President Trump’s niece, Mary Trump, admits in her new book that she was the source who gave Mr. Trump’s tax information to The New York Times in 2019, saying the moment she handed over the documents to journalists was “the happiest I’d felt in months.”
“It wasn’t enough for me to volunteer at an organization helping Syrian refugees,” she writes in the book. “I had to take Donald down.”
The book, titled “Too Much and Never Enough,” is scheduled to be published Tuesday. A New York state appeals judge has lifted a temporary restraining order against its publication, after the president’s brother Robert initially got a lower court to block its release.
In numerous excerpts circulating ahead of the book’s release, Ms. Trump acknowledges that she harbors ill will against the president. A clinical psychologist, Ms. Trump blames the president for the death of her father, Fred Trump Jr. The president’s older brother died of a heart attack complicated by alcoholism in 1981 at age 42.
“Donald, following the lead of my grandfather and with the complicity, silence, and inaction of his siblings, destroyed my father,” Ms. Trump writes. “I can’t let him destroy my country.”
She claims that the president, when he was a high school student in Queens, cheated on his SAT college entrance test by paying someone else to take the exam for him. Cheating, she said, is a “way of life” for the president.
White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said the book is filled with “ridiculous, absurd allegations that have absolute no bearing in truth.”
She told reporters, “It is a book of falsehoods.”
White House counselor Kellyanne Conway questioned the media’s emphasis on Ms. Trump’s role as a psychologist, saying that he president is not her patient but her uncle.
“Family matters are family matters,” Mrs. Conway told reporters.
She also said the president reveres the memory of his late brother.
“I know firsthand the way the president feels about his brother Fred Trump Jr. … and he has been very public about his commitment to ending drug abuse in our nation because of the way he witnesses the struggles with alcoholism,” Mrs. Conway said. “He’s always complimentary of his brother privately and publicly.”
The book remains the subject of a legal challenge. Publisher Simon & Schuster moved up the publication date amid the court battle.
Robert Trump, the president’s other brother, is arguing in court that Ms. Trump, 55, is violating a 2001 nondisclosure agreement with him, the president and their sister, retired federal appeals court Judge Maryanne Trump Barry.
The NDA resulted from a court case over the estate of the siblings’ father, real-estate developer Fred Trump Sr.
Ms. Trump calls the book “the story of the most visible and powerful family in the world.” “And I am the only Trump who is willing to tell it,” she writes.
Another “tell-all” book about the first family is due out on Sept. 1. Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, who was viewed as a confidante of first lady Melania Trump, is set to publish a book titled “Melania and Me” that is expected to be critical of Mrs. Trump.
• Dave Boyer can be reached at dboyer@washingtontimes.com.
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