‘House of absolute horrors’: Mary Trump’s book reveals how Trump family gave rise to a ‘sociopath’

In a new book, Mary Trump — the president’s niece — describes Donald Trump as a “sociopath” who grew up in a dysfunctional family that fostered his greed and cruelty. Donald Trump’s younger brother, Robert, is seeking to block the sale of the book on the grounds that it violates a confidentiality agreement, but publisher Simon & Schuster says 600,000 copies of the book have already been distributed ahead of its July 14 publishing date. Investigative journalist David Cay Johnston, who has reported on Trump for three decades, says the book is “very, very important” and helps to answer how Trump got to the White House.

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: So, let’s talk about that. Let’s talk about Donald Trump’s niece, Mary Trump, a clinical psychologist, and her new book, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man. Mary Trump’s father was Fred Trump Jr. He was Donald Trump’s older brother. Fred Jr. died of a heart attack in 1981 after a struggle with alcohol and addiction.

Mary Trump wrote that after Donald Trump’s inauguration, quote, “the smallest thing — seeing Donald’s face or hearing my own name, both of which happened dozens of times a day — took me back to the time when my father had withered and died beneath the cruelty and contempt of my grandfather. I had lost him when he was only 42 and I was 16. The horror of Donald’s cruelty was being magnified by the fact that his acts were now official U.S. policy, affecting millions of people,” she wrote. Continue reading.