All families have their issues, but the Trump clan's problems are more publicized than most.
While most of the former president's closest relatives are in line with his whole MAGA ethos,
his niece, Mary, is decidedly not. Here's a look inside Mary Trump's war against her uncle.
Unlike the rest of the Trump family, it doesn't look like Mary Trump ever wanted Donald Trump to
become president. There's also no evidence that she's ever been a fan of the Republican party
at all. As a matter of fact, back in 2016, when Donald was running against Democrat candidate
Hillary Clinton, Mary was a vocal supporter of the former Secretary of State. After Clinton
lost the election to The Donald, Mary didn't hold back at voicing her disgust on Twitter, writing,
"Hillary Clinton is an extraordinary human being and public servant.
That she lost to this is unspeakable."
Even if Mary wasn't as big a Clinton fan as she clearly appears to be, referring to her uncle as
"this" certainly seems to speak to her feelings about the former president. But this tweet also
indicates that Mary Trump had been wanting to get Donald Trump out of office for a very long time.
Despite having such strong, negative, and very public feelings toward Donald Trump,
few people had heard about Mary Trump until she published her bombshell tell-all book in 2020:
Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man.
While the book ultimately concluded that Donald was unfit to be president,
it also included several salacious details that hadn't been revealed before.
For example, to showcase how the former POTUS had allegedly taken on, quote,
"cheating as a way of life," the book claimed that Donald once paid a friend
to take the SATs for him. As Vanity Fair previously reported, the former president
was reportedly "obsessed" with hiding his SAT scores, and if Mary's allegations are correct,
we now know why — they were phony. Donald's — or Donald's apparent stand-in's — high score
on the standardized test is what helped him get into the University of Pennsylvania's
prestigious Wharton business school, which he often called, as Mary wrote,
"A great school."
Other jaw-dropping claims Mary made about what she called her, quote,
"malignantly dysfunctional family" in her first book included the accusation that,
when her father, Fred Trump Jr., was sent to the hospital on the night of his death,
not one member of his family came with him. She alleged that, instead, Donald went to the movies.
The bad blood between Mary Trump and her estranged uncle Donald started long before
The Apprentice alum ever became president of the United States. In addition to what Mary has
described as Donald's allegedly cruel treatment of his brother and her father, Fred Trump Jr.,
she has also sued him for supposedly cheating her out of her rightful inheritance.
It's no secret that Donald's relationship with taxes and money generally has been a
bit suspicious over the years, according to The New York Times, but what Mary has accused him of
seems particularly dirty, if true. According to the 2020 lawsuit, when Fred Jr. died in
1981 — during Mary's teens — Donald and his siblings, Robert and Maryanne Barry Trump,
wrested control of all of his assets, which included Mary and her brother's inheritance.
Per the lawsuit, the trio were committed to watch over Mary's interests as trustees but never did.
Instead, the Trump siblings allegedly "siphoned" money away from Mary's inheritance and lied about
their real worth to avoid tax liability and cheat her out of what was rightfully hers.
In addition to fraud and conspiracy, the lawsuit alleged "violations of fiduciary duties."
Aside from Mary Trump herself, the Trump family has publicly pretty much closed
ranks and toed the family line when it comes to the former reality-star-turned-president.
But Mary Trump came with the receipts when she claimed she wasn't the only family member who
ever doubted Donald Trump. In August of 2020, The Washington Post reported on audio tapes Mary
secretly recorded of her aunt and Donald's sister, Maryanne Barry,
allegedly disparaging her brother. Barry appeared to say in the audio clip:
"All he wants to do is appeal to his base. He has no principles. None. None. And his base,
I mean my God, if you were a religious person, you want to help people. Not do this."
When commenting on her younger brother's time as president, the former federal judge added:
"I'm talking too freely, but you know. The change of stories. The lack of preparation. The lying."
Barry also reportedly sounded off her disapproval of the Trump administration's
policies at the U.S.-Mexico border, and stated that Donald, quote,
"doesn't read." She also seemed to echo a lot of what Mary herself had been saying about her uncle:
"It's the phoniness of it all. It's the phoniness and this cruelty. Donald is cruel."
With this secretly recorded audio recording coming out a month before Mary filed her
inheritance-related fraud lawsuit, then-White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany claimed,
"The only fraud committed there was Mary Trump recording one of her relatives,
and she's really discredited herself."
As Donald Trump's niece, it's plausible that Mary Trump is in a better position than most
to assess his capabilities and aptitude for the job of president. That said, she's not been very
complimentary about his job performance. In a 2020 interview with ABC News, Mary admitted that she at
first felt a little sorry for then-President Trump, telling the news organization,
"You know, he'd never been in a situation before where he wasn't entirely protected from criticism,
or accountability, or things like that. I just remember thinking, he seems tired,
he seems — this is not what he signed up for, if he even knows what he signed up for."
But while Mary may have been at least somewhat supportive in the beginning,
by the end of Donald's four years in office, she called on him to "resign," saying,
"[Donald is] utterly incapable of leading this country,
and it's dangerous to allow him to do so."
Mary had even stronger words following the January 6, 2021 insurrection at the Capitol.
"We the people! We are the storm!"
