Mary Trump Says Racism Was the Norm in Trump Family

Mary Trump, the niece of former President Donald Trump and one of his harshest critics, said Friday that she would listen to family members being racist on a typical day while growing up.

Podcast host Karen Hunter of The Karen Hunter Show asked Mary about her family history and how she was "radicalized" despite growing up in a "semi-privileged" household.

"Was it the disinheritance?" Hunter asked, in reference to a real estate portfolio worth millions of dollars that Mary's father left for her after he died in 1981. However, the former president, Mary's other uncle Robert Trump, and aunt Maryanne Trump Barry allegedly "squeezed" her out of the inheritance, Reuters reported. Mary then filed a lawsuit against her family, but lost.

Mary told Hunter on Friday that her criticism of her family is not relevant to the inheritance case, but instead was related to their racism, including her grandparents who lived in Jamaica Estates, New York, a neighborhood that she described as "100 percent white and very upper middle class" at the time she was growing up.

Mary said that she grew up in Jamaica, New York, in the 1960s and '70s, which she said was predominantly Black at the time.

"So I walked to the subway every day to go to school and I walked home and I passed by shops that were Black-owned. Most of the people I interacted with in stores and stuff were Black and I would listen to the racism in my family, and then I'd have my own experience as a kid growing up in Jamaica. I didn't know what the hell they were talking about," she said. "You're demeaning this entire class of people and that is so far from my experience. It doesn't make sense."

Mary didn't give examples of some of the remarks made by her family members that she deemed as racist during her interview.

She continued: "My parents didn't have any Black friends and everybody at my school practically was white. It was just this weird cognitive dissonance. I just grew up with this sort of unformed notion that racism was just absolute nonsense and anybody who subscribed to it was an idiot at best."

Donald Trump's Long History of Racism Accusations

Donald Trump has faced accusations of racism in the past even long before he became president. However, he repeatedly denied the claims made by others, and said at one point that he was the "least racist person."

However, a 2021 report by Reuters revealed some instances that happened between 1972 and 2011 in which Trump was accused of racism, including the time when the FBI investigated alleged racial discrimination at residential units that were owned by Trump Management Co., which he presided over at the time, in the early 1970s. The report also mentioned that the former president also called for the reinstatement of the death penalty in a one-page ad in several city newspapers following the "Central Park Five" case.

The case involved five non-white young men who were named as suspects in assaulting a white woman in New York City in 1989. The men's convictions were overturned in 2002 after a DNA test was matched with another man who confessed to the crime.

In addition, Trump made a number of racist remarks during his presidential campaign trail where he repeatedly called Mexican immigrants "criminals" and "rapists." He also banned individuals from countries with a Muslim majority from entering the country during his presidency.

A 2019 report by the Brookings Institution, a U.S.-based think tank, said that "there is substantial evidence that Trump encouraged racism and benefited politically from it." The report cited data showing an increase in hate crimes in areas where Trump held rallies.

"First, Donald Trump's support in the 2016 campaign was clearly driven by racism, sexism, and xenophobia. While some observers have explained Trump's success as a result of economic anxiety, the data demonstrate that anti-immigrant sentiment, racism, and sexism are much more strongly related to support for Trump," the think tank's report read.

Newsweek reached out to Trump's media office and the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan for comment.