Mary Trump Reveals The One Comment That Her Uncle Made That “Sent A Chill Down My Spine”

Yikes.


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Mary Trump, the daughter of the former president’s late brother Fred Trump Jr., offered more details about her uncle in her newly-released book, “The Reckoning: Our nation’s trauma and finding a way to heal,” according to an excerpt obtained by Business Insider. In the book, Mary Trump tells of one comment that the twice-impeached one-term president said while he was in office that “sent a chill” down her spine. And frankly, Donald Trump has said many things that sent a chill down my spine, but as a family member, Mary Trump zeroed in one in particular. According to the book, the phrase Donald Trump used that Mary refers to is one that her family often used to minimize the suffering of others.

When Trump said, “It is what it is” to Axios’ Jonathan Swan in September of 2020 regarding the COVID-19 death toll, that hit the former president’s niece hard.

“They are dying, that’s true. And it is what it is,” Trump told Swan last year. “But that doesn’t mean we aren’t doing everything we can; it’s under control as much as we can control it.”

“That was a popular expression in my family, and hearing it sent a chill down my spine,” she wrote, according to Insider. “Whenever my grandfather, my aunt, or one of my uncles had said it, it was always with a cruel indifference to somebody else in despair.”

“She wrote that her uncle used the phrase to brush off her concerns that their family hadn’t abided by her father’s burial plan after he died in 1981 of a heart attack caused by alcoholism,” the outlet reports. “Mary was 16 at the time.”

It is what it is. 

“Donald had said it to me at my grandparents’ house in Queens when I’d asked him why my grandfather insisted that my father’s ashes were to be buried in the family plot instead of scattered off the coast of Montauk, as he’d wanted,” she wrote, adding that her uncle replied, “‘It is what it is, honeybunch.'”

Imagine being a sane person surrounded by mentally ill family members. That’s what Mary Trump’s childhood must have been like.

Featured image via Gage Skidmore/Flickr, under Creative Commons license 2.0/screen capture

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