President Donald Trump was emotionally abused as a child, the president’s niece Mary Trump claimed in her tell-all memoir.

Mary Trump, a clinical psychologist, wrote in Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man that the president’s father, Fred Trump Sr., hindered his “ability to develop and experience the entire spectrum of human emotion.”

“By limiting Donald’s access to his own feelings and rendering many of them unacceptable, Fred perverted his son’s perception of the world and damaged his ability to live in it,” Mary Trump wrote in the book, according to extracts released on Tuesday.

“Child abuse is, in some sense, the expectation of ‘too much’ or ‘not enough’. Donald directly experienced the ‘not enough’ in the loss of connection to his mother at a crucial development stage, which was deeply traumatic,” she added.

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She noted that Donald’s mother fell ill when he was two years old, leaving him with “total dependence on a caregiver (Fred Sr.) who also caused him terror.”

Mary Trump wrote that “love meant nothing” to Fred Trump Sr. and that his failure to make Donald “feel safe or loved” during this time would “scar him for life.”

“The personality traits that resulted – displays of narcissism, bullying, grandiosity – finally made my grandfather take notice but not in a way that ameliorated any of the horror that had come before,” she wrote.

White House deputy press secretary Sarah Matthews denied the allegations that his father was in any way abusive.

“The President describes the relationship he had with his father as warm and said his father was very good to him. He said his father was loving and not at all hard on him as a child,” Matthews told Business Insider.

The book, set to be released July 14, is still the subject of a legal dispute, with the Trump claiming it violates a 20-year-old non-disclosure agreement.

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Katherine Huggins

Article by Katherine Huggins