Who Could Ever Love You: A Family Memoir

“a timely, sensitive, informative, and important memoir, particularly for those who are straddling the political fence . . .”

Every child deserves to be born into a loving, harmonious family. In the case of Mary L. Trump, her family legacy brought greed, abuse, notoriety, and dysfunction.

“I’m here because Donald Trump is my uncle,” says Mary Trump, in December 2021, as she experiences the ketamine entering her vein during a stay at a clinic, just as people began leaving their homes after the initial wave of COVID.

Five years prior, she loses control of her life, the shame of having that last name, and, after people begin to get out again, she decides to check in for treatment for trauma. In session she writes, “I want to live.”

Mary was born in 1965. Her family lives in Jamaica Estates (Queens), her father, Freddy, an alcoholic TWA pilot who soon abandons his family, leaving them financially unstable. “I’d begun to . . . walk on the eggshells of my mother’s quiet despair.”

Mary’s mother, Linda, was born Kalamazoo. Linda’s father, Mike Clapp, has a rough upbringing as result of a father (Willis) with a “frightening temper” resulting from Willis’s head wound as a young boy. Mike’s wife, Nellie (Mary’s paternal grandmother), becomes the sole breadwinner in the 1920s by handwashing other families’ laundry.

Linda’s mother, Mary Rolfe, leaves her family home after the death of her (Mary’s) mother—she didn’t like her stepmother, and moves to Kalamazoo from Menominee, Michigan, to live with Aunt Pearl. At Linda’s job at the YWCA, she meets Mike Clapp at a Y dance. They marry, have their first daughter, Carol, then Linda (Mary Trump’s mother) was born in 1939.

By 1952, the Clapp family leaves the harsh winters of Kalamazoo and moves to Fort Lauderdale, partly to help Linda’s mother’s rheumatoid arthritis. Carol and Linda are mostly ignored so their dad can take care of Mary. They own a clam shack, and Linda hates being forced to work there as a teen. But she loves the ocean.

At 19, Linda takes a Nassau vacation with her friend, and meets Freddy Trump, who was 20 and attending Lehigh. They meet up again during Linda’s New York vacation the following year. They stop by “The House,” where Linda meets Freddy’s 13-year-old brother, Donald, “who was two months away from being shipped off to a military academy . . .”

Linda returns to Fort Lauderdale and becomes a stewardess, as they were called then. At 21, she gets a job with National Airlines and is based in New York.

Freddy’s father (Fred Sr.) is in real estate, Linda needs an apartment to share with another stewardess, so Linda phones Freddy, who finds them an apartment near the Queens airport. They begin dating, Freddy graduates Lehigh, earns his pilot’s license; in 1961 they get engaged. He works for Trump Management.

Wedding planning is costly for middle-class Linda’s family, as the Trumps insist on the best of everything—which her family can’t afford. After they marry, they move to the upscale Sutton Place in Manhattan and visit the Trump family home in Jamaica Estates, Queens, for weekly Wednesday dinners.

Freddy becomes a pilot for TWA; he detests his father’s control. He, Linda, and young baby Fritz move to Kansas City for Freddy’s pilot training. After training, the young family moves to Massachusetts—but Freddy lasts just four months as a pilot. Mary arrives in 1965.

Trump Sr. tells his son, “You’re just a goddamned chauffeur in the sky,” and young Donald calls Freddy a “glorified bus driver.” The pressure, along with providing for his young family at only 26, exacerbates his drinking habit, which, in turn, creates a struggling marriage. Freddy pilots planes even while intoxicated.

One evening, when Mary is very young, she awakens to her father’s drunken laughter as he’s “pointing a rifle at my mother and threatening to blow her head off.” Adult Mary L. Trump recollects, “it still hums with a mild current, alive, unprocessed and intact.”

After her parents separate, Linda, Fritz and Mary move to a rental in Jamaica, Queens; one of the neighbors teaches Mary to read at three. During their dad’s visitation days, he takes them to “The (Trump) House” for visits with the grandparents in Jamaica Estates.

Mary’s mother, Linda, takes a volunteer position at a local hospital’s Women’s Auxiliary as both children are in school. Sometimes Mary stays at Mrs. Lombardi’s—a widow who watches children to supplement her income, after school. Mary adores observing Lombardi’s Italian meatball prep: “What most amazed me was watching her roll . . . into perfect spheres with the practiced hands of an artisan.”

One of Mrs. Lombardi’s five children, Antonio, is caught molesting little Mary. Mrs. Lombardi slaps tiny Mary’s bottom (which Mary perceives as “mixed signals,”) but continues to provide childcare for her for the next few years. She’s never left alone with Antonio again.

