The role that Donald Trump’s mother (pictured in 1995 to his right; his sister Elizabeth is at left) has played and continues to play in his life is the subject of a Politico profile
President Donald Trump has, in past interviews, long gushed about his father. He has previously said that Fred Trump instilled in him a desire to be a ‘killer’ and a ‘king’ in the pursuit of individualistic success.
About his mother, who died in 2000 at the age of 88, he has said barely anything.
Why he says comparatively nothing about Mary Anne MacLeod, a Scottish woman who came to the United States at 18 with hardly any money in her pocket, is the subject of a Politico profile of the mysterious woman.
Among the synthesized analysis of her life is a tidbit from 1990, when the future president was in a vastly different position than the one he finds himself in today.
Trump was going through a very public divorce with his first wife, Ivana, a conflict ready-made for the tabloids. Allegations that he was discreetly liaising with Marla Maples, his future second wife, fueled the fire of the spectacle.
And Trump’s real estate dealings were tanking, thrusting the bullish mogul further and further into debt.
Mary, by then nearly 80, had been thrust into the paparazzi’s spotlight herself, due to her son’s conduct.
She asked her future ex-daughter-in-law, per Vanity Fair, a rather hard-hitting question.
‘What kind of son have I created?’ she allegedly asked.
Donald Trump, the current United States President, has spoken comparatively less in public about his mother than he has about his father
Mary Anne MacLeod Trump is pictured with her husband, Fred, in 1999. Fred died that year and Mary died the following year. She was 88. She fled an impoverished life in rural Scotland for the promise New York City at the age of 18
Donald Trump and his parents are pictured during his wedding to Marla Maples in 1993
Politico details how Trump has alternately referred to her mother as ‘fantastic’ and ‘tremendous’ and how she relished being a homemaker.
The avid Tweeter has tweeted a saying of hers no less than seven times since February 2013.
Her words of wisdom were: ‘Trust in God and be true to yourself.’
‘I didn’t really get it at first,’ he later wrote in his 2004 book, How to Get Rich. ‘Later I realized how comprehensive this is.’
But in comparison to his father, who he frequently characterizes as a sort of tour-de-force who instilled in him a singular desire to succeed, he still speaks very little of her publicly.
And when he visited her childhood house in Tong, an impoverished and far-flung village on the Isle of Lewis in Scotland, he apparently spent only 97 seconds inside.
He visited with his sister, Maryanne, on a 2008 trip during which he also flew to Balmedie, a settlement about 200 miles away in which he tried to and, in 2012, succeeded in building a golf course.
His sister Maryanne, Politico notes, had visited Tong 24 times previously.
Another example of her comparative absence is the fact that the only family photograph he kept in the Oval Office for at least a couple of months was a portrait of his father.
Donald Trump has, since February 2013, tweeted out a saying his mother said no less than seven times. Pictured are two such instances
Pictured is Donald Trump’s childhood home in Jamaica Estates. The home is a five-bedroom Tudor-style house
Mary fled a life of poverty in Scotland for the lights of New York City at the age of 18. She worked as a domestic before marrying Fred, by then a successful property developer, in 1936. Five children – Maryanne, Fred Jr, Elizabeth, Donald and Robert – came respectively in 1937, 1938, 1942, 1947 and 1948.
By all accounts, a sort-of society woman who passed her time volunteering and attending luncheons.
Trump’s childhood friends who spoke to Politico described the boy as ‘detached’ from his mother, who was rarely seen when such friends came over for playdates at the Trump home in Jamaica, Queens.
In 1990, Trump’s mother allegedly asked her future ex-daughter-in law, Ivana (pictured): ‘What kind of son have I created?’
The fourth Trump child proved to have problems with discipline and was sent by his parents to the New York Military Academy at the age of 13.
Fellow students recalled to Politico that his father visited frequently while his mother was rarely seen at the school in Cornwall-on-Hudson, about an hour and a half’s drive from Jamaica.
Later, as Trump was inheriting his father’s real estate empire and building his own, he rarely spoke of his mother.
‘My mother was a wife who really was a great homemaker. She always said, “Be happy!” She wanted me to be happy,’ he wrote in his 2007 book Think Big and Kick A**.
‘My father understood me more,’ he wrote in the same book.
Psychiatrist Prudence Gourguechon, who stressed that she was not referring specifically to Donald Trump, told Politico that a mother builds in a child ‘the capacity to trust’ and ‘a sense of security’.
She added: ‘I think it’s fair to say that the capacity for empathy develops through your maternal relationship.’