Top 40 Mary L. Trump Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Although more powerful people put Donald into the institutions that have shielded him since the very beginning, it’s people weaker than he is who are keeping him there.”

— Mary L. Trump

2. “When your motive is not simply winning at all costs but grievance and revenge, you’re more dangerous than a straight-up sociopath. Donald is much worse than that – he’s someone with a gaping wound where his soul should.”

— Mary L. Trump

3. “Donald has always needed to perpetuate the fiction my grandfather started that he is strong, smart, and otherwise extraordinary, because facing the truth – that he is none of those things – is too terrifying for him to contemplate.”

— Mary L. Trump

4. “His cruelty serves, in part, as a means to distract both us and himself from the true extent of his failures. The more egregious his failures become, the more egregious his cruelty becomes.”

— Mary L. Trump

5. “If he is afforded a second term, it would be the end of American democracy.”

— Mary L. Trump

6. “White Americans worry that by acknowledging the atrocities of the past, the guilt of the actual perpetrators will somehow attach to us, while it’s the failure to acknowledge those atrocities that makes us complicit. We as a nation cannot begin to heal unless we face our past head-on with complete honesty and begin to understand how our country’s legacy continues to affect every aspect of our lives.”

— Mary L. Trump

7. “Fred had disowned us because he could. The people who’d been assigned to protect us, at least financially, were our trustees – Maryanne, Donald, Robert, and Irwin Durben – but they apparently had no interest in protecting us, especially at their own expense.”

— Mary L. Trump

8. “Donald today is much as he was at three years old: incapable of growing, learning, or evolving, unable to regulate his emotions, moderate his responses, or take in and synthesize information.”

— Mary L. Trump

9. “Failing to demand a reckoning for atrocities, even retrospectively, creates a situation in which we ensure such atrocities or crimes or transgressions will happen again. Failing to call them out is to condone them.”

— Mary L. Trump

10. “Honest work was never demanded of him, and no matter how badly he failed, he was rewarded in ways that are almost unfathomable. He continues to be protected from his own disasters in the White House, where a claque of loyalists applauds his every pronouncement or covers up his possible criminal negligence by normalizing it to the point that we’ve become almost numb to the accumulating transgressions.”

— Mary L. Trump

11. “The people with access to him are weaker than Donald is, more craven, but just as desperate. Their futures are directly dependent on his success and favor. They either fail to see or refuse to believe that their fate will be the same as that of anyone who pledged loyalty to him in the past. There seems to be an endless number of people willing to join the claque that protects Donald from his own inadequacies while perpetuating his unfounded belief in himself.”

— Mary L. Trump

12. “Annamaria, who was three years older than Donald, said, “Who are you to be disappointed in me?” That ended the conversation. His idea of flirting was to insult her and act superior.”

— Mary L. Trump

13. “For him, it was not “the more you have, the more you can give.” It was “the more you have, the more you have.” Financial worth was the same as self-worth, monetary value was human value. The more Fred Trump had, the better he was. If he gave something to someone else, that person would be worth more and he less. He would pass that attitude on to Donald in spades.”

— Mary L. Trump

14. “Although Donald and Marla were still married, she was already a distant memory, replaced by his new girlfriend, Melania, a twenty-eight-year-old Slovenian model whom I’d never met.”

— Mary L. Trump

15. “Instead, states are forced to buy vital supplies from private contractors; the federal government commandeers those supplies, and then FEMA distributes them back to private contractors, who then resell them.”

— Mary L. Trump

16. “Though nothing Donald did surprised me, the speed and volume with which he started inflicting his worst impulses on the country – from lying about the crowd size at the inauguration and whining about how poorly he was treated to rolling back environmental protections, targeting the Affordable Care Act in order to take affordable health care away from millions of people, and enacting his racist Muslim ban – overwhelmed me.”

— Mary L. Trump

17. “I hope this book will end the practice of referring to Donald’s “strategies” or “agendas,” as if he operates according to any organizing principles. He doesn’t.”

— Mary L. Trump

18. “Why did it take so long for Donald to act? Why didn’t he take the novel coronavirus seriously? In part because, like my grandfather, he has no imagination.”

— Mary L. Trump

19. “Many, but by no means all of us, have been shielded until now from the worst effects of his pathologies by a stable economy and a lack of serious crises. But the out-of-control COVID-19 pandemic, the possibility of an economic depression, deepening social divides along political lines thanks to Donald’s penchant for division, and devastating uncertainty about our country’s future have created a perfect storm of catastrophes that no one is less equipped than my uncle to manage. Doing.”

— Mary L. Trump

20. “The more New Yorkers wanted spectacle, the more willing the media were to provide it – even at the expense of more important and substantive stories. Why bore them with hard-to-follow articles about his convoluted bank transactions? The distractions and sleights of hand benefited Donald enormously while giving him exactly what he wanted: the ongoing adulation of media that focused on his salacious divorce and alleged sexual prowess. If the media could deny reality, so could he.”

— Mary L. Trump

21. “Fred didn’t groom Donald to succeed him; when he was in his right mind, he wouldn’t trust Trump Management to anybody. Instead, he used Donald, despite his failures and poor judgment, as the public face of his own thwarted ambition. Fred kept propping up Donald’s false sense of accomplishment until the only asset Donald had was the ease with which he could be duped by more powerful men.”

