The president’s niece has spent years telling readers what she thinks is behind his insults, and her latest answer is that he is describing himself.
Mary Trump, a clinical psychologist and the daughter of the president’s late brother Fred Trump Jr., argued in her newsletter “The Good in Us” on Friday, Oct. 16, that President Donald Trump’s attacks on his rivals work as self-portraits. “every accusation Donald makes is really a confession,” she wrote.
She framed the behavior as projection rather than hypocrisy — a defense mechanism in which a person pins traits he cannot accept in himself onto somebody else, usually beneath his own awareness.
“When Donald says that somebody is stupid, has a low IQ, or is corrupt, criminal, or traitorous, he is literally talking about himself,” she wrote. “He just isn’t aware of it because acknowledging those shortcomings in himself is unthinkable to him.”
Mary Trump, 61, addressed the 80-year-old president directly in the same post: “Donald, stop looking in a mirror when you say these things,”
“Donald can never be the bad guy in his own mind,” she added. “He is full of grievance. He is the perpetual victim, and the rest of us can never, ever, ever be allowed to forget it.”
The Jail List She Reads Backward
She argued the pattern shows clearest in two places: his refusal to accept the 2020 result, and his calls to jail opponents. Her newsletter named former special counsel Jack Smith, Hillary Clinton, former Presidents Joe Biden and Barack Obama, and New York Attorney General Letitia James. When investigators turn toward him, she claimed, he recasts them as the criminals.
A Reuters review published Tuesday, May 26, counted the false claim of a 2020 win repeated at least 107 times in the six months to May. The president raised it in at least six meetings with foreign leaders, according to that review, and posted it seven times in a single day in April. Courts and state officials found no evidence of mass fraud that year, and Biden won by about seven million votes.
Trump repeated the claim at a Georgia rally the same day the newsletter went out. Georgia opened early voting on Tuesday, Oct. 13, three days before the rally.
White House spokeswoman Lauren Bis said Thursday, Oct. 15, that the president is right and that every legal vote must count — the administration’s response to his 2020 claim.
Eighteen Days Before the Vote
The newsletter landed 18 days before a midterm vote deciding control of Congress. Voters will fill all 435 House seats on Nov. 3.
Election expert Alexandra Chandler of the nonpartisan group Protect Democracy told Reuters in May: “He’s not looking back; this is about the midterms.” Experts say the claim could help Trump challenge Republican losses in November.
Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy, who had backed Trump’s impeachment after the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol attack, lost his Republican primary in May after Trump declined to endorse him. “You don’t claim the election was stolen,” he said as he conceded.
An Orange Iran Shaped Like Him
In early September, Truth Social filled with AI-generated images of the president trading stocks from the Resolute Desk, modeling Space Force uniforms, dropping bombs from a space station, and an upside-down map of Iran rendered in orange and shaped into his own profile.
“Donald is decompensating in real time—just look at the insanity he’s posted on social media today,” she posted on X on Sept. 6. In that post she renewed her demand that Republicans invoke the 25th Amendment and faulted lawmakers for leaving him in place. She first made that call in January 2021.
The Aide Called a Human Printer
In an interview with former CNN correspondent Jim Acosta reported Aug. 28, Mary Trump turned to executive assistant Natalie Harp, 35, nicknamed the “human printer” for trailing the president with a mini printer and a steady supply of flattering news clips on a taxpayer-funded $150,000 salary.
The arrangement makes her uncle look like a pathetic, frail and needy old man, Mary Trump said, and she called Harp a national security threat. She read Harp’s leaked letters to the president as a cry for help. The White House has previously described Harp as loyal and hard-working.
Her grandfather, Fred Trump Sr., sorted the world into winners and losers and held deep contempt for the losers, she wrote, placing her own father in that second category. Mary Trump has described Fred Trump Sr. as “a high-functioning sociopath.” Fred Trump Jr. died at 42 of a heart attack related to alcoholism.
Donald Trump “learned very early on that vulnerability, dependence, and failure were dangerous,” she wrote. “Being kind, empathetic, and sensitive, in addition to being vulnerable, also made you a loser in Fred Trump’s world.”
She drew the same family portrait in her 2020 bestseller, “Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man,” which described her uncle’s ego as a fragile thing requiring constant propping up.
She closed on the question of audience. The country is not the one he is working to persuade, she wrote — he is trying to convince himself.
