Mary Trump was on Fresh Air yesterday.

GROSS: Donald Trump was sent to military school, the New York Military Academy. And this was against his protests. Why was he sent there, and who do you have that information from? Who told you why he was sent there?

TRUMP: My grandmother told me stories. And, you know, I think it was a combination of things. He was a student at a school in Forest Hills that my grandfather was a trustee for. He was on the board of trustees. And Donald’s behavior, as he grew up, became increasingly belligerent and uncontrollable. So I think that was causing some problems. I think my grandfather probably found it, if not embarrassing then inconvenient that one of his children was getting into all sorts of trouble at a school he was associated with.

It’s interesting that Donald was getting more belligerent and uncontrollable in his early teens. He’s had some sixty years of being belligerent and uncontrollable…of being an intrinsically horrible person who does bad things to people and makes them feel bad.

At home – where my grandmother certainly had to deal with Donald more than my grandfather did because he was at work all the time – he was incredibly disrespectful to her. He didn’t listen to her. He was a slob. He tormented – in one way or another, I think he tormented all of his siblings. But certainly, by then, you know, the older kids were out of the house, and Robert was the most frequent target of his bullying.

If only we could send him to military school.

For a time Mary Trump worked as a ghost writer on Donald’s second book. It didn’t work out, partly because he would never sit down with her to do an interview – I guess he expected her to just make it up? It’s what he would have done.

GROSS: He did give you some pages that he had written, which were not exactly germane. Tell us what was on the pages. TRUMP: Yeah. You know, the awful thing is I was so excited because I thought, finally, I’m going to have something to go on. And it just turned out to be about 10 pages, a transcript from a recording he had made, you know, speaking into a microphone. And it was page after page of his ideas about women, you know, his evaluation of them, almost entirely of their physical appearance or their bearing. And most of it was just – it was so dripping with misogyny. I just – it was hard to read. And I never looked at it again and certainly didn’t plan to use any of it.

That’s the guy we know.

GROSS: Donald Trump is so fixated on numbers when he can use it to prove that he’s best. And he’ll sometimes change the numbers or not know what the real numbers are and put that in service of proving that he’s best. And he’s done that with money, overstating how much he has, bragging about test scores, about his cognitive test, about the size of crowds at his inauguration, about the size of crowds at his rallies, his TV ratings – all numbers to prove, like, I am the best. What I do is the best. Was he that way before? Like, did you notice that before he became president?

TRUMP: Oh, yeah. That’s – one thing we can say about Donald is he has been consistently himself for decades. I can’t really think of any way in which he’s evolved or changed from the person he was when he was a teenager. Now, obviously, I wasn’t alive when he was a teenager. But there’s a reason my dad nicknamed him The Great I Am when Donald was 12.

Twelve. Interesting. So that’s at least 62 years of being a known egomaniac.

TRUMP: He meant that, you know, nobody could be as good. Donald was always the best and claimed to be the best at everything and the greatest and et cetera. So yeah, it started very early on. And I believe that, initially, it was just a way to make sure that my grandfather never for one second mistook Donald for being like my dad.

Mary Trump’s father was seen in the family as being weak, a loser, disappointing – in other words not a ruthless conscienceless criminal cheating racist exploiter like Fred and Donald.