How ‘Star Trek’ Became Mary Trump’s Unexpected Sanctuary—and What That Teaches Us About Finding Strength in Strange Places
Ever wonder how a groundbreaking sci-fi show could serve as a lifeline amidst the chaos of a challenging family life? For Mary Trump, the niece of former President Donald Trump and a keen psychologist and author in her own right, the original Star Trek wasn’t just a TV show—it was an unexpected sanctuary. Imagine a kid from a complex, often difficult home, finding refuge not in typical playground hangouts but in distant galaxies, radical new worlds, and most importantly, an alternative set of values that sharply contrasted her own reality. Growing up with the Trump name attached might come with its own unique pressures, but Mary discovered in Gene Roddenberry’s vision a spot of hope and an imaginative spark that encouraged her to explore kindness, curiosity, and ethical strength. Her journey with Star Trek—starting as a youngster watching reruns on New York’s WPIX Channel 11—became more than escapism; it laid the foundations for a mindset that questioned norms and embraced the extraordinary potential of humanity. Curious how a show about space exploration shaped the worldview of a woman who’s as multifaceted as they come? Dive deeper into her story and see why Star Trek’s legacy still lights up her path today. LEARN MORE
For Mary Trump, more than being just a regular television show, the original Star Trek offered something of an escape. It also opened her imagination to science fiction, space exploration and worlds radically different from her own. Growing up in the Trump family, it also provided something considerably more important: an alternative set of values.
Trump, psychologist, author, political activist, co-host of the Trek Politics podcast and niece of the President Donald Trump, discovered Star Trek as a child when reruns began airing on New York’s WPIX Channel 11. Speaking to Woman’s World at a recent convention celebrating the franchise’s 60th anniversary, she recalled being immediately drawn into Gene Roddenberry‘s vision of the future, while admitting that at that age she couldn’t possibly have understood why it affected her so deeply.
MARY TRUMP: “I don’t remember whose idea it was to start watching it, but it became my favorite thing very quickly. The world building, the relationships between the characters, the stories, obviously the space exploration and just the sense of hopefulness. Also, quite frankly, it was a bit of an escape, because life could be difficult sometimes. To understand at so young an age that these worlds can be created and inhabited that are so different from your own lived experience was extremely powerful to me, even though I’m guessing I wasn’t conscious of it in that way.”
More than Kirk, Spock and McCoy
What fascinated Trump wasn’t merely the Enterprise or the prospect of traveling among the stars. She responded to the relationships between the characters and, ultimately, the philosophy underlying them. Looking back, she believes Star Trek introduced her to the possibility that encountering people different from ourselves should inspire curiosity rather than fear.
MARY TRUMP: “I loved the characters individually, but it was more the ways in which they interacted and that their friendships deepened over time. We got more and more insight into how they came to be friends and crew members. There’s also the spirit of exploration; the ethos of wanting to build relationships with people, species, what have you, that are different from us, and leading with the desire to understand and challenge ourselves to be better and not make judgments. Not be so human-centric that we always go in thinking we’re right about everything and everybody else must bend to our way of interpreting things. That sense of possibility was one of the things that spoke most deeply to me about that show.”
“It’s had a huge influence on my life, especially early on, because I came from a problematic family [laughs]. I came from a family in which the so-called values were completely antithetical to who I wanted to be—not that I recognized that in any obvious way until I was much older. But to have this group of people, week after week, exemplifying the kinds of values that really resonated with me — even when they got it wrong, even when they messed up, even when they did things that were morally suspect on occasion, they still were coming from a place of real moral rectitude and ethics and striving to do better, be better.”
“So it served for me as a safe space in a way. And it allowed me to hang on to the hope that there was more outside of the system in which I was being raised. I don’t think I can overstate the importance or the influence the original series had on me.”
It also sent Trump toward science fiction. Until roughly the age of 12, she says, the genre dominated her reading, including Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury and Robert Heinlein. But Star Trek remained different. And one character really stood out.
MARY TRUMP: “There was definitely the escape part of that, for sure. Just imagining a cleaner, clearer future that made sense, where we figured out all sorts of things. But Star Trek was unique in that it also created this foundation of, as I said earlier, values that were relevant even if largely absent in my life, but that I knew could actually be something that I created for myself later.”
“Star Trek was the very first and maybe only time in my life one character sort of became a role model—again, without my knowing that, because I wouldn’t have known what that was. But Nichelle Nichols was such a badass as Uhura. That was a character that became so important to me. I always wanted those characters, that world, that universe to be part of my life.”
