Page 133 - Too Much and Never Enough - Mary L. Trump

always went. More than twenty-five years later, my grandmother chose Ivana and Blaine, without factoring in how the decision might affect me and my brother.
Now Donald said, “I think we made a big mistake continuing to support your mother. It might have been better if we’d cut her off after a couple of years and she had to stand on her own two feet.”
The idea that anyone else was entitled to money or support he or she wasn’t obviously earning was impossible for Donald and my grandfather to fathom. Nothing my mother had received as the former wife of the oldest son of a very wealthy family, who had raised two of Fred and Mary Trump’s grandchildren almost single-handedly, had come from my grandfather, and it certainly hadn’t come from Donald, yet they both acted as if it did.
Donald probably thought he was being kind. There used to be a spark of that in him. He did once give me $100 to get my car out of impound. And after my father died, Donald was the only member of my family, other than my grandmother, who included me in anything. But his kindness had become so warped over time—through lack of use and Fred’s discouragement—that what he considered kindness would have been practically unrecognizable to the rest of us. I didn’t know it at the time, but when we had that conversation, Donald was still receiving his $450,000 allowance from the banks every month.
One morning as I sat across from Donald at his desk going over the details of our trip to Mar-a-Lago (Donald thought it would help me with the book if I saw his Palm Beach mansion firsthand) the phone rang. It was Philip Johnson.
As they chatted, Donald suddenly seemed to get an idea. He put the phone on speaker. “Philip!” he said. “You have to talk to my niece. She’s writing my next book. You can tell her all about the Taj.”
I introduced myself, and Philip suggested I come to his house in Connecticut the following week to discuss the book.
After Donald finished the call, he said to me, “That’ll be fantastic. Philip is a great guy. I hired him to design the porta-co-share for the Taj Mahal. It’s tremendous—I’d never seen anything like it.”