In audiotapes that were secretly recorded in 2018 and 2019 by their niece, Mary Trump, Maryanne Trump Barry, Donald Trump’s older sister, harshly criticized the president.
Barry, 83, did not hold back when speaking about her brother, 74, and how he’s handled the presidency, in the 15-hour long recordings, which were published by The Washington Post on Saturday.
Barry, a former federal judge, said in one recording that all the president wants to do is appeal to his base and that he has no principles – adding that you want to help people, and not do this if you were a religious person.
In an effort to demonstrate she had been misled about Trump family patriarch Fred Trump Sr.’s will, Mary, the daughter of Trump’s late older brother, Fred Trump Jr., told The Washington Post that she recorded a 15-hour conversation between her and her aunt.
Barry spoke about her brother’s strict immigration policies in another recording. She said that it’s the phoniness of it all and this cruelty and that Donald is cruel.
In the recordings, Barry also claimed that Trump did not take his college entrance exams on his own, – which in her memoir Too Much and Never Enough, Mary similarly claimed (The claim was denied by the White House and called Mary’s account “absurd.”
Trump dismissed the recordings as insignificant and cited his brother Robert, who died earlier this month at the age of 71, in a statement to The Washington Post.
Mary published her book Too Much and Never Enough, which recounts the president’s alleged tumultuous relationship with his father, Fred Trump Sr., in June, and in her words – how the patriarch’s dysfunction – shaped her uncle’s politics and personality in connection with her own father’s ruin and early demise in 1981.
In the memoir, Mary writes that Donald’s monstrosity is the manifestation of the very weakness inside him that he’s been avoiding his entire life. For Donald, there has never been any option other than being positive, and no matter how illusory, to project strength – because a death sentence is carried by doing anything else; her father’s short life evidences that.
- Advertisement -Trump has heavily criticized his niece since the release of Too Much and Never Enough. Last month, in an interview with Fox News, Trump said that Mary “was not exactly the family’s favourite.”
A week after its release, Mary’s memoir was ranked as Amazon’s best-selling book. At the time, Publisher Simon & Schuster said that by selling more than 950,000 copies, Too Much and Never Enough had set a company record.