Why ‘Star Trek’ is still significant
Sixty years after the original series premiered, Trump believes the longevity of Star Trek comes largely from the fact that its optimism was never simply about imagining cool technology. The franchise challenged audiences to imagine better human beings. She also believes it could only have originated when it did, amid the cultural and political upheaval of the 1960s.
MARY TRUMP: “There was this spirit of rebelling, and there was a real point at which we were trying to figure out how to challenge our assumptions about things and recognizing how dangerous it was for us as a country not to do better.
“Whether we’re talking about the protests around the Vietnam War, whether we’re talking about civil rights and voting rights and women’s rights, there was a real urgency to broadening our ideas about how to include people, how to achieve equality.”
That tradition, Trump argues, makes complaints that contemporary Star Trek has somehow become “too woke” particularly strange.
MARY TRUMP: “It’s absurd to say it’s too woke. I think you could point to instances in which there’s a sort of self-consciousness about inclusion that feels a little heavy-handed, but there’s nothing more woke than… if we’re even using that term, it’s a good thing to be woke and awake and paying attention and a decent ethical human being—just watch the original series.”
That doesn’t mean she embraces every creative choice the franchise has made. Her second favorite Star Trek series, after the original, is Deep Space Nine, precisely because it expanded Roddenberry’s universe without simply duplicating what had worked before.
MARY TRUMP: “I think DS9 is some of the most brilliant world-building I’ve ever seen. And it still stays true to the spirit of the original. I think that’s where some mistakes are made. It’s the spirit we need to stay true to, not the formula.”
For Trump, Deep Space Nine also demonstrated how fragile political relationships can be, exploring shifting alliances, cultural differences, religion, economics and the consequences of placing power in the wrong hands. Yet there’s another element of Star Trek that she believes has become almost radical in contemporary entertainment: its willingness to stop the action and allow intelligent people to talk.
MARY TRUMP: “The willingness Star Trek continues to have to have conversations, to be philosophical, to take time, not always to make it driven by the fighting or the drama, but literally just letting two characters sit in a room and talk it out, or be in a courtroom and have people making a case for something—that philosophical, thoughtful, relationship-driven interiority of Star Trek is what I think continues to be one of the most profound things about it.”
“I think it’s even more daring to do that now because people are so much less patient. People have such short attention spans, so trusting the viewer to be willing to watch a five-minute or 10-minute conversation about deep philosophical issues without phaser fights and transporters and chaos and life-threatening disasters—it continues to be the thing I most love about Star Trek.”
Holding on to the future
Which brings Trump back to the reason thousands of people would gather six decades after the Enterprise first left Earth to celebrate a television series whose future still hasn’t arrived. Perhaps the point isn’t whether Roddenberry’s vision accurately predicted what humanity would become, but rather that Star Trek continues asking audiences to believe humanity is capable of becoming it.
MARY TRUMP: “It is so aspirational. It is a realistic, deeply human—no offense to Spock— exploration of the ways in which we evolve emotionally, psychologically, in which we can be more open-minded, in which we can challenge our own assumptions without worrying about somehow risking our egos or worrying about being wrong. And it shows us in ways that are narratively powerful that it is possible to be better versions of ourselves. It is possible to have a better version of our society.”
Trump acknowledges that, from her perspective, today’s world can make that future seem more distant rather than closer. Yet that’s precisely why she believes Star Trek remains important.
MARY TRUMP: “I think it’s in those moments of struggle where people actually begin to understand there is the most potential. There’s nothing about Star Trek that puts it outside the realm of our ability to imagine for ourselves. And that continues to be one of the most powerful reasons people stay connected to the original series, yes, but also the entire Star Trek universe and believe that it’s possible.”
Get to know Mary Trump, President Trump’s niece
- Full name: Mary Lea Trump
- Born: May 3, 1965, in New York City
- Family: Mary L. Trump is the daughter of Fred Trump Jr., the older brother of Donald Trump, making the president her uncle. Her older brother is Fred Trump III.
- Father: Fred Trump Jr. was a commercial airline pilot who died of a heart attack at age 42 after struggling with alcoholism. Mary was 16 at the time.
- Education: She studied English literature at Tufts University, earned a master’s in English literature from Columbia University and received a Ph.D. in clinical psychology from Adelphi University on Long Island.
- Career: Trump has taught graduate courses in psychology, worked as a life coach and founded the Trump Coaching Group in 2012.
- Bestselling author: Her books include Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man, The Reckoning and Who Could Ever Love You. Her first book sold nearly a million copies on its first day of release.
- Star Trek connection: In our interview, Trump revealed that she discovered Star Trek as a young girl watching syndicated reruns on WPIX in New York City. She says the show became an escape and ultimately provided a set of values that helped shape her life.
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