President Donald Trump’s niece, Mary Trump, said she was “devastated” by her “pathetic” uncle’s 2016 presidential victory, noting his “policies were designed to be cruel.”
“I handled the 2016 election ... badly. I was devastated by it,” Mary Trump told BBC’s Samira Ahmed onstage at the Hay Festival in Wales on Tuesday. “I took it really personally because it felt, once again, like the worst person on the planet is being elevated at the expense of better people.”
Mary Trump, who has been estranged from her uncle, appeared at the festival to promote her new book, “Who Could Ever Love You,” a memoir that dives deeper into her family’s relationship with the now-president.
Mary Trump told moderator Ahmed that she knew her uncle’s presidency was “going to be unspeakably awful,” citing “specific policies and the ways in which those policies were designed to be cruel and to have a devastating impact on the most vulnerable people in the country.”
“I think one of the reasons I took 2016 so personally, because it felt like — I guess, 62 million people voted for him — it felt like they were voting to turn America into my family, which is a bad idea. It’s just a terrible idea,” the writer said. “And now that’s much, much more pronounced, right?”
