On Friday, a family member of President Donald Trump warned that Trump’s busted sense of empathy is making “every single one of us worse off” as the nation hurdles toward chaos and cruelty.
“Empathy is being attacked as something that is not necessary, that is somehow antithetical to human greatness, when of course the opposite is true,” said Trump’s niece Mary Trump, a psychologist with a podcast. “Our ability to be empathetic is one of the greatest things about being human, and the inability to be empathetic is an egregious failing.”
But in Trumpland, she said the idea of having no empathy whatsoever catches on because her uncle “wields his cruelty with such Joy, and he loves humiliating people who are less powerful than he is,” she said, citing Trump’s recent attacks on an adult victim of abuse who is Trump’s target because she’s a Democrat.
But how did “Donald become such a creature?” she asked. Look to Trump’s father, Fred Trump, who Mary described as a paragon of cruelty himself.
Mary then referenced her own father, Donald Trump’s brother, Fred, Jr., a passionate TWA commercial pilot in the 1960s and a boat captain. Mary said her father turned to piloting after father Fred Trump made it clear that he would inherit none of the family’s real estate empire.
Fred suffered from severe alcoholism and smoked two packs of cigarettes a day, leading to open-heart surgery in the late 1970s. During recovery, Fred Jr., was forced to move back home with his neglectful father, Fred. But she said he sobered up, stopped smoking, and petitioned the FAA to renew his pilot's license to reclaim his dream.
But instead of supporting his recovery, Trump Sr. forced Fred to return to the family company, not as an executive, but on a maintenance crew, fixing toilets, painting, and landscaping. Mary added that this was done in front of former subordinates to intentionally humiliate him. She added that the systematic degradation broke Fred Jr.'s spirit. He relapsed into heavy drinking and smoking with no intervention from his siblings — including Donald Trump, who personally benefited from his displacement. Mary’s father passed away, destroyed and neglected, in the early 1980s.
“But here's the thing,” said Mary Trump. “He was destroyed for the things that made him the best of them. He was destroyed for the things that make all of us better as people: his empathy, his kindness, his sensitivity, his generosity, and his passions.”
“Donald is also a destroyed human being,” Mary Trump added, “but he is a destroyed human being that was of great use to his father. And he is a destroyed human being because he lacks all of the things my father had that led to his destruction.”
“So, what kind of person stands up and supports a man who paid for this despicable video in which an estranged mother … to say she's a liar, even though we know there's documentary evidence that [candidate] Amy Acton was indeed [violated] over 30 years ago by her stepfather, and her estranged mother supported it?” demanded Mary Trump. “That kind of person is Donald Trump. He is the most powerful person in the United States of America … and every single one of us is worse off because of his brand of cruelty, and his love of humiliation.”
“It is his complete and utter lack of empathy that make all of us less,” Mary Trump concluded.
