The most recent public attack on President Trump comes from his own sister. It’s an election year and the Democrats and their wingmen in the media are a little skittish about Joe Biden’s chances of victory in November. So the Washington Post made the decision to run a piece about the president’s sister and her thoughts about her younger brother the day after the family held a memorial for Robert Trump at the White House.
Former federal judge Maryanne Trump Barry was secretly recorded in 2018 and 2019 by Mary Trump, niece of Barry and President Trump. The story is that Maryanne let go with some ugly thoughts about her brother and how he is conducting himself in office. She was especially irritated about how he was handling the southern border and illegal immigration. You may remember at one time, she was still a federal judge and the president joked, “maybe I’ll have to put her at the border” to handle the increased influx of illegal immigrants.
“All he wants to do is appeal to his base,” Barry said in a conversation secretly recorded by her niece, Mary L. Trump. “He has no principles. None. None. And his base, I mean my God, if you were a religious person, you want to help people. Not do this.”
Barry, 83, was aghast at how her 74-year-old brother operated as president. “His goddamned tweet and lying, oh my God,” she said. “I’m talking too freely, but you know. The change of stories. The lack of preparation. The lying. Holy shit.”
Lamenting “what they’re doing with kids at the border,” she guessed her brother “hasn’t read my immigration opinions” in court cases. In one case, she berated a judge for failing to treat an asylum applicant respectfully.
Then Mary Trump asked her aunt, ““What has he read?” The former judge replied, “No. He doesn’t read.”
The Democrats and Never Trump crowd love this kind of story because it vindicates them, they think, about what a horrible person Trump is. Coming off the Democrat convention last week, this plays up Joe Biden’s not-so-humble boast that he will bring back decency and morality to the White House. He’s as big of a phony as anyone in the Washington swamp, he’s been there for 50 years, but he’s the new hope for light and love or something.
What strikes me is that Maryanne Trump Barry wasn’t aware her conversation with her niece was being recorded. Now, the Trump niece has used it to her own financial gain, as she wrote a book about her uncle and the Trump family that has recently been released. She is cashing in on her dislike of her Uncle Donald. I heard Chris Christie on ABC’s This Week this morning and he knows her from his days as a U.S. Attorney. He claims to know her well enough to know that the president and his sister have a strong relationship and that she must be horrified today that their niece betrayed her by releasing a secret recording just to trash the president and capture headlines in an election year.
Mary Trump is coming under scrutiny (but not too much) for some of the more outlandish claims she made in her book.
In the weeks since Mary Trump’s tell-all book about her uncle has been released, she’s been questioned about the source of some of the information, such as her allegation that Trump paid a friend to take his SATs to enable him to transfer into the University of Pennsylvania. Nowhere in the book does she say that she recorded conversations with her aunt.
In response to a question from The Washington Post about how she knew the president paid someone to take the SATs, Mary Trump revealed that she had surreptitiously taped 15 hours of face-to-face conversations with Barry in 2018 and 2019. She provided The Post with previously unreleased transcripts and audio excerpts, which include exchanges that are not in her book.
The tape also has Maryanne saying, “It’s the phoniness of it all. It’s the phoniness and this cruelty. Donald is cruel.” Allegedly it was Maryanne who told her niece that she helped Trump get into college and that someone else took the SAT exam for him. The story has a problem with the name of the alleged person who took the test for Trump, though, and that person is now likely dead. The dots of the story don’t quite connect.
It is legal to tape a conversation with the consent of one party under New York law. In this case, one person is Mary Trump.
Perhaps Mary Trump is retaliating against Maryanne for joining with President Trump and Robert Trump in a lawsuit against her over getting a larger amount of the inheritance from Fred Trump, Sr.’s estate. Who knows? Family relationships are often dysfunctional between siblings at any given time. Mary Trump’s book includes other less than favorable quotes from Maryanne against the president, which you would expect to find in such a family tell-all for the financial gain of one of the family members. Mary Trump is not exactly covering herself in glory here. Like all siblings, Maryanne and the president have had their ups and downs.
Saturday night the White House issued a statement from President Trump:
“Every day it’s something else, who cares. I miss my brother, and I’ll continue to work hard for the American people. Not everyone agrees, but the results are obvious. Our country will soon be stronger than ever before!”
This is what we can expect as the election nears – more attacks on the president from people we would assume would not be out to smear him. Never Trump Republicans are ramped up to elect Joe Biden which tells us that they never were concerned about conserving conservatism because Biden is no conservative. Disaffected Republicans who may have voted for Trump in 2016 will be featured over and over again in interviews on television and online to encourage others to go to the dark side and support Biden and the Democrats. I saw a few such interviews on ABC’s This Week this morning. The voters live in North Carolina, the location of some of the Republican convention this week. We’ll soon be seeing these interviews coming from all the swing states in play this November.
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