The most surprising revelations from Mary Trump’s tell-all book about the president

'He has no principles. None!'

The president attempted to block his niece's exposé (AP)

One week from today, Dr Mary L Trump’s controversial book, Too Much and Never Enough, will hit store shelves.

Dr Trump, a trained clinical psychologist who earned a master’s and a doctoral degree from Adelphi University, has authored a 211-page exposé of how the Trump family “created the world’s most dangerous man” — otherwise known as Donald John Trump, the 45th President of the United States.

President Trump and his brother Robert Trump have been trying to stop the book’s publication since last month, by filing lawsuits to enforce a confidentiality agreement concerning a dispute over the estate of their father (and the author’s grandfather), Fred Trump Sr. But a New York State judge has so far refused to block the book’s publisher, Simon and Schuster, from releasing it to stores.

Dr Trump has been estranged from Donald Trump for years, and is the first member of the president’s family to break ranks with him and the rest of her relatives by writing a book about them.

Here are some highlights taken from an advance copy of the book read by your correspondent:

Donald Trump’s sister, a future federal judge, did his college homework for him

While President Trump frequently boasts of his undergraduate degree from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Finance, he only ended up there after finishing the first two years of his undergraduate education at Fordham University, a half-hour drive from his parents’ Queens home.

As Dr Trump relates young Donald’s efforts to gain entry to the Ivy League school as a transfer student, she claims that despite the fact that his sister Maryanne did his homework for him, his grade point average placed him “far from the top of his class”.

He paid a fellow student to take the SAT for him

After noting that an obstacle to Donald’s desired transfer to Wharton was the fact that his sister Maryanne could not take tests for him, Dr Trump reveals that Donald solved the problem of the SAT (the most common US college entrance exam) by hiring a friend.

“To hedge his bets,” she writes, “he [Donald] enlisted Joe Shapiro, a smart kid with a reputation for being a good test taker, to take his SATs for him.”

His older sister isn’t a fan of Donald or his presidency

Early on in her manuscript, Dr Trump relates a conversation she had with her aunt, now-retired federal judge Maryanne Trump Barry, in which Barry, then still a circuit judge of the US Court of Appeals for the third circuit, dismissed his chances of winning the presidency.

“He’s a clown,” Barry said (according to her niece). “This will never happen.”

When Dr Trump asked her aunt what her uncle – merely a candidate for the presidency at the time – had accomplished on his own, the highly respected jurist replied: “Well, he has had five bankruptcies.”

Judge Barry, who retired from the bench amid an ethics investigation prompted by a New York Times report detailing the allegedly fraudulent methods her family used to avoid paying taxes, also objected to her brother invoking the name of her older brother (and the author’s father), Fred Trump Jr, to bolster his own anti-drug bona fides (the late Fred Trump Jr died of complications related to alcoholism).

According to the manuscript, Judge Barry told her niece that Donald was “using your father’s memory for political purposes”, adding that his doing so was “a sin, especially since Freddy “should have been the star of the family”.

And when then-president-elect Trump called his sister to ask how he was doing, she told him: “Not that good.”

Judge Trump Barry, a devout Catholic, doesn’t think much of Trump’s evangelical boosters — or his North Korea diplomacy

When a number of high-profile evangelical figures – including Jerry Falwell Jr – began endorsing Donald Trump in 2016, his sister, who converted to Catholicism more than 50 years ago, reportedly asked her niece: “What the f**k is wrong with them?”

“The only time Donald went to church was when the cameras were there. It’s mind-boggling,” she apparently said of her brother. “He has no principles. None!”

And as Donald Trump prepared to become the first American president to meet with a North Korean dictator, Judge Barry called the White House to leave a message for her brother: “Tell him his older sister called with a little sisterly advice. Learn from those who know what they’re doing. Stay away from Dennis Rodman. And leave his Twitter at home.”

According to Dr Trump, her aunt and uncle have not spoken much since then.

Diagnosing Donald Trump is impossible — especially in the White House

Dr Trump, a trained clinical psychologist, says her uncle does meet all nine criteria needed to be diagnosed as a narcissist. But she writes that his mental problems are far more complicated than mere narcissism.

“The fact is,” she explains, “Donald’s pathologies are so complex and his behaviors so often inexplicable that coming up with an accurate and comprehensive diagnosis would require a full battery of psychological and neuropsychological tests that he’ll never sit for.”

Moreover, she writes that trying to evaluate his day-to-day functioning would be “impossible” because “he is, in the West Wing, essentially institutionalised”.

Mary Trump says a second term for her uncle ‘would be the end of American democracy’

At the outset of the book, Dr Trump stresses that despite what her aunts and uncles might think, she did not write the book out of any desire for revenge or in an attempt to cash in on her uncle’s presidency.

“If either of those had been my intention,” she explains, “I would have written a book about our family years ago, when there was no way to anticipate that Donald would trade on his reputation as a serially bankrupt businessman and irrelevant reality show host to ascend to the White House; when it would have been safer because my uncle wasn’t in a position to threaten and endanger whistleblowers and critics.”

But “the events of the last three years” have “forced [her] hand,” she declares, adding that she “can no longer remain silent”.

“By the time this book is published, hundreds of thousands of American lives will have been sacrificed on the altar of Donald’s hubris and wilful ignorance. If he is afforded a second term, it would be the end of American democracy,” she warns.

“Donald, following the lead of my grandfather and with the complicity, silence, and inaction of his siblings, destroyed my father. I can’t let him destroy my country.”