Many American families have their dysfunction. But in only one contemporary American family has the racist, misogynistic, ignorant blowhard uncle become the president of the United States. What is that like? Well, we dont have to guess. Because Mary L. Trump, the niece of Donald Trump, has written a bestseller about the horrific family environment that produced him. And this week she talked to Mother Jones about her uncle, her book, and how she came to write it.

After the Trump family went to court to stop the bookand lostit was published last week and has reportedly sold a million copies. This memoir/psychological dissection, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the Worlds Most Dangerous Man, is a harrowing account of a man and a clan shaped by ego, rivalry, the pursuit of wealth, and profound pathology. Mary Trumps depiction of her uncle as a broken human beingbroken by his father, Fred, a ruthless patriarch with sociopathic traitsis more explanatory than revelatory. She doesnt show us a Trump we havent already seen. But she explains how and why he became a person more concerned about his TV ratings than the deaths of 140,000 fellow Americans.

I have a bit of a history with Mary Trump going back to 2016. Shortly before Election Day that year, I tracked her down. Throughout the campaign, she had practically no presence within all the stories about Donald Trump and his family. I hoped that she could provide information on him, the family, and their finances. After all, she had been involved in two bitter lawsuits against Trump and his siblingsone over the disposition of Freds estate and one challenging the decision of Trump and his siblings to cut off health insurance for Mary and her brothers families. (Her brother had an infant son at the time with a serious neurological disorder that resulted in tremendous medical bills.) Mary returned my call, expressed her horror at the prospect of her uncle becoming the most powerful man in the world, and explained that Fred, with Donald, had raised a mini-me sociopath. Donald Trump was not the most evil man in the world, she remarked to me; Fred was. But she said she could not speak on the record about any of this. (She has now given me permission to reveal our communications from that time.)

I chased Mary as a source for months and years, sensing she had much to share. I never persuaded her to go public. But now she has done so, and as her book has become a publishing sensation, I was finally able to talk openly with her. And I could ask her why she thanked me in her acknowledgments.

Explaining why she did not come forward at the time of the 2016 election, Mary noted in our interview, I didnt feel it would make a difference. She believed she didnt have that much to offer and would be dismissed as a disgruntled relative still upset over being screwed during the battle over Freds estate. She was also fearful of retribution from the Trump crew: Theyre very vindictive people. She explained that she had forgotten that within the records of her lawsuits were loads of documents detailing Trump family finances. It was when the New York Times came knocking in the spring of 2017, in search of this material, that Mary realized she possessed significant information related to Donald Trump. After persistent coaxing from a Timesreporter, she retrieved the material from her lawyers storage facility and handed it over to the newspaper. About a year later, the Times, using these documents, produced a blockbuster report showing that Trump and his family had committed fraud to avoid paying hundreds of millions of dollars in taxes. (The story also revealed that Trump had received about $413 million from his father, far more than the mere pittance of a $1 million loan that he had claimed.) Marys involvement with this project got her thinking: She did have something to say about Trump and her family. Soon she was contemplating writing a book.

In the interview, Mary, who has a PhD in clinical psychology, discussed her main thesis: Fred Trump was a straight-up sociopath who psychologically destroyed his oldest son and her father, Freddy, who wanted to be a commercial pilot rather than take over the family real estate business, and Donald Trump was permanently warped by witnessing this abuse and by other dysfunction within the family. Donald, Mary said, learnedin order to be safe, in order to protect himself from my grandfathers cruelty, he needed to make himself in his dads image, which I think was at the expense of his humanity. My grandfather had no redeeming characteristicsand [Donald Trump] no longer does. She added that there was a point [Trump] wasnt so cruel, not so deliberatively divisive.

One Trump family mystery involves a 1927New York Times story that reported Fred Trump was arrested at a KKK rally and march in Jamaica, Queens. The article didnt say why Fred was detained and gave no indication if he had been there as a supporter or opponent of the KKK. When I asked Mary about this, she replied that she never heard this matter discussed within her family, but she added, I have no doubt which side he wouldve been on. Fred, she explained, was quite anti-Semitic, and, as she has said elsewhere, the n-word was routinely used within her family circle.

She also shared her view that Donald Trump inherited his fathers bigotry. Hes racist, Mary said of her uncle. It has to be said honestly and straightforwardly.

I asked Mary if she could explain Donalds affinity for Vladimir Putin and other authoritarian rulers. And she could: I think he sees in somebody like a Putin or a Kim Jong Un or a Duterte or an Erdoan a person who has a lot of power and by associating with them it sort of confers on him that aura of strength and invincibility. And who cares what that leads to? Concentration camps in China. Or disappearing people. If hes associated with that [power], then it reflects on him.

So could she answer for me a question that Ive pondered for years: Does Donald Trump believe his own lies? After all, does Trump truly think he is the smartest guy of all time, that he knows more than the generals, that hes been more right about the coronavirus pandemic than anyone else, that his polls are great, that he has achieved more than any other president, and blah, blah, blah? Very often he is lying to himself, Mary said. It depends on the circumstances. She continued: The more stress hes under, the more besieged he feels, the more likely it is that the distance between the telling the lie and believing it is the truth is decreasing. Were getting to the point its instantaneous.

I pressed her on this point. Does he lie (so much!) as a means to get what he wants and knows this is what he is doingor is he delusional? Its a combination, she said. Is it just delusion or is it a tactic? I think it might start out as a tactic but it ends up being a delusion because his need to perpetuate a narrative about himselfa very specific narrative about himself as the winner, as always being rightis decades old. Its a defense mechanism to protect him against the reality of who he really isIf he had any insight into that, I dont know that he could bear it.

Mary Trumps book is a deep dive into Trumps damaged psyche, and it does ring trueespecially at a time when Americans are watching him botch the response to a pandemic due to his narcissism, ignorance, and lack of compassion. But does her analysis provide an escape route for her unclehes harming the nation because he was harmed as a child? Does this, I asked Mary, absolve Trump? I cant say this emphatically enough, she replied. Absolutely not. This was not in any way intended to let him off the hook. Hes a responsiblehes responsible for his actions. Hes an adult human being who knows the difference between right and wrong. He just doesnt think it applies to him. But he knows the difference. The point of the analysis of his developmental history was in its explanatory powerEven I feel sympathy for Donald the 2-and-a-half-year-old. A lot of people who end up being horrible criminals when they are adults had very abusive childhoods. You can have sympathy for that child. It does not at all, under any circumstances, diminish their responsibility for what they doHe does not get a pass. He needs to be held to account. Very seriously held to an account when this nightmare were living through is over.

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Watch: Mary Trump on Why Donald Trump Lies, Why He's Racist, and Why She Wrote Her Book - Mother Jones