President Trump’s niece, Mary Trump, said racism was a casual affair growing up in her family.
In a new interview with the Washington Post discussing her new book, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man, Mary Trump said hearing her family use racial and ethnic slurs was a common occurrence, noting that “a knee-jerk anti-Semitism, a knee-jerk racism” was part of her experience.
“Growing up, it was sort of normal to hear them use the N-word or use anti-Semitic expressions,” Mary Trump, 55, said.
Her book dissects her strained relationship with her family and her view of her uncle’s presidency as a “dangerous” event in United States history. Mary Trump, a trained clinical psychologist, has called the president a “sociopath” and urged him to resign.
Mary Trump said the president is “clearly racist” but added that his behavior stems from his upbringing and the family’s political cynicism.
“It comes easily to him, and he thinks it’s going to score him points with the only people who are continuing to support him,” Mary Trump said.
Mary Trump, who is gay, also said “homophobia was never an issue” because her family didn’t discuss gay people, but at one point, her grandmother used a slur to describe singer Elton John.
The White House pushed back on many of the claims made in Mary Trump’s book, asserting it is riddled with lies, and her uncle, Robert Trump, tried to block its publication in court.
Mary Trump stands by the book, including her claim about the president and others in her family, saying they stem from personal experience or speaking with sources close to her family, with whom she is estranged.
