Mary Trump blames Trump's 'sociopath' father for creating his 'dangerous presidency'

Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner.
(Image credit: TOBY MELVILLE/AFP via Getty Images)

President Trump's niece has some harsh criticism of his erratic and "dangerous" behavior — and everyone else who helped him get there.

Mary Trump's memoir, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man, paints a damaging picture of Trump's upbringing and rise to power, and has become an immediate bestseller based on preorders alone. And when discussing the book with The Washington Post's Ashley Parker, Mary Trump was not afraid to name names and assign blame.

Mary Trump blames Fred Trump, her grandfather and the president's father, "almost 100 percent" for Trump's beliefs and ultimate election. A clinical psychologist, she describes Fred Trump as a "sociopath" who led a family full of "a knee-jerk anti-Semitism, a knee-jerk racism." "Growing up, it was sort of normal to hear them use the n-word or use anti-Semitic expressions,” she added.

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It was Fred Trump who raised the president to have "an unerring instinct for finding people who are weaker than he is," while also somehow being "eminently usable by people who are stronger and savvier than he is," Mary Trump continued. But while Fred Trump was the president's "chief enabler," Trump's daughter Ivanka Trump and son-in-law Jared Kushner are largely to blame now that he's in the White House, the Post writes. They're just like Trump's "chiefs of staff who went along thinking that they could have some kind of influence, only to find that they didn't," Mary Trump said.

Read more from The Washington Post's interview with Mary Trump here.

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Kathryn Krawczyk

Kathryn is a graduate of Syracuse University, with degrees in magazine journalism and information technology, along with hours to earn another degree after working at SU's independent paper The Daily Orange. She's currently recovering from a horse addiction while living in New York City, and likes to share her extremely dry sense of humor on Twitter.