Americans are heading to the polls today for the U.S. midterm elections. Since returning to the White House, Donald Trump has amassed an estimated $2.2 billion, including royalties from his own branded meme coin. Meanwhile, as the president and his family have grown wealthier, voters have struggled with rising living costs. The war with Iran - which Donald Trump launched last February together with - has fueled inflation by driving up global oil prices, pushing gasoline prices higher and increasing the cost of diesel, a crucial fuel for supply chains and farmers.
Donald Trump won the 2024 presidential election because millions of swing voters were taken in by his economic promises, particularly his pledge to reverse the surge in prices that followed the COVID-19 pandemic. If the polls are anything to go by, many of those voters now feel betrayed. Public approval of Trump's handling of the economy is at an exceptionally low level. As Donald Trump himself might say, it is like nothing anyone has ever seen before.
Trump has urged voters to imagine that he is personally on the ballot in these midterm elections. Given his historically low approval ratings, his political opponents can only hope that voters take him at his word today.
Huub Drenth
The Rest Is Politics, 19 October 2026.
Family affairs
Mary Lea Trump, born in 1965, is a niece of Donald Trump and the daughter of Fred Trump Jr., the eldest son of businessman Fred Trump Sr. Her father died of an alcohol-related heart attack when she was 16, an event that influenced her understanding of family relationships and trauma.
Mary received degrees in English literature from Tufts University and Columbia University before earning a PhD in clinical psychology from Adelphi University. She has worked in psychiatric research, taught graduate-level psychology courses, contributed to academic publications, and founded The Trump Coaching Group.
Her relationship with the Trump family became particularly strained following disputes over her grandfather's estate. After Fred Trump Sr. died in 1999, Mary and her brother Fred challenged his will, which had left them relatively small inheritances.*1 During the legal proceedings, Mary gained access to family financial documents and later provided information for a major New York Times investigation into Donald Trump's finances, published in 2018.
The reckoning
Mary Trump became widely known in 2020 following the publication of her bestselling book, Too Much and Never Enough, how my family created the world's most dangerous man, in which she described her experiences within the Trump family and offered a psychological interpretation of her uncle Donald's behaviour. She subsequently published The Reckoning (2021), in which she argues that much current discord in the United States is the result of its "original sin of slavery" and the persistence of racism and white supremacy, a divide that her uncle Donald has aggravated and exploited. Her third book, Who Could Ever Love You (2024), is a memoir about her father's troubled relationship with Fred Trump Sr. and the family conflicts that shaped his life.
Mary has also been an outspoken critic of Donald Trump. In 2020, she publicly called for his resignation, questioning his leadership, and following the January 6, 2021, Capitol attack, argued that he should be prevented from holding public office again.
Overall, Mary Trump is known for combining her professional background in psychology with personal experiences of the Trump family to write about family dysfunction, inherited trauma, financial disputes, and American politics.
Source: Wikipedia
*1 Fred Trump Sr.'s will left the bulk of his estate, in equal shares, to his surviving children, while each of his grandchildren were left $200,000. In 1981, when Mary's father predeceased him, Fred Sr.'s lawyers had recommended amending his will, to leave Fred Trump Jr.'s children Mary and Fred III larger shares than the grandchildren with living parents, writing that "Given the size of your estate, this is tantamount to disinheriting them. You may wish to increase their participation in your estate to avoid ill will in the future." However, Fred Trump Sr. refused to do so.














