How Donald Trump’s and RFK Jr’s female relatives became their biggest trolls

RFK Jr may have felt prepped for assailants, both physical and political, but he almost certainly hadn’t reckoned with the wrathful woman in his own family. The grilling by the Senate Committee on Finance, which wields the crucial vote on whether his nomination to become secretary for the Department of Health and Human Services should proceed, was nothing compared to the open letter penned by his cousin Caroline Kennedy.

Videoing herself reading the missive and releasing the footage on her social media account, the world watched the sole surviving child of JFK and first woman to serve as US ambassador to Japan land blow after blow.

“He lacks any relevant government, financial, management, or medical experience. His views on vaccines are dangerous and wilfully misinformed.” Then she tells us what she really thinks: “It is no surprise that he keeps birds of prey as pets because he himself is a predator.” Adding gory heft to the metaphor, she describes him as a young man, “enjoying showing off how he put baby chickens and mice in the blender to feed his hawks”.

She alleges that RFK Jr preys on the desperate parents “of sick kids” by “hypocritically” encouraging them to abandon vaccines, even though his own children are vaccinated. The razor-sharp cuts are that “Bobby is addicted to attention and power” and “has gone on to misrepresent, lie and cheat his way through life”.

And while RFK Jr’s past battles with drug abuse have been well documented (in 1984 he pleaded guilty to possessing heroin on a plane) it is something which his cousin brings back into focus. With intimate knowledge of the comings and goings of family life behind closed doors, she paints a picture where his home basement and garage, along with his student dorm, “was often a perverse scene of despair and violence”.

It might be easy to ignore such assertions if they came from a rival politician, but these napalm-laced claims come from a blood relative, from a woman who played with cousin Bobby in the Kennedy compound and was photographed leaning into his shoulder in NYC in 1974. They come from someone who admits she was “reluctant” to speak out because of the weight of family connection. In politics, loyalty is everything and in family blood ties are sanctified and yet here was cousin Caroline blowing the doors wide open.

If RFK Jr is reeling from the deeply personal savagery of the attack, there’s one person he can go to for solidarity: the new US president. For years, Donald Trump has also been relentlessly, devastatingly denounced by his female niece. Over the past five years, Mary Trump, the daughter of his late, alcoholic older brother, Fred Trump Jr, has published three books revealing deeply personal and intimate knowledge about Donald and the family experiences which shaped him.

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To take him down, she first published Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man, which sold almost a million copies on the first day of publication in 2020. Then, The Reckoning: America’s Trauma and Finding a Way to Heal, which was followed by an even more personal memoir: Who Could Ever Love You.

Her account of a long Trump lineage of male braggarts and bullies, who evaded civic duties and common decency (like paying taxes) and used racist and antisemitic language at the dinner table, springs straight from the petty tyrant playbook.

According to Mary, Donald Trump was unloved by his father, so had to award himself vast doses of self-adulation. As a family witness, she ticked off his inadequacies one by one: narcissism, sociopathy, arrogance, philistinism, lying, cheating (her first book alleges that the US president paid someone else to take a university entrance exam for him, which he’s denied) and arrested development. In one interview she said, “I would say he behaves like a white supremacist, certainly.” Perhaps even more damning was her observation that she’d never seen her uncle laugh, “and my grandfather didn’t laugh either. When you’re able to laugh you’re also letting your guard down and that was frowned upon.”

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Like Caroline Kennedy, Mary Trump is a woman of undisputed substance, with a masters in English literature from Columbia University and a PhD in psychology from the Derner Institute of Advanced Psychological Studies. In other words, she’s used to looking under the human bonnet and working out what's really going on, so you really pay attention to what she says. Also, like Caroline, she has intimate knowledge of what these men were like when they were growing up, what family experiences have contributed to their world view and how this is playing out for the rest of us.

When she writes that the only way the future Potus could relate to younger family members was by throwing a baseball at them so hard it hurt, you believe her. In the interests of scrupulous fairness, it’s also worth mentioning that Mary’s been involved with heated inheritance wrangling (along with her brother Fred) against the rest of the Trump dynasty for the best part of the past 25 years. And has emerged unsuccessful. So while there’s quite possibly a side-helping of vengeance in her utterances because we know she is someone who has been there from the beginning, we’ll still stop to listen to what she has to say.

For those of you who can’t get enough of a “malignantly dysfunctional family” as Mary Trump describes it – especially now Succession has come to an end – the good news is the psychologist also pens a gripping Substack entitled “The Good in Us”: a gift that keeps on giving.

Last August she despaired of Donald Trump planning to address a gathering of the National Guard Association in Detroit despite ripping into military leaders when he was in the White House. She described in detail how her father Fred Jr was the only member of the family to have shown any interest whatsoever in US armed forces, having joined the Air Force National Guard after graduation. Donald, meanwhile, she alleges, “received four deferments based on a false diagnosis of bone spurs engineered by his father”.

In the same month, she wrote about Trump’s desperate attempts to persuade voters that his rallies have attracted the largest crowds in political history – pointing out he claimed more people turned up to the 6 January protest and insurrection than attended Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech. Mary’s withering conclusion on all this self-deception and aggrandisement is that the US president is drastically lacking in self-worth due to childhood neglect. His mother, she tells us, was unwell and unavailable when he was a toddler, while his father had no nurturing tendencies. So, there’s an inner void that Donald Trump tries to fix with ever-inflated numbers of devotees. The psychologist concludes dryly, “I’ve often described him as a black hole of need.”

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She deduces that the only way he could get daddy’s attention “was to be hyperbolic”. From her niece’s eye-view, growing up he had “to be the best, the greatest, the smartest, the toughest – whatever it was his father required of him”. For the briefest of moments, she relents, “And that is a tragedy. We should have compassion for that child.” But clearly not for the adult Trump, “we have to accept that this man is a monster who means all of us harm.”

It's hard not to conjure up a mental picture of RFK and Trump sitting in an inglenook at the White House musing that with relatives like this, who needs enemies? Meanwhile, ambitious young politicos would be well advised to nurture their cousins and nieces. The family insiders, who are just outside enough that blood ties are loose enough for them to go rogue, can inflict enormous damage.

But families’ female members can have more power than old-fashioned hierarchies initially suggest. And – crucially – they tend to be believed by the rest of us