It begins, like so much with Donald Trump, with an image: a little boy, blond, well cared for, in the large house in Queens. A son from a good home – and yet, according to his niece Mary L. Trump, behind this façade grew an emotional void that extends to the very center of American politics. The man who, now 78 years old, floods the country with decrees and threats, has never truly emerged from the moment that shaped him – a moment that occurred when he was just two and a half years old.
The absence of the mother. The presence of the shadow.
Mary Trump, clinical psychologist, author, and one of the sharpest voices of familial resistance against her uncle, describes in an interview with Times Radio the childhood of the US president as the primal scene of coldness. His mother, Mary Anne MacLeod Trump, was seriously ill – physically and psychologically. For months, she was unreachable to little Donald – neither in her arms, nor in her gaze, nor in her voice. A mother who could not hold. And a father who stepped into that void.
But that father was Fred Trump – a man whom Mary now unhesitatingly describes as a "sociopath." Strict, controlling, incapable of empathy – and yet the only reference point that remained for the little boy during that crucial phase. It was, says Mary Trump, "the most dangerous constellation for a child" – the absence of warmth and the overpresence of hardness.
A heart without hold
What grows from such a lack? According to Mary, a person grows who does not believe that love exists – a person who perceives closeness as a threat, weakness as a flaw, dependency as a disgrace. A child who was never safe becomes a man who controls security. And one who never experienced affection becomes someone who uses others – to avoid being used himself.
"He became hard. He became a bully. And he convinced himself that he didn’t need anything from anyone," Mary says about her uncle. But this is not a moral diagnosis – it is a structural one. One who never experienced himself as lovable will confuse power with worth – and loyalty with love.
The sociological president.
Donald Trump, according to Mary Trump, is not an accident but a mirror. He embodies what happens when emotional neglect meets socioeconomic privilege – when wounded children grow up and come to dominate entire systems. His presidency, seen in this light, is not a political event but a biographical tragedy – with global reach.
For while the world debates, protests, or resigns, Trump acts like a child still yearning for recognition – and at the same time punishes those who remind him that he was never loved. The world becomes the stage of his self-defense. The institutions become tools of his avoidance. And the public becomes the projection surface of an ego that knows no security other than control.
Fred Trump's legacy
Mary Trump’s conclusion is clear: the true architect of the catastrophe is not Donald, but Fred. It was the father who deformed the son – not through blows, but through coldness. Not through punishment, but through manipulation. A man who saw only a tool in the child – and whose failure he took as a personal insult.
"My grandfather never healed Donald – he broke him further," says Mary. And she adds: "Anyone who is broken so early and never finds someone to see the cracks will live henceforth in service of their pain."
A country under the logic of deprivation.
As Trump now enacts new border regimes – such as the freeze on international student visas and intensified social media checks – it becomes clear how deeply the personal reaches into the political. What began as emotional deprivation has expanded into the geopolitical architecture of an entire era.
And yet, in the end, perhaps only one simple insight remains: A child who never felt safe now governs a world that no longer feels safe itself.
A president as the product of withdrawal.
A nation as the stage of his repetition.
And a story that might have been prevented – with a different hand on his shoulder.
English 
German 
