Page 167 - Too Much and Never Enough - Mary L. Trump

My aunt has always insisted that she’d earned her position on the bench entirely on her own merits, and she shot back at him, “If you say that one more time, I will level you.”
But it was an empty threat. Although Maryanne had prided herself on being the only person on the planet Donald ever listened to, those days were long past, which was illustrated not long after, in June 2018. On the eve of Donald’s first summit with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, Maryanne called the White House and left a message with his secretary: “Tell him his older sister called with a little sisterly advice. Prepare. Learn from those who know what they are doing. Stay away from Dennis Rodman. And leave his Twitter at home.”
He ignored all of it. The Politico headline the following day read “Trump Says Kim Meeting Will Be About ‘Attitude,’ Not Prep Work.” If Maryanne had ever had any sway over her little brother, it was gone now. Aside from the requisite birthday call, they didn’t speak much after that.
While they were working on the article, the Times reporters invited me to join them for a tour of my grandfather’s properties. On the morning of January 10, 2018, they picked me up in David’s SUV, still adorned with its antlers and red nose, at the Jamaica train station. We started at the Highlander, where I’d grown up, and over the course of the day we traversed snow drifts and patches of ice in an effort to visit as much of the Trump empire as possible.
After nine hours we still hadn’t managed to see all of it. I had traded in my crutches for a cane by then but was still exhausted, mentally and physically, when I got home. I tried to make sense of what I’d seen. I’d always known that my grandfather owned buildings, but I’d had no idea just how many. More disturbing, my father had apparently owned 20 percent of some of the buildings I’d never heard of before.
On October 2, 2018, the New York Times published an almost 14,000- word article, the longest in its history, revealing the long litany of potentially fraudulent and criminal activities my grandfather, aunts, and uncles had engaged in.
Through the extraordinary reporting of the Times team, I learned more about my family’s finances than I’d ever known.