Commonwealth club produces over 500 programs annually even during a pandemic head on over to commonwealthclub. Org slash mms for more michelle meow show programming or Commonwealth Club dot org for future programs podcasts videos of past events and also the opportunity to support the work of the club. If youre joining us live on youtube use the chat box feature to send us your questions for our speakers. Its now my pleasure to introduce to you our speakers today. Mary trump is a clinical psychologist with a phd from the Derner Institute of advanced psychological studies, Adelphi University her first book too much and never enough how my family created the most dangerous man was an International Bestseller and provided deep insight into americas 45th president. Shes here today to talk about many things but most importantly her second and newest book the reckoning our nations trauma and finding a way to heal our moderator today is molly jong fass. Who is the editor at large at the daily beast and also host of the new abnormal podcasts. Lets get our program started. Enjoy the program. Lets welcome molly and mary hi mary. Hey molly. Hi everybody. Its great to be here. Its very fun to get to interview you one day after i got you sued. Im sorry, you know, i was actually telling somebody the other day that i really wish donald would sue me. Because it would help book cells and turns out youre the reason i got sued all along. So thank you. I mean, its you know, my editor at the daily beast sent me a text. It was like yo molly and i wrote back whats going on harry and he was like youre in this lawsuit. And i was just delighted but then my husband whos like an adult was like oh my god, you know. Oh, what does this mean . You know, its having a heart attack, but you know, i mean it is the i think the lawyer misspelled her own name at one point in the im not sure but there were i think shes not shes a very kind of trumpy lawyer. I think her office is in a strip mall or something, but just so youre aware if i do indeed have to pay a hundred million dollars. Youre going to have to pay your fair share. Just so quickly. Lets go. I mean im good for it. I mean i have spokes here. I can probably sell them. You im kidding by lamb certainly not good for it. Um, but so the i want to ask you i have a lot of questions for you obviously, but the biggest question is what first lets just talk this this lawsuit is a state lawsuit too. Its not a federal lawsuit and its its like they they did in westchester or some not westchester, but upstairs county duchess county, which i think is is central new york. Yes slightly strange. Thats my uncle rob lived there. So it is a little strange because he doesnt live there anymore, right . Um, okay, so lets get to the book. The book called the reckoning. Just came out and i want to talk to you first. Im very proud of myself for having it right because you often im very disorganized, um for someone to talk to you about the first chapter, which is like incredibly autobiographical in a way that i really appreciate. Can you talk to me about right talk a little bit about that first chapter and how you came to right . So personally because i know how i think we both are able to write about our families but not right about ourselves and and this is a departure for you. Yeah, you know the first book obviously had a particular agenda attached to it and it really wasnt a memoir. In a way, and it certainly wasnt my memoir. So a lot of things that i might have been interested in writing about werent really relevant to the task at hand and you know in large part the same is true of this book, which is not at all a memoir. It really has nothing to do with my family. However as you and i have discussed over the course of the last year covid has touched all of us it has traumatized a lot of people. It is retraumatized a lot of people and for probably obvious reasons. I took it really personally because my uncle is the one who is responsible for for this mass suffering and the mass death, which was kind of hard to live with but i also take it personally because i have ptsd i came into covid already having a complex btsd which just means its something that happened over. Its trauma that occurred over a long period of time. And thats what a lot of us have been feeling for the last year and a half and i felt that. It was important for me to be honest about that for a couple of reasons one because it it gave me an in to the experiences people might be having that other people wouldnt have you know, i understand it not just clinically but personally. And we do Mental Health and Mental Illness really badly in this country, you know, we treat Mental Health like its a luxury and Mental Illness like its some still like some kind of moral failing and theyre still stigmatized. And that is that gets in the way of our ability to heal so i felt you know if i can be straight with people about my own experiences and that helps. Normalize the experience for some people then im happy to do that because we are all suffering so much, you know. I mean, i i know you and i have bonded about this before but im sober since i was 19, so and i love to talk about it because i feel like talking about being sober is a way to help other people and i didnt know that people could get sober until i saw you know, i mean it would have helped me a lot to know that there were so people got sober at 19 and stayed sober. So i agree. I think its really wonderful when you can share your experience to help other people. Talk to me though about the put do you go to hot . Its not cottonwood, right . It is i was just dont think i dont say that in the book. No, but i was like, you know one of the great things about being a sober is, you know, im trying to guess the rehab i was like mixed with aa people, you know, it has to be. Um, but and but so did you what did did the program work . Did you feel like the program worked . You know, i wasnt there long enough i went. I went into treatment two different times for various reasons, so the first time around i was there for three weeks and it should have been three months probably. But i had to go back to new york and