Maryan Trump, the older sister of former President Donald Trump, has died in New York. Her death is the second of a person close to the former president and candidate in 2024, Donald Trump, after the death in July of last year of his first wife, Ivana, after falling down the stairs of her house. Maryan’s death has not surprised those who knew her, given that she suffered from very advanced cancer.
Beyond her brilliant career in the world of Justice, where she became a federal judge before her retirement, the figure of Maryan Trump is inescapably linked to that of her brother, Donald, thanks, in large part, to the book Too Much and Never Enough written by his niece, Mary Trump, on the eve of the 2020 presidential election, which Joe Biden won.
In the book, Mary Trump accuses the Trump patriarch, Fred, and his children of evading the taxes they should have paid when receiving his inheritance. According to Trump’s niece – and Maryan – the judge, thanks to her legal training, she was instrumental in the design of the plan.
The New York Times had already reported this – with the invaluable help of Mary – in 2018, when describing the Trumps’ donations to a shell company that in reality had no type of activity except opening the door to tax evasion. However, an investigation by the New York Treasury was closed without finding evidence of a crime. Mary Trump also accused her aunt of securing her appointment as a federal judge thanks to the good offices of her brother and her future president, through controversial lawyer Roy Cohn, an old friend of Trump.
According to Mary Trump, it was all those family connections that kept Maryan in the background when Donald Trump launched his presidential campaign in 2015, even though she privately called her brother a “moron,” “cruel,” and declared that “I cannot stand his constant lies, his lack of preparation, his duplicity.” All of those statements were secretly recorded by Mary.
Publicly, however, the furthest Maryan went in distancing herself from Donald Trump was in 1985, in a distant era when her brother was nothing more than a real estate and casino businessman, when she recused herself in a case against a drug trafficker with whom the future president maintained a friendly relationship.
In judicial matters, Maryan was conservative, as revealed by the fact that in 2006 she testified in favor of the approval of Judge Samuel Alito as a Supreme Court justice. Alito, nominated by George W. Bush, has emerged as the most conservative of all the judges of that court.
But the judge had clear points of divergence with her brother. For example, in 2006 she was very harsh in a ruling against the United States immigration authorities, who had denied the request for political asylum to the nephew of former Gambian president Dawda Jawara, deposed 12 years earlier in a coup d’état. Maryan Trump’s sentence was so harsh – against the system and immigration, not against the refugee – that it led to the dismissal of the judge who had ruled against her request for the right to asylum. She also tried several cases involving the New York mafia.
Maryan, a Catholic, made million-dollar donations to the Ignatian spirituality center – of Saint Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Jesuits – at Farfield University. She was married twice, to William Desmond, whom she divorced in 1980, and to John Joseph Barry, who died in 2000.