Mary said in interview with CBS News:
"It's also incredibly important that no matter what happens Donald
be barred from ever running for public office again."
She also claimed that, because Donald had apparently never learned to deal with the concept
of losing, he was becoming, quote, "increasingly desperate and dangerous," in her view.
Former President Donald Trump has been diagnosed with various personality disorders from afar
by plenty of clinical psychiatrists, and Mary Trump — a trained psychologist herself — hasn't
been shy when it comes to diagnosing her famous uncle. In her Too Much and Never Enough book,
she claimed that Donald is a, quote, "textbook narcissist." She wrote,
"Nothing is ever enough. This is far beyond garden-variety narcissism;
Donald is not simply weak, his ego is a fragile thing that must be bolstered every moment
because he knows deep down that he is nothing of what he claims to be."
In another section, Mary explained,
"The fact is, Donald's pathologies are so complex and his behaviors so
often inexplicable that coming up with an accurate and comprehensive diagnosis
would require a full battery of psychological and neuro-physical tests, that he'll never sit for."
Mary also alleged that Donald's upbringing made it impossible for him to admit he's ever lost
anything, which is why she believed he was incapable of conceding the 2020 election.
"There's literally nothing he can do about this, so it's sort of unfathomable, because
in my family, losing was literally the worst thing you could do."
Though Mary Trump hasn't shied away from calling Donald Trump a "narcissist" or claiming
that he lacks empathy, she's alleged that his personality is largely a result of his upbringing,
and specifically due to alleged psychological abuse on the part
of his father and her grandfather, Fred Trump Sr. Mary wrote in Too Much and Never Enough:
"Fred destroyed Donald, too, but not by snuffing him out as he did [my father] Freddy; instead,
he short-circuited Donald's ability to develop and experience the entire spectrum of human emotion."
In the book, she also called Fred Sr. a, quote,
"high-functioning sociopath" who equated kindness with weakness.
"My father liked to win."
Mary further alleged that the damage Fred Sr. inflicted on Donald
led him to become the man he is today, writing,
"Having been abandoned by his mother for at least a year,
and having his father fail not only to meet his needs but to make him feel safe or loved,
valued or mirrored, Donald suffered deprivations that would scar him for life."
Mary Trump has also taken her crusade to stop Donald Trump from maintaining or regaining
power to social media. Her Twitter feed is full of criticism and insights into the former president.
In 2021 alone, she has referred to him as "the Disgraced Former Occupant"
who is "responsible for the deaths of over 500,000 Americans" due to the COVID-19 pandemic,
supported lawsuits taken up against her uncle, and claimed,
"He's calling for the lynching of a Capitol police officer. And he's a traitor."
The psychologist has also shown a lot of support on Twitter for writer E. Jean
Carroll, who has accused Donald Trump of sexual assault and sued him for defamation,
by often retweeting Carroll and boosting articles that support her. Furthermore,
Mary has called Carroll a "warrior" who, quote, "deserves to have her case heard."
If you or anyone you know has been a victim of sexual assault,
help is available. Visit the Rape, Abuse & Incest
National Network website or contact RAINN's National Helpline at 1-800-656-HOPE (4673).
Former President Donald Trump has never really been known to let criticism slide.
So it's not surprising to learn that he tried
to stop Mary Trump's first book from ever seeing the light of day,
and then tried to make her look as bad as possible once it was published. From the title alone,
the Trump family probably had some indication of what Mary's 2020 tell-all would contain.
According to The New York Times, the former president's younger brother, Robert S. Trump,
attempted to file a temporary restraining order to block it from being published,
claiming that the book violated a nondisclosure agreement Mary had supposedly signed.
Unfortunately for them, they were unsuccessful. Of course, Donald wasn't going to let Mary's
allegations go unanswered. In an interview with Fox News, he told Chris Wallace,
"She was not exactly a family favorite. We didn't have a lot of respect or like for her."
Naturally, The Donald also went after his estranged niece on Twitter, calling her:
"[A] seldom seen niece who knows little about me,
says untruthful things about my wonderful parents (who couldn't stand her!) and me."
Now that the last name of Trump is so closely associated with a man she's so openly despised,
it's perhaps not all that surprising that Mary Trump has debated changing her own surname.
In an interview with The Telegraph, Mary explained that she feared how the negative
"connotations" associated with the name of Trump could impact her life in the future, saying,
"I am prepared to change my name if need be."
Considering the types of things The Donald has said about his estranged niece in the past,
including that nobody in the family even likes her, we're somewhat doubtful that he'd
be too offended if she did go ahead with altering her famous moniker. Then again,
there's no denying that in keeping the Trump last name, Mary would most likely still gain
a lot of public interest for her insider look at the Trump clan. And hey, she'd hardly be the
first political family member to disavow their relatives' politics, but keep the family name.
Ron Reagan Jr. and Porter McConnell are just a couple of examples of members of high-profile
political families who have done exactly that. Either way, despite sharing the same last name,
we don't think anyone could mistake Mary Trump for a Donald Trump fan at this point.
Check out one of our newest videos right here! Plus,
even more Nicki Swift videos about your favorite stuff are coming soon.
Subscribe to our YouTube channel and hit the bell so you don't miss a single one.