Donald Trump with Donald Trump, Jr. and Ivanka Trump on January 4, 2021, Wikimedia Commons
On Wednesday, a family member of President Donald Trump warned that powerful Republicans have “enabled” his “creepy” behavior toward women. This is according to his niece, psychologist Mary L. Trump, who detailed her uncle’s “familiar pattern” toward young women and girls.
She begins by relating an anecdote from 1994, when Trump and his second wife, Marla Maples, appeared on the television show Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. When the host asked Trump what his then one-year-old daughter Tiffany had inherited from his wife, “First, he said her legs. Then he gestured to his chest and said, ‘We don’t know about this part yet.’” According to Mary Trump, “In the 1990s and aughts, he repeatedly made inappropriate and creepy statements about his daughters in which he sexualized them and made them targets of his vile musings, especially Ivanka.” Mary Trump notes a number of such incidents, including one particularly notorious one in which her uncle declared, “if Ivanka weren’t my daughter, perhaps I would be dating her.”
His behavior hasn’t changed over the past 30 years, asserts Mary Trump, writing, “It turns out that you just cannot keep a good sex offender down, because these are the actual words that came out of Donald’s mouth the other day.” Here she quotes the president, who during a lengthy rant about crime included this strange tidbit: “Now these young beautiful girls, these young, beautiful girls, these young, beautiful girls in the White House, they come in. Now, I’m not supposed to say beautiful, but what the hell? These young, these gorgeous, beautiful girls.”
“Look at what we’ve done, America,” writes Mary Trump. “In 2016, 62 million of us voted for Donald despite his having admitted on tape that he routinely sexually harassed and assaulted women with impunity because he could. In 2024, 78 million Americans voted to elect a man who only 18 months earlier had been found liable by a jury of his peers for sexually abusing E. Jean Carroll. Undoubtedly, many of those people cast their vote for him despite that verdict, but we need to look squarely in the face of the fact that many of them also voted for him because of it…Somehow, for the vast majority of Republican politicians and tens of millions of Republican voters, none of that was disqualifying.”
According to Mary Trump, her uncle has revealed “just how deeply misogynistic” the country is, and has “shown us that a not insignificant minority of men in this country aspire to get away with the kind of crimes Jeffrey Epstein and Andrew Tate got away with for a very long time.” She concludes with a reminder that “many Republicans with power enabled” her uncle, who has reinforced the idea that men are “entitled to use women and young girls however they want to and with no consequences. And why should there be any consequences, as far as they’re concerned? Because look who’s President of the United States of America.”