[Transcript edited for clarity, flow and length]
I had the great good fortune of being on Mornings with Zerlina, with the amazing Zerlina Maxwell, and we talked about the implications for all of us of Donald’s rapid deterioration and much, much more.
Zerlina Maxwell: Back with us is one of my favorite guests to chat with because she is Donald Trump’s niece. Mary Trump is here. She is the founder of Mary Trump Media and also a psychologist, which is going to become relevant for today’s conversation. Good morning. It’s so great to see you.
Mary Trump: It is so great to see you, and I’m sorry it’s been so long. It feels like decades.
Zerlina Maxwell: I know. It really, really does, but that’s because I feel like the last decade has felt like decades, so that’s part of it. One of the things I wanted to start with is I’ve been talking a lot about obviously the major developing story. He’s banning CNN, MSNBC, and Politico from the White House. Badge access was revoked. Then yesterday he was standing in front of a helicopter whizzing. Nobody could hear him because there was no pool camera. From a psychological perspective, what does it mean to take away his oxygen? And what I mean is the attention that he so desperately craves.
Mary Trump: Yeah, it’s a fascinating issue and it’s important to recognize this is entirely of Donald’s own making. It is one of the most self-defeating moves he could possibly have made, and this is in a long series of them. Now, first of all, if only this had happened back in the seventies, we wouldn’t be having this conversation because somebody with his fathomless needs is incapable of existing without the attention you mentioned. Probably the worst thing you could do to Donald is put him in a room by himself without a mirror and without any access to the outside world. I honestly think he would cease to exist as a human being because he is entirely fueled by the attention that he seeks. I’ve often referred to him as a black hole of need, and he has just taken away one of the biggest sources of that attention in this incredibly self-defeating move.
Zerlina Maxwell: And it was really funny to watch because he’s really excited about this helipad and he was so excited to cut the ribbon. I mean, I cannot believe that forty days out from the election, he’s even doing something like this, taking time to do this, but that’s not the point. And it was embarrassing because you can’t hear him because they took away the microphones and the cameras that are normally there. And I feel like in a normal world, the president wouldn’t care about that, but Donald Trump is not like a normal president. In a lot of ways, I feel like the media attention that they give him, that the people that are operating behind the scenes allow him to go out in front of the cameras every day because he’s really useful as a large distraction from what’s actually happening and what moves they’re actually making. But I still do think that it’s interesting that they’ve even started this fight this close to the election, which makes me think that they want us to pay attention to it because of what they’re doing in the back.
Mary Trump: Yeah, I think that’s been the case all along, but it’s increasingly the case now because there are so many things wrong. Again, most of which are of Donald’s own devising: the war of choice against Iran, the insane tariff wars, the dismantling of our alliances, all of it is down to him pretty much. And they need a new crisis. I think it’s worth mentioning, we don’t really talk about the Epstein files anymore, for example. There are a lot of things. We don’t talk about the horrific fallout of some Supreme Court decisions. We don’t talk about the people detained in ICE concentration camps very much anymore. So it’s effective and it begs the question: why are the media incapable, and I’m looking at you, corporate media, of focusing people’s attention simultaneously on all of the things that continue to be going wrong for America and the American people, as well as the implications of Donald’s deteriorating cognitive, physical, and psychological decline.
Zerlina Maxwell: I've never met Donald Trump in person, though I have seen him once, a long time ago in Atlantic City. It was at a Mariah Carey concert, and I saw him walking through the casino. But you have been up close with him. You understand his family history and background, and you have a psychology background as well. I feel like you are in the best position to help us understand what we need to be afraid of and what lengths he will actually go to in order to help Republicans stay in power or perhaps stay there beyond his term.
Mary Trump: It’s an important question and unfortunately the answer is the same as it’s been for a very long time. Unfortunately, in 2020, a lot of people weren’t ready to hear it yet. I had an interview in the run-up to the election in 2020, and I said what remains true: if Donald thinks he’s going down, he’ll take all of us with him. And the response to the person interviewing me was complete disbelief. I think his response was, “You can’t be serious.” I’m like, “Yeah, of course I’m serious.” And look where we are because that’s exactly what he’s doing. He’s aware on some deep level anyway that he’s losing the plot, he’s losing control of the narrative, he’s losing ground, and he’s losing his party’s chances or he’s diminishing his party’s chances of winning in the midterm. He doesn’t care about the Republican Party, but the Republican Party exists for him simply to protect him and keep him in power.
So as he declines, he will get more dangerous. I think we need to continue to press on the people around him, those who are enabling him, those who are his co-conspirators, and ask why it’s okay with them. I mean, we’ve heard from Representative Joyce Beatty who was on the board of the Kennedy Center that the President of the United States had an epic temper tantrum during a board meeting and nobody seemed to have a problem with it except her. We see Donald’s fixations on things like destroying the White House to build a ballroom, putting up an arch to destroy the sanctity of Arlington National Cemetery, putting his name on the Kennedy Center and threatening to just demolish it if he can’t get his name back up there. And nobody who could stop him is stopping him. Why? Because if they think that they are exempt from any of this, they’re wrong. Not one person has ever survived a close allegiance with Donald Trump and they won’t either.
Zerlina Maxwell: What are some of the things that you see in terms of his cognitive decline that concern you?