Mary’s parents’ divorce finalizes in 1970; her dad continues, reluctantly, to work at Fred Sr.’s Brooklyn office, while his alcoholism worsens. Meanwhile Donald graduates from college in 1968 and joins Trump Management, with a “salary that far surpassed [Freddy’s] . . . a car, driver, bonuses, credit for work he didn’t even do . . .” and ultimately becomes president of the company—further alienating Fred Jr.

Fritz (then eight) and Mary (five) see a weird psychiatrist, Dr. Rice, whom their parents had seen; and to their shock, the shrink forces them (Mary only five) to view charts of and discuss names of human sexual anatomy.

Freddy is in and out of the hospital or rehab for either smoking-related lung issues or alcoholism and lives in the attic of the “Trump House” where their visitations were held. During that time, “Gam” Trump is also ill and frequently hospitalized for osteoporosis. Grandfather Trump is always distant.

Mary has serious, nocturnal asthma attacks beginning at age five with several hospitalizations, painful tests, and horrendous medications. Mom Linda is unsympathetic and often sleeps during these attacks. “[Her breathing] . . . was the loneliest sound.”

Summer camp has a minimum age requirement of seven; Mary gets in at six. Mom and Dad visit at separate times, and Mary adores her annual summer camp experiences.

Preordained by the Trumps, Mary and Fritz attend Kew-Forest School, instead of public school, in Queens. The same one where Donald gets kicked out of years before for being a “thin-skinned bully who beat up on younger kids.” Donald transfers to the NY Military Academy— “essentially a rich kids’ alternative to reform school.”

At 11, Mary’s a wreck between frequent hospitalizations and asthma meds. She soon becomes a fangirl to all things sci-fi and Isaac Asimov (“my days were suffused with the . . . molten sands of the Martian desert”), begins to read everything she gets her hands on, and enjoys creative writing as an escape to dismal homelife, missing camp life, and stuffy private school.

At 12, Mary develops a crush on Kim, the 16-year-old camp counselor, and they’re often unclothed, sleeping in Mary’s cot. “I began to worry . . . if I held on to this secret.”

In 1978, Dad’s health declines, he has mitral valve surgery, and Mom has “intractable depression;” those issues “became the magnetic poles of my existence.” And since “Mr. (Fred) Trump Sr.” owns Mary’s building, he refuses to authorize any repairs to a deteriorating apartment.

By eighth grade, Mary steals money for video games during Mom’s deep sleeps, avoiding her apartment as often as possible. When Fritz leaves for college, “I was on my own.”

After her Sweet Sixteen at the Grand Hyatt, owned by Donald Trump and for which they had to pay him rental fees, Ethel Walker School in Connecticut becomes Mary’s getaway as she transfers from Kew-Forest in Queens; Dad has to beg Fred Sr. for tuition. Fred Sr. is obsessed with clipping newspaper stories on Donald. For everyone else in the large Trump family, “Nothing we did mattered . . . unless you were Donald . . .”

After Dad dies, she takes “up the habits of smoking and sarcasm.” She begins to analyze the family’s dysfunction, which causes insomnia, nightmares, poor grades, and a break from school.

By 2017, her uncle is president; “He’s a fascist. . . . This was America now.” Ten years prior, Mary brings a lawsuit against her grandfather’s estate as she’s disinherited.

By 2020, Mary—anonymously—checks into a trauma treatment center in Tucson, hates being away from daughter, Avary, but begins to feel relief from her traumas while growing up.

Her first book about the Trump family publishes in 2020 and a previously private person is forced out into “the real world.” Lawsuits were exchanged between Mary and family members.

Donald sues Mary for a hundred million dollars for defamation after she sues him for disinheritance. She laments, “there was no joy in the family my father grew up in besides the joy he himself possessed, which existed in abundance.”

Regarding book format, the centerfold contains 36 photos of the Trump families; however instead of a brief description of who’s who, the editor sometimes extracts full paragraphs from the text which the reader might feel to be a bit redundant.

At times, the text is jumpy and out of clear chronological order. This can confuse the reader as Mary slips from college to a more recent meeting with her racist aunt Maryanne, then back to graduate school times, and then back to present.

Overall, Who Could Ever Love You: A Family Memoir by Mary L. Trump, is a timely, sensitive, informative, and important memoir, particularly for those who are straddling the political fence of this critical election year—the story of a tortured soul who comes from a family of tortured souls, and the steps she takes to feel “normal.”