JULY 14, 2020
The cover art for “Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man,”and author Mary Trump, the niece of President Donald Trump. – Simon & Schuster/ Peter Serling via AP
In an interview on the day her much-anticipated book excoriating President Donald Trump was released, Mary Trump had one word of advice for her uncle: “Resign.”
Mary Trump, speaking about “Too Much and Never Enough” one day after a judge lifted a gag order, offered a simple message about President Trump, her uncle, in response to a question by ABC News chief anchor George Stephanopoulos.
“He is utterly incapable of leading this country. And it’s dangerous to allow him to do so,” she said during a clip broadcast Tuesday on ABC’s “World News Tonight with David Muir,” adding that her conclusion is based on what she’s seen of Donald Trump over “my entire adult life.”
In an ABC News story highlighting other parts of the interview, Trump, whose book already is on best-seller lists, offered an assessment of how dangerous behaviors cultivated before her uncle became president have flowered during his time in the White House.
“I saw first-hand what focusing on the wrong things, elevating the wrong people, can do – the collateral damage that can be created by allowing somebody to live their lives without accountability,” Trump told Stephanopoulos. “And it is striking to see that continuing now on a much grander scale.”
The highlights released on “World News Tonight,” in an ABC News clip and in the ABC News story largely reflect earlier discussion of the book, whose unflattering descriptions of the Trump family and the president have been the subject of many stories by journalists who received advance copies.
In the Stephanopoulos interview, which also will be featured Wednesday on ABC’s “Good Morning America,” Trump described an Oval Office encounter with her uncle just months after the start of his presidential term.
“He already seemed very strained by the pressures. He’d never been in a situation before where he wasn’t entirely protected from criticism or accountability,” said Trump, whose father, Fred Trump Jr., died in 1981. “And I just remember thinking, ‘He seems tired. He seems like this is not what he signed up for, if he even knows what he signed up for.”
She also remembers President Trump saying, “They won’t get me,” during that April 2017 visit. “And, so far, it looks like he’s right,” she added.
The author relies on her memories, first-hand observations and various documents for the book, which survived a legal effort by Robert Trump, her uncle and President Trump’s younger brother, to keep it from being released.
In the interview, Trump, a psychologist, also discussed Fred Trump, Donald Trump’s father and a huge influence, calling him “a sociopath.’
“He was incredibly driven in a way that turned other people, including his children (and) wife, into pawns to be used to his own ends,” Trump said. “It’s impossible to know who Donald might have been under different circumstances and with different parents. But clearly he learned the lesson.”
A photograph of President Donald Trump’s father, Fred Trump, sits behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office. – SAUL LOEB, AFP/Getty Images
The White House on Tuesday referred ABC News to its previous statements about the book. The White House previously said: “Mary Trump and her book’s publisher may claim to be acting in the public interest, but this book is clearly in the author’s own financial self-interest.”
“President Trump has been in office for over three years working on behalf of the American people – why speak out now? The President describes the relationship he had with his father as warm and said his father was very good to him. He said his father was loving and not at all hard on him as a child,” the statement continued.
As of Monday, publisher Simon & Schuster had shipped more than 600,000 copies of the book, subtitled “How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man,” to bookstores across the country.
President Donald Trump steps out of his vehicle upon his return to the White House in Washington, DC, on June 28, 2020 after golfing at his Trump National Golf Club in Virginia.
Courtesy/Source: This article originally appeared on USA TODAY