Mary Trump: Well, the fact that he continues to brag about the results of a very basic cognitive assessment that he’s apparently taken several times now, that’s alarming. His impulse control is deteriorating. I mean, he’s never had great impulse control anyway, but it seems like he has none at this point. I mean, he practically launched himself at yet another female reporter not too long ago. His inability to stay awake during the day is concerning, and his physical decline is obvious to everybody. And the cognitive decline, as I said, bragging about cognitive tests, being told that he’s taken them repeatedly, his ability to stay awake during the day and his increasing lack of impulse control, those are all signs of cognitive decline. This is a man with longstanding serious untreated psychiatric disorders that will continue also to deteriorate over time because they’re undiagnosed and untreated. So this is a perfect storm of deterioration.
Sometimes it looks like he’s decompensated. He sometimes doesn’t seem to know where he is or who he’s with. He doesn’t always seem to be oriented to time and place. Some of it, of course, is just aging. He’s older than most eighty-year-olds because he’s so incredibly unhealthy. He’s sedentary, he eats terribly, he drinks like twelve Diet Cokes a day. And if it weren’t for the fact that he has access to the best medical care in the world, who knows? Who knows what kind of shape he would be in? But it seems like he’s just being held together by people who continue to get something out of him, whether it’s proximity to power or their ability to push through their agenda in exchange for letting him continue to enrich himself off the presidency. But as those things worsen, so too will his threat to us.
Zerlina Maxwell: One of the quotes that I use a lot is one of yours, and it’s from your book and it’s:
If he can in any way profit from your death, he will facilitate it and then he will ignore the fact that you died.
I don’t even have to look that up. I memorized this quote when I first read it. And I think about the ways in which that quote can be applied to how he was behaving during COVID, or even most recently when he got on the catering truck to escape the credible threat they had determined and left the reporters on the decoy plane. I mean, what are some of the other things that you identify in his behavior where he literally is facilitating harm in order to profit from it and then ignoring it, the harm that’s happening?
Mary Trump: Yeah, this has been going on for decades and probably his first victim was my dad. And unfortunately, as I’ve also written, a lot of people mistake his cruelty for strength. There’s something just so cool and macho about causing harm to people over whom you have power. And he also enjoys humiliating people, as did my grandfather, but we’ve seen it in the way he talks so dismissively about service members who’ve died in his illegal war of choice, and not just illegal war of choice, but deeply, deeply misguided and criminal, in my view. We see it in the way he dismisses the fact that seventy-seven farmers on average are declaring bankruptcy every day, and those are bankruptcies directly caused by his benighted economic policies and his willingness to do favors to foreign countries over the wellbeing of our farmers. And this is something that I’ve never understood why this wasn’t disqualifying, but apparently we currently live in a culture that thinks empathy is a waste of time, even though it’s one of the most profoundly important things about being human.
He is a deeply cruel person who cares about nobody. He doesn’t even care about himself. He cares about his wealth, he cares about his power, and he cares about attention, which is how we started this conversation. So many people fail to see that that extends to them. He doesn’t care about the people who vote for him. He doesn’t care about his closest inner circle, except to the extent they are of use to him, and that’s it.
Zerlina Maxwell: What is it about his psychology that makes him want to put his name on so many things? I mean, the thing that I’ve been obsessed with is how he’s just doing what he did during his real estate career. He wasn’t really a builder. He just licensed the name to put on the front of the building, and he’s just doing that all over Washington DC right now.
Mary Trump: Well, I think it’s important to put this in the context of the fact that Donald is a deeply unaccomplished person. He has accomplished nothing on his own in his lifetime. He didn’t build a fortune. My grandfather had a fortune. He wasn’t responsible for the only two legitimate building projects I’m aware of. My grandfather was able to make those things happen with his money, his connections, and his power. So he knows that on some level. And there are two of the most fundamental things to understand about Donald: one, he is a terrified little boy, and two, he is the most insecure person I’ve ever known, and he has spent his entire life practically trying to protect himself from the knowledge that he is a loser who has done nothing valuable. So to compensate for those things and to continue to protect his very fragile ego, he needs constant attention and he needs to glorify himself as a way to compensate for all of his failures.
And it’s as simple as that, and it’s just embarrassing. And it’s another thing that other people are allowing him to do instead of stepping back and saying, “This is a deeply, deeply damaged and depraved little man, and we should just contain him, not allow him to spread his toxin everywhere.” Unfortunately though, there are a lot of people still willing to sign up to do his bidding, and that’s also been one of the things that I have found most troubling.
Zerlina Maxwell: Based on your knowledge of who he is and the way that his mind works, do you think that he is leaving in 2028?
Mary Trump: No. No. It’s just going to be 2020 redux, but worse, because I’ve always found it amusing when people thought that he was going to accept the results of the election and even more amusing when people thought he was going to go to Joe Biden’s inauguration. But now he and people like Russ Vought and others have put in place the mechanisms by which he won’t have to leave, the ballroom and bunker, for example, with all of its drones or whatever. So the question really though is, and you’ll notice along those lines, Donald hasn’t picked a successor and he never will because to do so would mean that he’s accepting the fact that he won’t be there anymore and he’s not going to accept that fact. But the question remains: is he going to get to 2028? If he does, then no, he will not leave. He will not, even if a Republican wins, quite frankly, and he won’t do anything to help that Republican unless it’s simply in terms of his own self-interest.
Zerlina Maxwell: Mary Trump is the founder of Mary Trump Media. Thank you so much for being here. Come back anytime and sooner. Sooner rather than later, please.
Mary Trump: Absolutely. It’s great to see you, Zerlina. Thank you so much. The conversation continues in the comments. So let us know what you think. And if you’d like to help others find us, subscribe and share our videos with someone you know.
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Thank you that was a good read. I appreciate your insight into whatever going on in his head.
Great conversation...