Suzanne Harrington: We live in a world where we need more Mary Trumps

On the eve of the midterms, the thing that might undo Trump is not what one might have expected. 

Trump had urged his base to vote as if he is on the ballot in the midterms. Picture:  AP Photo/Alex Brandon

At a talk by Mary Trump in a surprisingly small central London venue, you could hear a pin drop as she eloquently eviscerates her mad uncle. 

As a clinical psychologist and the only woman on earth who gets to call him Uncle Donald, she is supremely qualified to do so. She is unexpectedly funny; a wry weariness about her, sick to death of talking about her appalling relative, yet driven by a duty to do so.

She’s not in it for the money. Unlike her uncle, she’s not about hoovering up the cash. Nor is she a recipient of the Trump billions — when her father died young, he was deemed a “loser” by the wider family. 

As the bereaved children of a “loser”, she has claimed that she and her brother were disinherited by their grandfather.

Having read her eye-popping 2020 memoir about growing up with the Trump surname — and more recently hearing her describe how her grandfather was a “high-functioning sociopath” who “dismantled” her own father for displaying the “loser” traits of empathy and kindness — Mary Trump has made it her life’s mission to speak up about her uncle. 

To confirm to the world what we have been watching unfold in real time over the past decade — a malignant force destabilising the world for nothing deeper than dollars and likes. 

Unlike Putin and the North Korean guy, there’s not even a shred of ideology behind all the self-aggrandisement. Just an insatiable desire for more, now, again.

In the book signing queue after her talk — David Gilmour from Pink Floyd behind me — I overhear a man in front telling Mary Trump how it’s the wrong Trump who is in the White House. She laughs. 

You get the feeling she’s heard that one before, as the world continues to convulse thanks to the wrong Trump.

On her Substack, The Good In Us, a recent post looks at tomorrow’s midterms.

“Welcome to The Art of the Scam, where we follow the gobsmacking grift committed by Donald, his useless children and the people in his inner circle,” she writes. 

Regarding the midterms, she adds how “the stakes are not simply political ... they are financial”, as Uncle Donald presides over a self-serving administrative machine which facilitates “the grotesque accumulation of massive and obscene wealth”. 

And because the elections are not about him, he has urged his base to vote as though it’s his name on the ballot. Will they, though?

As we know, on the eve of these midterms, Uncle Donald and his grifters are low in the polls. 

Not because of bombing Iran, invading Venezuela, supporting Israeli genocide, abandoning Ukraine, sucking up to Putin, pissing off Canada and the EU, falsely claiming electoral fraud, causing an insurrection, releasing ICE to kill Americans on their own streets, crushing the reproductive rights of American women, putting children in cages, letting Elon Musk loose with a chainsaw, suppressing the Epstein files, protecting paedophiles, accusations of insider trading, imposing crippling tariffs, cutting food stamps and Medicaid, or creating a political discourse so degraded that racial slurs are having their biggest moment since the Civil War. 

No.

None of these. It’s the price of petrol. This is what may undo him — the fact that people have to pay a bit more to drive their cars. 

This is the world we live in. A world where we desperately need more Mary Trumps, more pinpricks of light in the darkness.