— Mary L. Trump

22. “The North won the armed conflict after an extraordinary loss of blood and treasure, but it was at the point of surrender that the South, symbolically and rhetorically, won the war itself.”

— Mary L. Trump

23. “Donald was to my grandfather what the border wall has been for Donald: a vanity project funded at the expense of more worthy pursuits.”

— Mary L. Trump

24. “What Donald can do in order to offset the powerlessness and rage he feels is punish the rest of us.”

— Mary L. Trump

25. “Andrew Cuomo, the governor of New York and currently the de facto leader of the country’s COVID-19 response, has committed not only the sin of insufficiently kissing Donald’s ass but the ultimate sin of showing Donald up by being better and more competent, a real leader who is respected and effective and admired.”

— Mary L. Trump

26. “Since the election, he’s figured out how to avoid such questions completely; White House press briefings and formal news conferences have been replaced with “chopper talk” during which he can pretend he can’t hear any unwelcome questions over the noise of the helicopter blades.”

— Mary L. Trump

27. “What freedmen and freedwomen accomplished between 1865 and 1877 was nothing short of astonishing, especially considering the extent and seriousness of the impediments put in their way, from uninterrupted racism and white supremacy to inadequate assistance from the North and campaigns of terrorist violence. Given the climate, it shouldn’t be surprising that the gains made at the beginning of Reconstruction, as impressive as they were, proved to be fleeting.”

— Mary L. Trump

28. “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. In addition to the firsthand accounts I can give as my father’s daughter and my uncle’s only niece, I have the perspective of a trained clinical psychologist. Too Much and Never Enough is the story of the most visible and powerful family in the world. And I am the only Trump who is willing to tell it.”

— Mary L. Trump

29. “Donald probably thought he was being kind. There used to be a spark of that in him.”

— Mary L. Trump

30. “At 5: 00 the next morning, only a couple of hours after the opposite result had been announced, I was wandering around my house, as traumatized as many other people but in a more personal way: it felt as though 62,979,636 voters had chosen to turn this country into a macro version of my malignantly dysfunctional family.”

— Mary L. Trump

31. “White people were allowed to buy houses with low-interest mortgages and receive free college educations. In the first instance this enabled them to amass wealth and equity, in the second it enabled them to live free of often crushing debt. Blacks were denied these opportunities, robbing them of untold wealth, the result of which has reverberated through succeeding generations.”

— Mary L. Trump

32. “Donald is completely unprepared to solve his own problems or adequately cover his tracks.”

— Mary L. Trump

33. “Donald has always struggled for legitimacy – as an adequate replacement for Freddy, as a Manhattan real estate developer or casino tycoon, and now as the occupant of the Oval Office who can never escape the taint of being utterly without qualification or the sense that his “win” was illegitimate.”

— Mary L. Trump

34. “Toni Morrison wrote, “In this country American means white. Everybody else has to hyphenate.”

— Mary L. Trump

35. “The banks admonished him for betraying their agreement, but they never took any action against him, which just reinforced his belief that he could do whatever he wanted, as he almost always had.”

— Mary L. Trump

36. “Fred kept propping up Donald’s false sense of accomplishment until the only asset Donald had was the ease with which he could be duped by more powerful men.”

— Mary L. Trump

37. “Donald did have – as a savant of self-promotion, shameless liar, marketer, and builder of brands – to achieve the one thing that had always eluded him: a level of fame that matched his ego and satisfied his ambition in a way money alone never could.”

— Mary L. Trump

38. “If you are white in America and feel you’ve been left behind and shut out of the prosperity afforded to others, it’s not because of Black people and immigrants. It’s because the politicians you continue to vote for stoke your bigotry and sense of grievance while exploiting your ignorance in order to keep you exactly where you are – disempowered, angry, and fearful.”

— Mary L. Trump

39. “He had all the confidence of a bully who knows he’s always going to get what he wants and never has to fight for it.”

— Mary L. Trump

40. “Donald set his sights on the University of Pennsylvania. Unfortunately, even though Maryanne had been doing his homework for him, she couldn’t take his tests, and Donald worried that his grade point average, which put him far from the top of his class, would scuttle his efforts to get accepted. To hedge his bets he enlisted Joe Shapiro, a smart kid with a reputation for being a good test taker, to take his SATs for him.”

— Mary L. Trump

41. “If not for an accident of birth, none of them would have been a multimillionaire.”

— Mary L. Trump

42. “For Donald, lying was primarily a mode of self-aggrandizement meant to convince other people he was better than he actually was.”

— Mary L. Trump

43. “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.”

— Mary L. Trump

44. “That’s how it always works with the sycophants. First they remain silent no matter what outrages are committed; then they make themselves complicit by not acting. Ultimately, they find they are expendable when Donald needs a scapegoat.”

— Mary L. Trump

45. “If he can keep forty-seven thousand spinning plates in the air, nobody can focus on any one of them. So there’s that: it’s just a distraction.”

— Mary L. Trump

46. “The atmosphere of division my grandfather created in the Trump family is the water in which Donald has always swum, and division continues to benefit him at the expense of everybody else. It’s wearing the country down, just as it did my father, changing us even as it leaves Donald unaltered.”

— Mary L. Trump

47. “As the bankruptcies and embarrassments mounted, Donald was confronted for the first time with the limits of his ability to talk or threaten his way out of a problem. Always adept at finding an escape hatch, he seems to have come up with a plan to betray his father and steal vast sums of money from his siblings.”

— Mary L. Trump