which they had completely screwed me over financially. My grandfather disinherited me, which he was completely within his right to do, but Donald and my other uncle, Robert and my Aunt Maryanne were my trustees--they had a fiduciary responsibility to me. And it turns out they did the opposite. That also factored into my decision because it became pretty obvious if I didn’t speak out, who was I protecting? It turns out that I would have been protecting them, and that became completely untenable for me.
Ronda:
Once you spoke out, I’m sure that was a harrowing experience with this newfound attention and fame and publicity. But as you went forward after you made that decision, did you find that it gave you a new perspective on how you had been thinking about things beforehand? Did it help you to see those thought patterns and those old, fixed narratives and help you resolve those? Did you feel stronger as you went forward? Or is this something you haven’t thought of?
Mary:
It’s something I actually have thought about because it was such a stark change. The day before the article by Lachlan Cartwright came out in The Daily Beast that outed my upcoming book, which had been completely embargoed for almost a year, I had 90 followers on Twitter. By the time my book came out a few weeks later, I had hundreds of thousands of them, which was weird. Part of it was realizing the extent to which I had kept myself from having community because I lurked on Twitter, but never interacted with anybody because that seemed fraught and scary. Two things that happened simultaneously. One, I found myself doing things I never in a billion years imagined I would be doing: things like this, for example; doing hits on MSNBC and CNN; and being asked to host political fundraisers. All things that were completely outside of my wheelhouse. It turned out, though, that I actually had some affinity for some of them, but how would I have known? It made me realize that I had not been, to any significant degree, doing anything that seemed valuable up until that point. I felt like I had been given this incredible opportunity to have some influence because the book came out in July, 2020, just a few months away from the presidential election. I needed to make sure to the tiny extent I could, that Donald lost, which he did by almost 8 million votes
Ronda:
Sticking with the time before you made that decision to talk to The New York Times and then write your book, I want to go back even before Donald ran for president or became the Republican nominee in 2016. Were you using your voice before then? Or did you feel you had a sense of purpose?
Mary:
Oh, I didn’t at all, actually. I don’t know that I would’ve been aware of that. And maybe if somebody had asked me that question, I would’ve said, “Use my voice for what?” I don’t know that it even occurred to me I had one. If you’re living in a particular way and you are dealing with, which at the time for me was untreated, undiagnosed PTSD, it’s very difficult to have any insight into what’s wrong or understand that you’re only subsisting not thriving. One of the things that’s happened since 2020 is that I did start to recognize the limitations I had placed on myself or that had been placed on me because I had all sorts of new opportunities and over time it became clear I wasn’t able to take advantage of them. Before that, certainly before 2015 and 2016 I didn’t recognize I had any opportunities? I was living in suburbia, and I just didn’t recognize that there could be something else out there for me professionally or even personally.
Ronda:
One thing I found very interesting about your story is how you straddled these two different worlds. On the one hand, you had access to things that were available through money and privilege, but without having the actual money and privilege. Once I started to learn more about you, because in fairness, I was one of those people, when your first book came out, who immediately dismissed you as somebody who was just seeking their 15 minutes. I was like, “Wait, who is this Trump? There’s another Trump?” So, I dismissed you. But once I actually paid attention and found out a little bit more about you, I saw how wrong I was. You were clearly quite different. But setting aside your role in all of that and the books and the election, I found your history up until that point very compelling and I wanted to learn more. I’m hoping you could talk a little bit about how that was for you, because you were in the family, but you weren’t really of it. How did that impact your feelings of not having a voice.
Mary:
You were not alone in dismissing me, and I understand that completely because I don’t know how I would’ve felt if I weren’t me. But to your point about my history and the impact that had, it was on the one hand, a very good thing for me ultimately that I did not grow up with the kinds of wealth and privilege other people in my family grew up with—which would have been mostly Donald’s kids, because my dad’s generation didn’t grow up with. My grandfather was very rich and very well known, but certainly my dad and my Aunt Maryanne and my Aunt Elizabeth did not have money thrown at them. As my aunt would say, as only she could, they grew up white trash poor.
I think that’s overstating the case a bit because they lived in a little mansion in Jamaica Estates and went to private schools. But similarly, as you mentioned, I did have an extraordinarily privileged life. I went to private schools. I went to a sailing camp on Cape Cod Bay. We always had food and clothes. But I grew up in Jamaica, Queens, which was a lower middle-class, working-class neighborhood. I took the subway to school. We did not have the trappings of wealth by any stretch of the imagination. I also had to contend with the fact that I was Freddy’s daughter. Despite being the oldest son and my grandfather’s namesake, my father was not respected by anybody in my family. Being his kid was one strike against me. Being a girl in a family of horrible misogynists was another strike against me.
Nobody in my extended family cared about me; I’m not overstating that. They had no expectations for me. That’s sad, I suppose, as a kid. But on the other hand, it was very freeing. It allowed me to make my own choices and never to feel like I had to fulfill anybody else’s expectations about my life because they didn’t have any. But when life got challenging, it made it very difficult for me to convince myself that anything I did mattered or that anything I could do would be enough to matter to anybody else. That had been a burden for a long time.
Ronda:
Turning back to today, you talked about having to learn things that weren’t in your wheelhouse and doing things that you never anticipated that you would be doing – like hosting a podcast on your own media channel. After your first book and Donald’s loss to Biden in the 2020 election you could have said, okay, “I’ve done my part,” and tried to return to some semblance of privacy. But you didn’t - you ended up continuing to write in the political space. You started the podcast and the media channel. I’m curious what made you decide to keep doing that work, even though a lot of it had been so new to you, and why you’re continuing to do it now?
