Trump’s estranged niece, Mary Trump, has reacted to Trump’s hospitalization for covid-19 by alleging the US President and his family have always viewed illness as “a display of unforgivable weakness.”
Mary Trump who is suing the family for money and recently wrote a new book criticizing her uncle and her family, told NPR’s Michel Martin that illness was seen as “unacceptable” by Donald Trump and his father, Fred Trump. “Which sounds incredibly cruel, but happens to be true.”
According to Mary, whose father Fred Trump Jr died of alcoholism, her family had a very toxic dynamic where they saw illness as a form of weakness.
There have been more than 7 million cases of coronavirus in the U.S. and more than 200,000 people have died and Mary feels her family’s thinking pattern is the reason why so many people in the country have died.
“That’s why [the U.S. is] in the horrible place we’re in, because he cannot admit to the weakness of being ill or of other people being ill,” Mary Trump says.
“In my family [it] was treated like a moral failing,” she says.
“First of all, what’s fascinating is I had no idea that my great-grandfather had died during the 1918 flu pandemic from the flu until I read about it somewhere a couple of years ago. And Donald also seems to have forgotten about that, which is incredible, considering it’s a pretty fascinating historical detail in the family.”
“But, you know, it depended on who it was. And it was also driven by the fact that my grandfather was never sick. Ever.”
“Until in the late ’80s, he had a tumor removed, but then he was completely fine. And then many years later when he was suffering from Alzheimer’s, he had a hip replacement but wasn’t really aware of much of what was going on.”
S”o between that and my grandfather’s adherence to Norman Vincent Peale’s power of positive thinking, which he took to such an extreme level that it was toxic because it left no room for expressions of what he considered negativity of any kind, you know, sadness, despair, being physically ill.”
“So my grandmother, with her osteoporosis, would come home from the hospital and need more care and physical therapy. And my grandfather was unable to tolerate it. You know, he’d be in the room with her. And as soon as she started showing that she was in physical pain, he would say “everything’s great, right. Everything’s great.” And he’d leave the room.”
“With my dad, it was worse, as you can imagine, because the alcoholism was considered his fault.”
When she was asked by NPR if she has heard anything through her family about Trump’s medical care since he contracted Covid-19, she replied;
“I have not and unfortunately, it seems like we can’t exactly rely upon the information we’re getting directly from the medical team at Walter Reed, which is unfortunate because we really do need as much accurate information as possible in a case like this.”
