A highly-anticipated book by President Donald Trump’s niece Mary Trump is promising an up-close insight into the Commander-in-Chief’s family history — but not without an honorable mention of Brooklyn Paper!
In her author’s note for Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man, Mary Trump writes that she consulted these pages — among others — while researching the iconic former Coney Island amusement park Steeplechase Park, which Donald’s father Fred bulldozed in the 1960s.
“For background on Steeplechase Park, I thank the Coney Island History Project website, Brooklyn Paper, and a May 14, 2018, article on 6sqft.com by Dana Schulz,” she writes in her soon-to-be-released work.
While it’s not clear which articles Mary Trump refers to specifically, Brooklyn’s real newspaper has written about the Fred Trump-Steeplechase Park saga at least twice, specifically in regards to local exhibits by the Coney Island History Project, once by the paper’s former scribe Will Bredderman in 2014, and again in 2016 by reporter Dennis Lynch.
Lynch said he was proud that his work for the Paper might have made it into Mary Trump’s book.
“It’s great to hear she relied on Brooklyn Paper reporting and I’m proud that it will help explain to a wider audience the impact Fred Trump had on Coney Island,” said Lynch. “Local news outlets are so important for the communities they cover and I’m very grateful for my time at the Brooklyn Paper. I can’t tell you how much I learned hitting the streets and in the newsroom from my colleagues and editors there.”
Fred Trump famously bought the Victorian amusement park after it closed in 1964, hoping to turn it into waterfront condos.
To stop the city from landmarking the old building, the real estate magnate invited a bunch of his rich pals to a party where they hurled bricks through the towering glass facade, knocking holes in the People’s Playground’s famous Funny Face painted on the windows, which Coney historian Charles Denson once told this paper was a “desecration of an icon.”
Mary Trump, 55, is a trained clinical psychologist and the daughter of Donald’s brother Fred Jr., an alcoholic who died when she was a teen.
Publisher Simon and Schuster wrote in a preview that Trump uses her intimate insight into the family and her clinical background to shine “a bright light on the dark history of their family in order to explain how her uncle became the man who now threatens the world’s health, economic security, and social fabric.”
The book has already caused a stir in Washington, with the president’s brother Robert Trump trying to stop publication by suing the author and the publisher, arguing the book violates a 20-year-old nondisclosure agreement, reported Long Island Press.
Still, an upstate judge allowed the book to be distributed as planned and the publisher moved up the release date from July 28 to July 14 amid the heightened demand.
A spokesman for Mary Trump did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Additional reporting by Timothy Bolger