Mary:
I think it’s part of the evolution that started with my working with The New York Times. There were plenty of reasons to believe that that article should have had a massive impact on public perception of Donald because it completely upended the myth that he was a self-made man or a brilliant entrepreneur. Neither of those things is the least bit true. Plus, of course, the alleged tax fraud and the massive amounts of wealth he got from my grandfather—something like $416 million over the course of my grandfather’s lifetime. But it didn’t make a dent and that was extraordinarily frustrating. That motivated me to write the book. Whether or not the book made a difference, I don’t know, but it did give me a platform. And if things had panned out differently, if after President Biden won Donald, would have conceded the election and he had gone back to private life and played golf and found other ways to grift, I don’t know what I would’ve done.
Then breathing a collective sigh of relief in the wake of the election, Donald started the big lie, and then he incited an insurrection against his own government in what was a terrifying display of anti-American corruption and cruelty and violence. The Republican Party decided that that was just fine. It took them a few of weeks, but it became clear that they were going to continue to support a man who had actively put them in a position to be killed by a mob he incited. I think it was then I realized we were in new territory and this was going to keep getting worse. Despite everything, Donald continued to have massive amounts of power within the Republican party.
Then, as you know, the corrupt, illegitimate super-majority of the Supreme Court started making some absolutely horrific anti-constitutional decisions about what kind of presidency Donald should have, about the regulatory state, and women’s rights to bodily autonomy. They were in service to eroding our rights and continuing to expand his power. Plus, of course, despite being indicted and charged, and in some cases convicted, Donald kept getting away with everything. Then in November, 2024, it became clear his coup had been successful because he got back into the Oval Office.
Throughout all of that, it would have felt like a complete abdication of responsibility to go off and write novels, which is really what I wanted to do. Having a platform is a privilege and not using it, especially when so many people are suffering because of the horrific inhumane policies of the Trump regime. I don’t think I would have been able to live with myself if I had just said, “Thanks, guys. I’m going to go do this other thing. Good luck with all of that.”
Ronda:
I think there’s an important lesson in that too. You didn’t know, when you first took those steps in 2020, what the results were going to be. You didn’t know what your impact would be or how wide it would reach, but you did it anyway. And I think that’s a key takeaway for people when they’re trying to figure out how to speak out or what to do. And I don’t mean just in terms of what’s going on with our democracy. It could be in your personal life or in your communities—a lot of the time the outcome is uncertain. So, it can be scary to speak out because you don’t know if you’re going to have an impact. But the one thing that is certain is that if you don’t, you’re definitely not going to make a difference. Your voice definitely is not going to matter. You didn’t know if it would matter, but you did it anyway because it was very important to you, to the kind of person that you want to be. So, thank you for that.
And thank you so much for being my first guest and for everything that you do. I’m so lucky that you did step out and write that book back in 2020 because I wouldn’t have known that you existed. And look at us now.
Mary:
Well, thank you for watching the George Stephanopoulos interview while you were folding laundry back in 2020. And also, mostly of course, thank you for marrying me.
Ronda:
. You’re dropping hints! As many viewers may know, you’ve written a couple of Substack posts at The Good in Us - first telling your readers that you’d gotten married and on Sunday, letting them know who you had married. You’ve told your side of the story, and I have not yet told mine. That’s going to be coming very soon. So stay tuned for a post on that.
Ronda:
I’m hoping you can share some advice for anyone who is watching and maybe struggling right now with feeling like they are powerless or that they don’t have a voice. Or that they don’t know how to use their voice or if it even matters. What advice do you have for them right now?
Mary:
Standing up always matters, right? And as you said, we’re not only talking about dealing with the political situation or speaking up against fascism or speaking up for immigrants. There are many, many things that people are doing in the world that don’t specifically have to do with what’s happening with the American government. There’s some extraordinary work being done to help people in all different ways. That could be working with international human rights law, or it could be creating art. There are so many ways to stand up and make a difference. I think when people have a hard time with that, recognize that even if what you’re doing is completely outside the realm of the political, it is having an impact on you every single day.
Give yourself a break and recognize the context in which you’re trying to make a difference. We’re being inundated on a daily basis with horrors. When necessary, unplug from it if you can. Here’s one of my favorite stories: I had the extraordinarily good fortune to be on a podcast with Jane Fonda in September of 2020. She’s as extraordinary person as you want her to be. We were a couple of months out from the election, and she asked me how people marshal their resources because. I said, “This is a marathon. It’s not a sprint yet. We still have time.” And she said, “Well, isn’t it more like a relay race?” And I say, “Yes, it is. That’s the analogy.” So, if you need to take a break and unplug, realize there are tons of people who are still engaged. Hand off the baton for a bit. We’ll keep bringing it down the track.
The other thing I would say is never underestimate the power of community to keep you buoyed, to keep you energized and to help heal you. One of the most unfortunate things that happened to me at the end of 2020 was that I became more and more isolated. We were still dealing with COVID, and I was having a very difficult time making the transition into doing the kinds of work I felt like I needed to be doing. It got harder for me to get outside and start connecting with people.
It wasn’t until the beginning of last year that I started reconnecting with people. You’re a major part of that, but other close friends of ours were as well. It’s stunning the difference it makes when you allow people into your lives, when, if necessary, you allow them to help you, and allow them to care for you, and nurture you because next thing you know, you’re able to do those kinds of things for other people, too. It has been one of the most revelatory and profound experiences I’ve had to remember how essentially important it is to be connected to your other humans. Without that, you cannot be as effective as you want to be; you can’t have as much impact as you want to. You cannot be the person you want to be. So that would be my most important suggestion.
Ronda:
That’s awesome. I want to thank you so much for being my very first guest on Big Voice Wednesdays, and I’m so glad you’re continuing to use your voice.
And then I want to thank all of you for watching. Stay tuned. There’s going to be a lot ahead.
And remember, even the littlest act can have a big impact.
