I was standing in the kitchen of my apartment on Cape Cod when my phone rang. It was Lachlan Cartwright, a reporter for the Daily Beast who had scooped the imminent publication of my first book despite the immense efforts of dozens of people over the course of more than a year and a half to keep it secret. I’d since gotten over it—he did great reporting, which had had the ancillary and unintentional benefit of helping the book by getting the word out ahead of time—but I couldn’t imagine why he’d be calling me at nine o’clock at night.
I’d spent the afternoon at the beach kayaking, so my guard was down. When I answered, Lachlan immediately asked me how I felt about Donald’s new lawsuit. I had no idea what he was talking about. He clarified: “Your uncle is suing you and The New York Times for a hundred million dollars for breach of contract. I wanted to know what you think.”
What I wasn’t thinking was that I was on the record, so I said, “I think he’s a fucking loser.”
Donald filed his lawsuit a year after I filed my lawsuit against him, Maryanne, and my uncle Robert’s estate for fraud and breach of fiduciary duty. In the ensuing three years, very little has happened. As of January 2024, The New York Times has been removed as a defendant, but he’s still suing me for a hundred million dollars.
It’s an odd thought that brings me full circle. While Donald had a hand in destroying his older brother, and triumphed over that, he knows—he knows—that nothing can change the fact that Freddy was superior to him in every way. He can pretend all he wants that he was smarter or more successful or that the qualities that made Freddy so much the better man didn’t count for anything, just as he can pretend that he’s more popular than Taylor Swift. But Donald Trump—he knows.
My grandfather disinherited me (in his will he singled me out as “the issue of Frederick C. Trump, Jr.”). With a significant assist from Donald and Maryanne, he took my father away from me. Then Maryanne, Donald, and Robert stole the inheritance that would have come to me from my father—and they did it while they were my trustees (and my aunt and uncles). Yet it’s still not enough.
I kept losing and he kept winning against me. This meant that I had less of a platform from which to challenge him. As time went on and the cases against him piled up, the only one that was never mentioned anymore was mine. More than that, it underscored that my family’s crimes against my father and me, and by extension my daughter, didn’t matter. And not only were they deemed inconsequential—the judge having found that the fraud used to coerce me into signing a document was of less consequence than my having signed the document—it wasn’t enough. Because Donald’s case against me was succeeding. If the crime was foundational, so, too, was the impunity that followed it.