Mary Trump on Trying to Reach Out to Uncle Donald: ‘Useless’

Donald Trump’s estranged niece described the prospect of reconciling with her famous uncle as “spine-chilling.”

Mary Trump is the daughter of the former president’s brother, Fred Trump Jr., and she has long been a vocal critic of her uncle’s political decisions. The psychologist and writer was asked to analyze Trump’s personality and how his family life may have shaped him during a recent episode of actor David Duchovny’s podcast, Fail Better.

The X-Files star asked her about her tell-all books regarding Trump, including Too Much and Never Enough (2020) and 2021’s The Reckoning: Our Nation’s Trauma and Finding a Way to Heal, which explored her uncle’s tenure in the White House.

“Correct me if I’m wrong, but your books, while they’re speaking to the general public, [they’re] not just about your position in the Trump family or Donald Trump,” Duchovny began.

“It’s really about how we educate and how we raise our kids, is really what I see your mission as ultimately, and I can’t help but feel you’re trying to speak to the man as well.”

Duchovny questioned whether Mary Trump was trying “corner” her uncle in order to empathize with him over what she described as a hard childhood as a means of convincing him that it was his upbringing that shaped him into the person he is today and ultimately, led him to the political decisions he has made.

“Are you trying to reach him? Is that in any way in the back back of your mind when you’re when you’re writing?” he asked.

An astonished Mary Trump admitted: “You just blew my mind. That’s fascinating, it’s just sent a bit of a chill down my spine.”

She continued by saying Trump’s pursuit of power was a “tragedy and it has become everybody’s tragedy at this point,” so it “would be useless,” to try and reach out to him.

“And that’s the saddest thing because he’s decades past that kind of intervention, I wish for everybody’s sake, but particularly for that little boy’s sake that somebody had intervened when it would have made a difference,” Mary Trump said.

The writer added she wished “somebody had hugged him and taught him how to find joy, and taught him ‘that it’s okay to laugh at yourself and that it’s okay to be vulnerable.’

“Vulnerability opens you up to a world of extraordinary beauty, and all sorts of other things we need to be fully realized human beings.

“You know he doesn’t experience any of that and it’s the emptiest, saddest life. But unfortunately, it also has made him a deeply cruel person.”

Newsweek contacted Trump’s representatives by email for comment.

Trump is making a third run at the White House as the Republican nominee after losing the 2020 election to Joe Biden.