In new book, Mary Trump says Donald Trump appeared 'afraid' after COVID-19 hospitalization

In The Reckoning, the follow-up to her 2020 memoir Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man, Mary Trump argues that her uncle Donald Trump's presidency helped push the United States toward "an even darker period in our nation's history."

The book has been seen by The Guardian, which reports that Mary Trump writes extensively about how Americans are collectively experiencing trauma because of Donald Trump and his "assault on democracy." She also describes what it was like watching on television last October when her uncle was released from the hospital after spending three days receiving treatment for a severe case of COVID-19.

Trump was flown back to the White House by helicopter, and after landing on the South Lawn, made his way up to the Truman Balcony. His niece writes that when he ripped his mask off, Trump was doing his "best Mussolini imitation," and what he thought was a "macho display of invulnerability" looked familiar to her.

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"He clenched his teeth and jutted out his jaw, just as my grandmother did when she was biting back anger or clamping down on her pain," Mary Trump writes. "In Donald, I saw the latter." Mary Trump said she has asthma, and as such is "acutely aware of what it looks like when somebody is struggling to breathe. He was in pain, he was afraid, but he would never admit that to anybody — not even himself. Because, as always, the consequences of admitting vulnerability were much more frightening to him than being honest." Read more at The Guardian.