Mary Trump, the niece of President Trump, has said she heard her uncle use the n-word and anti-Semitic slurs.
Speaking to Rachel Maddow on MSNBC she said: ‘Of course I did. And I don’t think that should surprise anybody given how virulently racist he is today.’
Mary Trump had earlier said in a new interview about her blockbuster book that her family engaged in casual bigotry throughout her childhood.
‘Growing up, it was sort of normal to hear them use the n-word or use anti-Semitic expressions,’ she told The Washington Post. She said the president is ‘clearly racist,’ which she said was both a product of his upbringing, but also politically motivated.
Pressed by Maddow if she had heard the president use the n-word and anti-Semitic slurs Mary Trump replied: ‘Yes.’
The White House has called Mary’s allegations ‘a book of falsehoods’, adding: ‘The president doesn’t use those words.’
She told The Post that she hasn’t been surprised by the president’s racist language nor policies, including separating children from their parents at the southern border.
‘No, the more divisive the better, the cooler,’ she said.
‘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.
She described what her family engaged in as ‘a knee-jerk anti-Semitism, a knee-jerk racism.’
‘Homophobia was never an issue because nobody ever talked about gay people, well, until my grandmother called Elton John’ an anti-gay slur, she also told The Post.
That anecote was one of many memorable moments in Mary Trump’s new book, ‘Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man.’
In the book, she describes her grandmother Mary calling the choice to have John sing at the funeral of Princess Diana ‘a disgrace’ and said he was a ‘little’ six-letter slur.
She said that led to her decision not to come out to her family.
Mary Trump was secretly engaged to a woman, but had to push back her wedding because her grandfather, Fred Trump Sr., had died.
She recounts her grandfather using terms like ‘Jew me down.’
She said her father, Freddy Trump, who died at age 43 in 1981 after suffering from alcoholism, joined the historically Jewish fraternity Sigma Alpha Mu as a young man, and pondered in the book whether it was a ‘conscious rebuke’ of Fred Sr.’s anti-Semitism.
She described President Trump’s 2016 campaign as being racist several times in the book.
‘He did tap into a certain bigotry and inchoate rage, which he’s always been good at doing,’ she wrote, pointing to the 1989 New York Times ad the president took out demanding that the Central Park Five – a group of five black suspects who were cleared of assault and rape charges – be executed.
Mary Trump wrote about the Department of Justice case that accused Fred Trump Sr. and President Trump of not renting apartments to black people, though she called them allegations because she didn’t have evidence to back them up.
While not mentioned in the book, there’s long been speculation that Trump used the n-word behind-the-scenes during the filming of ‘The Apprentice,’ but the tapes have never surfaced.
She also recalled the odd scene at Ivanka Trump’s wedding to Jared Kushner when Kushner’s father, who’d been released from prison three years prior, spoke about how ‘when Jared had first introduced him to Ivanka, he had thought she would never be good enough to join the family.’
‘It was only after she had committed to converting to Judasim and worked hard to make it happen that he had begun to think she might be worthy of them after all,’ Mary Trump wrote.
The author took offense to this, adding, ‘Considering that Charles had been convicted of hiring a prostitute to seduce his brother-in-law, taping their illicit encounter, and then sending the recording to his sister at his nephew’s engagement party, I found his condescension a bit out of line.’
Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner’s wedding marked the first time Mary Trump had seen her living aunts and uncles in 10 years after her grandfather – and then grandmother – cut Mary Trump and her brother out of their wills, since their father had died.
It kicked off Mary Trump having a closer relationship with her eldest aunt, Maryanne, who’s quoted in parts of the book.
She also said that led to her decision to visit the White House in April 2017, as the family was celebrating aunt Maryanne and also aunt Elizabeth’s birthdays.
Still, Mary Trump had been a Hillary Clinton supporter and says she will vote for Joe Biden this time around, while having supported Sen. Elizabeth Warren in the Democratic primary.
She told The Post that she didn’t think her cousin Ivanka was enough of a steadying force in the administration.
‘She doesn’t do anything. She spouts bromides on social media, but either she tries to ahve an impact and fails, or just isn’t interested in having an impact,’ Mary Trump said. ‘I can’t think of one thing she’s done to show that she’s moderate or a moderating influence.’
And so she decided to make her own mark by putting out the book a mere four months before voters head to the polls.
‘I’d seen enough in the last few years to know that no one thing is going to make a bit of difference,’ she told The Post. ‘This is going to be – using the expression loosely – death by a thousand lashes, right? And maybe in this case it’s going [to] take a million lashes, so it’s more about adding to the record of egregious things that have happened and for which there has been no accountabilty.’
‘But more than that,’ she continued. ‘I also felt a responsibility to make sure that people are as informed as possible when November comes, because I do not believe that was the case in 2016 at all.’
When asked what will happen if her uncle wins a second term, she told the paper, ‘I may be in the Caribbean.’