“We’re seeing a very desperate man,” Mary Trump said of her uncle, President Donald Trump, during a Thursday morning appearance on The View.
The author of the best-selling book Too Much and Never Enough was talking about the deranged 46-minute speech the president delivered on Facebook the day before, but she could have been describing any of his behavior since he lost the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden.
She described him as a “somebody who knows that his best option is to cling to power no matter who gets hurt in the process,” adding, “Obviously there really isn’t any way for him to do that legitimately. So he’s going to pursue whatever illegitimate means that he has at his disposal.”
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As someone who grew up with the president and has spent a lot of time considering his motivations, Mary Trump tried to answer the question of whether her uncle actually believes he won the election or is just claiming “fraud” to grift every last dollar he can out of his supporters before he inevitably leaves office.
“It’s a great question and it’s pretty complicated because, on the one hand, it is impossible for Donald to believe that he lost,” she explained. “You know, he’s lost before in his life, but he’s never had to be in a situation in which he can’t somehow turn that loss into a win, either through cheating or buying his way out of a jam or using somebody else’s connections and power.”
“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. So it’s putting enormous amounts of pressure on him. So on the one hand, he can’t admit it to himself because that would suggest that there’s no way for him to get out of this mess.”
But by refusing to concede, Mary Trump argued that the president is ultimately only hurting himself. “He’s making himself look like a sore loser, he’s behaving like an immature bully,” she said, adding, “It is going to increase his irrelevance after the inauguration and I think it increases the urgency for holding him accountable when he no longer has the protection of the Oval Office.”
As for the idea that Trump should preemptively pardon his adult children—her cousins—Mary Trump asked, “Why would they want that?” because it “makes them look terrible.” Especially since it doesn’t protect them from any pending state charges, she added, “so what’s really the point?”
Towards the end of the interview, after she plugged her forthcoming book about the trauma of the Trump years, titled The Reckoning, Mary Trump was asked by Joy Behar to put on her clinical psychologist hat and answer a “shrink question” about her uncle: “Is the guy crazy?”
“Well, that’s a really technical term, so I’m not entirely sure how to answer the question,” Mary Trump joked, before answering the question directly.
“He has serious psychological disorders, which wouldn't have been of any interest to us if he had no power and if he didn’t have the ability to inflict pain on other people,” she said. “The biggest problem for us now is because of those undiagnosed and untreated disorders, and his appalling lack of empathy, people are dying unnecessarily every day. Children were stripped from their parents and incarcerated for no reason.”
“So the horrors that he’s inflicted upon us with the permission and enabling of the GOP makes the fact that he is, as you say, crazy, all of our problems,” she concluded.
