During an interview with the Associated Press, President Donald Trump’s niece Mary Trump slammed her uncle as “criminal, cruel and traitorous” and said he belongs in prison after he leaves the White House.
“It’s quite frankly insulting to be told time after time that the American people can handle it and that we just need to move on,” she told The AP while rejecting the notion that putting a former president on trial would deepen the nation’s political divisions.
“If anybody deserves to be prosecuted and tried, it’s Donald. Otherwise, we just leave ourselves open to somebody who, believe it or not, is even worse than he is,” Mary Trump, a psychologist, said of her estranged relative, Nevada CBS affiliate 8NewsNow reported via the AP.
Mary Trump said the president’s post-election behavior “makes perfect sense,” given his personality, psychology, and lifelong disdain for losers.
“This is somebody who’s never won legitimately in his life,” she said. “But he’s never lost either. Because in his view, winning is so important and he always deserves to win that it’s OK to lie, cheat and steal.”
Mary Trump said the president inherited his acerbic behavior from his father, Fred Trump, a real estate developer who died in 1999. She called her grandfather “a horrible human being who just reveled in other people’s humiliation.”
“It’s not simply that Donald is horrible and incompetent and cruel, it’s that he’s been allowed to be,” she said. “Every transgression that’s gone on unpunished has been an opportunity for him to push the envelope even further. That’s partially why we’re going to see him smashing as much stuff on his way out the door as he can.”
Mary Trump acknowledges that she has seen the president only sporadically over the last 20 years — she wrote in “Too Much and Never Enough” that he invited her to a family dinner at the White House in 2017 — but, she argues, “he hasn’t changed at all.”
“I’m essentially looking at the same person I knew when I was growing up,” she said.
Donald Trump is facing at least one pending criminal investigation, a probe into his business dealings by the Manhattan district attorney that has been slowed by a legal fight over access to his tax returns. No ex-president has ever been arrested after leaving office, but Mary Trump argues that shielding powerful people from punishment has historically harmed the country. She used Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s post-war absolution as an example.
“I think it would be a tragedy if Donald and everybody who’s enabled him and committed crimes with him is not held accountable,” Mary Trump said. “It would make it impossible for this country to recover in the long term.”
Read more at the Associated Press.