then after about a month or so i was unraveling again and knew i needed to put the brakes on it, so i went back to tucson. And it was a it was an amazing experience. I wouldnt trade it for anything. Unfortunately. Its an inordinately expensive and most its out of the reach of most people which is why our government needs to do better funding a treatments for peoples Mental Health issues. But i broke my foot like three days before i came home, right so my list of things that were was going to help keep me contained and motivated. I got thrown out the window because i wasnt going to be hobbling into manhattan on crutches, you know to help Syrian Refugees or whatever. It was i was planning on doing so that was that kind of got in the way of my healing but on the other hand if i hadnt broken my foot. I would never have im pretty sure i would not have. Cooperated with the New York Times. Yeah, i and i wouldnt have written the book and we wouldnt be having this conversation. So let should we talk more about the book or should we talk about the New York Times . Um were gonna go were gonna do both. But yeah, i mean the New York Times since we weve set up the segue. Lets go there because its relevant and theyre getting sued by donald too for a hundred million dollars, which is that the only amount he knows. I think it may be its just all all he has i dont know but hes like there other amounts of money. Yeah, its you think hed go bigger, right or during i mean, does it need to be even like i dont okay. So yes continue though. Yes. Um, so the this lawsuit besides being completely frivolous and its you could say its probably retaliatory too because im suing him. And in fact, the lawsuit is in the same county so for various reasons. And the i dont know if its a bad thing. I mean, i guess its a good thing but it just underscores like how shoddy he is. You know, its the worst reasoned. Most poorly written thing that you you could be subjected to and its so dramatic and silly and unserious. That it just its infuriating that people like him are allowed to game the system and use resources that could be used for much more important things simply as a way to avoid and evade responsibility. You know, this is just a stalling tactic. Im guessing well what some of the reporting i read said that it accused you of stealing documents that had actually been given to you. And smuggling them. You know, its its not cuban cigars. Its its documents that yes, were given to me in discovery right during yet another lawsuit 20 years ago because as i recently said, thats how my family communicates we sue each other lots of good love language. In their family it is if that happens when money is the only currency so but you know, i mean there are fan. I mean a lot of these new york families. Have they have older patriarchs who try to screw the younger kids out of stuff. I mean ive had cousins where this you know, things like that. Its not so unusual, but the i think the the frequency of the trump familys you know, its probably you know. Also the presidency im sorry also him being president. Yeah, thats a that still gives me the chills. I mean do i think so why so i want to just go back circle back for a second on the tax stuff . I it strikes me that you really did a huge service and that also by suing you he is actually confirming that all the documents that he said were fake are real. Yes. Yeah, i again it. Its amazing. How much of their brief is about . The success of my book the its just quite incredible it quotes my book, you know. And its just doing me a favor kind of and it is its admitting my my lawyer the brilliant Robbie Kaplan summed it up best basically saying, you know that in essence this lawsuit is donald saying you know we need to shut her up because shes revealing the truth about what we did and we need to keep in place the document that prevents her from talking about all the crimes we can its it is i mean, it really is a confirmation that the guy is pretty intricate and its the same thing with the my Fraud Lawsuit against them which alleges they stole quite a large sum of money from me after my dad died when i was 16, and he was 42 even though they were my trustees at the time. They dont argue that they didnt commit fraud. They say that theres a statute of limitations thats passed. So its the same kind of thing. Sort of mad that he the rnc didnt have to buy hundreds of copies of your book. You know like with don jr. Like i feel like a residual hostility like your book actually became a bestseller and no had to buy all the copies. Yeah, and listen, i im happy people bought it of course, and i hope it it served a purpose and people found it useful. In fact, that is one of the gratifying things a lot of people have said that they recognized their own families in it and it helped them feel validated or whatever, but the fact that my book sold in a day more copies than his first book sold in 30 years. Its pretty cool. Im now lets talk about this book because which im so pleased with myself for having it. Im just gonna put it up here all the time. Um, but it does its really an interesting book because you talk about yourself and then you go into the history of america. Yeah. Going it takes a turn. Because when when i started thinking about the next book in fact you and i spoke about this at the time. It was last october, i think. It was much more about the concerns. We were going to be facing when we started emerging from covid if we ever did, you know, i really believe that once we started. Coming out of our apartments and houses. We were all going to be confronted with things that we hadnt been able to confront because as i say you cant deal with your trauma while youre being traumatized and you know, whether its the ptsd or depression anxiety Substance Abuse disorders serious mental psychiatric disorders, like schizophrenia stress disorder all that stuff and and then i realized that cant really write about that in an effective way one because it was a big question mark into its thats a policy thing that you know in that needs to be dealt with through policy. So we were then. At this incredible point of crisis. We were in the second