Who Could Ever Love You

"The daughter of Freddy Trump, the highly accomplished, dashing eldest son of wealthy real estate developer Fred Trump, ... Mary lived in the shadow of Freddy‘s humiliation at the hands of his father. Fred Trump embodied the ethos of the zero-sum game and among his five children, there could only be one winner. That was supposed to be Freddy, his namesake, but Fred found him wanting--too sensitive, too kind, too interested in pursuits beyond the realm of the real estate empire he was meant to inherit. In Donald, Fred found a kindred spirit, a ‘killer,‘ who would stop at nothing to get his own way. ... At the age of forty-two, [Freddy] succumbed to Fred‘s lethal contempt and died alone in an emergency room. ... Mary Trump brings us inside the twisted family whose patriarch ignored, froze out, and eventually destroyed his own. Freddy Trump‘s decline into alcoholism and illness, along with [his wife] Linda‘s suffering after their divorce, left Mary dangerously vulnerable as a very young girl. Inadequately and only conditionally loved, there were no adults in her life except for the father she loved, but lost before she could know him; and a mother abandoned by her ex-husband‘s rich and powerful family who demanded her loyalty but left her with nothing"