bransonglobe.com LOCAL • TRUMP Continued from page 14 forgiveness, concepts that have never had any meaning for him.” Trump, who rarely admits regret, told The Washington Post last year that he regretted having tried to pressure his brother to join the family business — something Fred, who had long wanted to be a pilot had no interest in doing. “It was just not his thing. . . . I think the mistake that we made was we assumed that everybody would like it. That would be the biggest mistake. . . . There was sort of a double pressure put on him,” Trump told the paper. Trump has also cited his brother’s struggle with alcohol as one of one of the reasons he doesn’t drink. Publisher Simon & Schuster announced Monday that they would be publishing the book two weeks early, on July 14, citing “extraordinary interest.” The revised date came after a New York appellate court cleared the way for the book’s publication following a legal challenge. Robert Trump, the president’s younger brother, had sued Mary Trump to block publication of a book, arguing in legal papers that Mary Trump was subject to a 20-year-old agreement between family members that no one would publish accounts involving the core family members without their approval. A judge last week left in place a restraint that blocked Mary Trump and any agent of hers from distributing the book, but the court made clear it was not considering Simon & Schuster to be covered by the ruling. In the book, Mary Trump said she didn’t take her uncle’s run for the presidency seriously when he first ran. “‘He’s a clown,’ my aunt Maryanne said during one of our regular lunches at the time. ‘This will never happen.’” “I agreed,” Mary Trump wrote. She said she declined an invitation to attend her uncle’s election-night party in New York City four years ago, convinced she “wouldn’t be able to contain my euphoria when Clinton’s victory was announced.” Instead, she found herself wandering around her house a few hours after Trump’s victory was announced, fearful voters “had chosen to turn this country into a macro version of my malignantly dysfunctional family.” She writes that current challenges have weakened the president’s usual tools for shielding himself from blame. “His ability to control unfavorable situations by lying, spinning, and obfuscating has diminished to the point of impotence in the midst of the tragedies we are currently facing,” she writes. “His egregious and arguably intentional mishandling of the current catastrophe has led to a level of pushback and scrutiny that he’s never experienced before, increasing his belligerence and need for petty revenge as he withholds vital funding, personal protective equipment, and ventilators that your tax dollars have paid for from states whose governors don’t kiss his ass sufficiently,” Mary Trump wrote. White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said of the book: “It’s ridiculous, absurd accusations that have absolutely no bearing in truth. I have yet to see the book, but it is a July 8-9, 2020 • 15 book of falsehoods.” White House counselor Kellyanne Conway said in an interview with Fox News that “there are too many books out there that are never fact checked,” adding: “I believe family matters should be family matters.”
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