wave of covid. We had this serious economic crisis ongoing. And deep political crisis we were a month away from an election that was uncertain and the fact that there was uncertainty was mindblowing to me that at that point a 250,000 americans were dead because donald and yet there was a better than 40 chance that he might get four more years in the oval office. Um, so i thought it was just extraordinary me that this country got to this place. In what seemed like a very short period of time how how did this happen . And i realized that just as with trauma um in general and ptsd in particular in order to get through it. Because you you cant sure btsd, but you can learn how to manage it in order to get to that point. You need to face not just what happened to you, but the feelings. You felt while it was happening. And thats why either trauma gets suspended in time because it never gets processed and the feeling gets split off from it. And you cant get past it. It will continue to affect you. On a daytoday basis unless you go back and you do that hard work and its a terrible thing to ask somebody to do quite honestly, and i really we need to do that as a country. Yeah, because one were were in this amazing amount of trauma now, but we always have been and its never been addressed and the white people who committed the trauma or sorry committed the atrocities that led to trauma have never acknowledged their role let alone a tone for it and i really think thats partially because of major things one is the fact that White Supremacy always has been in continues to be operative in america and to we never hold powerful white men accountable for anything, right and i think that those two things lead us directly to donald john trump. It is incredible to me. That so many people are like and trump is going to go to jail and youre gonna see and and meanwhile, i see no imminent jailing. No it i mean do you right well . I mean, its its a terrible indictment. Of where we are because it suggests that we havent evolved at all and and if you consider that robert e lee who was the greatest trader to this country. He owned and tortured other human beings. And he was directly responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. Um, not only did he not get imprisoned. He went on to lead a very successful life as a University President and when he died the university was named after him. Washington and lee university, i think its still called that and in 1973 or four. President gerald ford pardoned him yeah, so, why would we expect . A powerful white man who has committed crimes with impunity and and committed other transgressions with impunity for his entire life right and been allowed to fail upwards so spectacularly, why would we expect that . There would be justice and that is a very sad commentary on not just where we are but where we might be headed. One of my yeah, i mean it seems it seems likely and you know, of course were talking about robert e lee who is one of trumps favorite generals and who i recently learned via whatever trumps little message. App or whatever it is what he publishes those sort of paragraphs or he talks about was actually very good general though, of course, he wasnt but no. I mean and he would have kicked in afghanistan. Apparently the guy is like but a friend of mine called me yesterday and was like trump is going to win trump is gonna run run again and hes gonna win. What do you think . I mean, its like the anxiety that all of us have even the words for years away. I think it depends on a few things. Im much less sanguine about it than i was in November December of last year because at the time there was no way to know how far although i suppose. I should have i swear. I feel like Charlie Brown in the football far too often because im a democrat, but there was no way to know how far they were going to take it in terms of allowing him to spread the big lie that the election was stolen from him to the extent that they were going to repeat the big lie and fail to allow President Biden president elect bidens team to get access. To very vital materials because remember thousands of people were still dying every day from covid and donald decided that it wasnt of interest to him anymore to the extent that it ever was and there was no way to know that there was going to be an insurrection incited by donald against his own government. So i felt at the time. That he would go the way of jimmy carter and george h. W. Bush and become irrelevant and his crushing defeat because look he didnt lose as badly as he should have right and its demoralizing that 12 million more people voted for him in 2020 than did in 2016. However, he did lose by eight million votes right and probably more humiliating than that is he couldnt blame the republicans because they outperformed expectation. I did much better. Then they should have so he cant blame them for his loss because they did pretty well. So i figured he was never gonna go over that narcissistic injury injury because as you know, theres nothing worse than losing in my family. You may as well just jump off cliff. Now im not so sure because as continues to happen and it never ceases to amaze me everything seems to be breaking his way. Crazy, yeah, it is. I mean i do think like i feel like with the republicans they kidnap themselves and hold themselves hostage like they had a moment to get rid of trump. They could have done it and they decided like oh, no dont want to alienate the base. Oh, no, what will you know, like dont want to and now i mean trump is finding is trying to find a challenger to go after mcconnell. Which i mean is really fun for me as a democrat but like they they should have known this guy was not you know, hes not there for republican. I mean whatever republican policies are anymore, i guess tax cuts for rich people and racism. I mean, i guess he is there for the race. Okay. All right. No, never mind. He is there for the Republican Values because those are the new Republican Values but like right but i mean, it strikes me that he has the party had sort of let trump transform them. Honestly, i dont think he transformed them. I think he just reveale