MARY LEA TRUMP is an American psychologist, businessperson, and author born on this date. She is a niece of the former President whose name shall not be mention. 

Her 2020 book about him and the family, Too Much and Never Enough, sold nearly one million copies on the day of its release.

Mary Lea Trump was born to Linda Lee Clapp and Fred Trump Jr. , a commercial jet pilot with TWA. Her older brother is Frederick Trump III. Trump graduated from the Ethel Walker School in 1983. She studied English literature at Tufts University, earned a masters degree in English literature at Columbia University, for which she studied the works of William Faulkner and his dysfunctional fictional Compson family. She holds a PhD in clinical psychology from the Derner Institute of Advanced Psychological Studies at Adelphi University.

Trump’s father died in September 1981 at the age of 42 from a heart attack caused by alcoholism; she was sixteen. He had undergone surgical procedures before he finally succumbed to the disease and died alone in Queens Hospital Center in Jamaica Hills. She was at school, watching a film in the auditorium with other kids when a school teacher pulled her aside and made her call home. She found out after a series of phone calls that her father had died. Mary was not able to see her father’s body despite her request to do so and had to be content with saying her goodbye to a closed coffin at the funeral.

In her book, Trump relates a time when her grandmother Mary Anne MacLeod Trump referred to Elton John as a “faggot”, and Trump decided not to come out as gay and tell her that she was going to marry a woman, with whom she would later raise a daughter. She has since divorced, and lives on Long Island, New York, New York, with her daughter.

Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man is a tell-all book written by Trump published in July 2020, by Simon & Schuster. According to Trump’s note at the beginning of the book, all accounts in the book come either from her own memory or from recorded conversations with family, friends and others. Other sources are legal, financial and family documents and email correspondence as well as the New York Times investigative article done by David Barstow, Susanne Craig, and Russ Buettner. The book details how the author was the anonymous source who revealed Trump family tax returns to The New York Times; the reporting won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize. A legal battle over whether the book could be published was waged in New York’s judicial system, with an appellate judge allowing Simon & Schuster to publish the book. The book sold close to one million copies on its first day of sales. 

Trump’s second book, The Reckoning: Our Nation’s Trauma and Finding a Way to Heal, was published by St. Martin’s Press in August 2021. Drawing from American history, Trump posits that the country has suffered trauma from its inception because of its inclusion of systemic racism and its failure to address the existence of white supremacy, especially by Republicans in recent decades.

She supported Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential election.