Image - Mary Trump and details from her book cover
Live Stream

Mary Trump: Family Ties and Lies

Buy Tickets

If you are not a member yet, now is the time to join our community and receive the great benefits of membership. We are a group of people seeking truth, insight and wisdom about the issues we face as individuals and as a society. Please join! You can become a monthly sustaining member for just $10 a month.

Everyone knows her name.

Mary Trump grew up in a family divided by its patriarch’s relentless drive for money and power. The daughter of Freddy Trump—the highly accomplished, dashing eldest son of wealthy real estate developer Fred Trump—and Linda Clapp—a flight attendant from a working-class family—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.

Even after Freddy’s short-lived career as a professional pilot for TWA came to an end, he never stopped trying to gain his father’s approval. Finally, at the age of 42, he succumbed to Fred’s lethal contempt and died alone in an emergency room, with no family by his side.

Mary Trump returns to the Club for a special online-only talk about the issues raised in her new memoir Who Could Ever Love You, in which she pulls back the curtains on what she calls the twisted family whose patriarch ignored, froze out, and eventually destroyed his own. Freddy Trump’s decline into alcoholism and illness, along with 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.

She says that cold, selfish cruelty has come to define the Trump family thanks in large part to her uncle, whose ambition has divided the nation and much of the world.

Notes

This program is online only; pre-register to receive a link to the live-stream.

The Commonwealth Club World Affairs of California is a nonprofit public forum; we welcome donations made during registration to support the production of our programming.

Copies of Who Could Ever Love You are available for purchase during checkout (U.S. domestic shipping only).

This program is part of our Good Lit series, underwritten by the Bernard Osher Foundation.

Bernard Osher Foundation

Mary Trump photo by Avary L Trump.

All ticket sales are final and nonrefundable.

Tue, Sep 3 / 3:00 PM PDT

The Commonwealth Club World Affairs of California
United States

Speakers
Image - Mary Trump

Mary Trump

Author, Who Could Ever Love You: A Family Memoir; X @MaryLTrump

Moderator TBA

Format

3–4 p.m program
(all times Pacific Time)

COST

Members receive 30–50 percent discounts (not a member? Join)

Online:
$10 
$39 with a book