Donald Trump beaten to the book punch by niece Mary

When it comes to post-presidential memoirs, it looks like Donald Trump will be beaten to the punch by his niece Mary Trump.

Mary Trump. Picture: Peter Serling

When it comes to post-presidential memoirs, it looks like Donald Trump will be beaten to the punch by his niece Mary Trump, who is set to release a second damning book about her uncle.

Dr Trump, a clinical psychologist with an interest in post-traumatic stress disorder, has written The Reckoning: America’s Trauma and Finding a Way to Heal.

She will argue that Mr Trump, the brother of her late father Fred Trump Jr, turned all of America into a “macro version of my malignantly dysfunctional family’’.

The book will be published in July, with Allen & Unwin securing the Australian distribution rights. It follows the author’s best-selling 2020 book about the Trump family, Too Much and Never Enough.

That book was highly critical of Mr Trump and that will continue in the follow-up, which will accuse him of, among other things, mishandling the coronavirus pandemic.

Announcing the book deal, Dr Trump said her uncle “for four years inflicted a series of traumas on the American people, targeting anyone he perceived as the ‘other’ as an enemy’’.

“Women were discounted and derided, the sick were dismissed as weak and unworthy of help, immigrants and minorities were ­demonised and discriminated against, and money was elevated above all else.

“He demonstrated his stunning lack of concern for the American people with his wilful mishandling of the pandemic and the ensuing economic collapse. In short, he transformed our country into a macro version of my malignantly dysfunctional family.’’

While the book will put a lot of blame on Mr Trump, it will also look back to past wrongs. The publisher’s blurb says the author will chart “America’s national trauma, rooted in its long history of slavery and civil rights abuses’’.

That trauma was “dramatically exacerbated by recent events and the Trump administration’s corrupt and immoral policies’’ and led to a national PTSD that “a new leader alone cannot fix’’.

A&U publishing director Tom Gilliatt said Dr Trump’s personal and professional insights would make the book important in the US and beyond.

Mr Trump has written, often with the aid of ghostwriters, about 20 books, all published before he became president. His 1987 debut, The Art of the Deal, topped the New York Times bestseller list.