Mary L Trump, Donald Trump’s niece, said her uncle should resign as she gave a scorched-earth interview Tuesday to ABC News following the publication of her new book about the president and his family.
“He is utterly incapable of leading this country,” Mary Trump said in an interview with ABC host George Stephanopoulos. “And it’s dangerous to allow him to do so, based on what I’ve seen my entire adult life.”
“If you were in the Oval Office today, what would you say to him?” Stephanopoulos asked at one point in the interview.
“Resign,” she said.
The full interview will air Wednesday on “Good Morning America.”
Mary Trump’s controversial book, “Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man,” was published Tuesday after a highly publicised court battle. The president’s younger brother, Robert Trump, had sued for a temporary restraining order last month, saying the contents of the book violated a nondisclosure agreement she signed in 2001 to end a bitter court battle over a family estate. Her father was Fred Trump Jr, who died in 1981.
A judge, however, rejected the claim and said earlier this month that Simon & Schuster could move forward with publication and was not bound by the terms of the deal, noting thousands of copies had already been printed and shipped.
A New York Supreme Court judge also ruled Monday that Mary Trump was free to speak about the book, saying the nondisclosure agreement she signed was not specific enough to silence her.
“Too many words, with too many meanings,” the judge, Hall Greenwald, said in a terse decision. “The cost of the litigation that was settled should have been finalised with more specifics, more clarity, if the current situation was even comprehended, at the time the Agreement was signed.”
The book includes several shocking claims about the president as well as allegations that her uncle “dismissed and derided” his father, Fred Trump Sr., when he was suffering from Alzheimer’s disease.
“If he is afforded a second term, it would be the end of American democracy,” Mary Trump writes at one point.
The White House has rejected the claims made in the book, saying simply: “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.”
In her interview with Stephanopoulos, she went on to say America had championed the wrong person and urged voters not to do so once more.
“I saw firsthand 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,” she said. “And it is striking to see that continuing now on a much grander scale.”