At a dinner at the White House in April 2017, President Trump quipped to the table that until daughter-in-law Lara Trump captured his attention with a campaign speech he “barely even knew who the f— she was,” according to a new book by his niece.
A campaign adviser to the president, Lara also hosts Trump Productions’s Real News Update and is married to his son Eric.
Mary Trump recounts the moment in her new family memoir, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man, due to be released next week. A copy of the book was obtained by the Washington Examiner.
“’Lara, there,’” Trump said, gesturing toward her, Mary Trump writes. “‘I barely even knew who the f— she was, honestly, but then she gave a great speech during the campaign in Georgia supporting me.’ By then, Lara and Eric had been together for almost eight years, so presumably Donald had at least met her at their wedding.”
Trump, who stirred controversy after calling Meghan Markle, the duchess of Sussex, “nasty” in an interview last year, said the same of his sister Maryanne when she told him he wasn’t doing a very good job as president.
He called Maryanne after the election, “ostensibly to find out how he was doing,” Mary Trump writes. “Of course, he thought he already knew the answer; otherwise he wouldn’t have made the call in the first place. He merely wanted her to confirm very strongly that he was doing a fantastic job.”
“When she said, ‘Not that good,’ Donald immediately went on offense.”
“‘That’s nasty,'” Trump said, before asking her, “‘Maryanne, where would you be without me?'”
This, according to the book, was in reference to Trump and his attorney Roy Cohn’s efforts years earlier to secure Maryanne’s first federal judgeship.
“My aunt has always insisted that she’d earned her position on the bench entirely on her own merits, and she shot back at him, ‘If you say that one more time, I will level you,'” Mary Trump writes.
Maryanne had been an assistant district attorney in New Jersey when Trump asked Cohn for a favor on behalf of his sister, who thought an open seat on the U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey “would be a great fit.”
The future president, Mary writes, “thought it might be useful to have a close relative on the bench in a state in which he planned to do a lot of business.”
Cohn, a political fixer and former aide to Sen. Joseph McCarthy, “gave Attorney General Ed Meese a call, and Maryanne was nominated in September and confirmed in October.”
Mary Trump also claims Donald Trump tried to gain complete control of his father’s estate, cutting out his siblings in a “scheme” that his mother said, “didn’t pass the smell test.”
The future president had approached two of his father Fred Trump Sr.’s longest-serving employees, his lawyer and his accountant, to draft an amendment to his will. Approaching Fred at home, at the time suffering from as-yet-diagnosed Alzheimer’s, the two men “presented the document as if it had been Fred’s idea all along.” As Maryanne’s mother told her soon after, Fred “angrily refused to sign.”
“It didn’t take long for Donald’s scheme to be uncovered,” Mary writes. “Maryanne would say years later, ‘We would have been penniless. Elizabeth would have been begging on a street corner. We would have had to beg Donald if we wanted a cup of coffee.'”
