Apologies for the light posting. I’ve been working on a deadline so, in the meantime, I wanted to flag this interview that I did this afternoon with Jim Acosta, plus a bonus transcript for anybody who prefers to read.
Enjoy!
JIM ACOSTA
Right now, joining me now is the niece, former President Trump, Mary Trump. Mary, great to have you back on the program. Really appreciate your time. You heard what the president was saying last night at this fundraiser in California, seizing on what Donald Trump has been talking about recently, and I just wanted to get your reaction to what Trump was saying on Fox the other night, a dictator, but only on day one. What was your reaction when you heard that?
MARY
First of all, thank you so much for having me. It's great to be back.
We need to take Donald at his word to a certain point. We can ignore the second half of that statement. Dictators, last I checked, don't stop being dictators. And he has every intention of destroying American democracy and we need to be clear that it's entirely for his own benefit. Nothing about this is ideological. So, in that context, it was really heartening to hear President Biden be so direct about what's facing this country.
I agree that it is too early to assume that people are paying attention and we don't want that argument to get normalized, which has been part of the problem over the last seven years. Almost everything Donald does seems to be normalized, but we've seen what he's done in the past, and I think what he's starting to do now is push the envelope and get people familiar with the concept of his dictatorial tendencies so that they just write it off the way they've written off all of his other egregious anti-democratic behaviors.
JIM ACOSTA
Yeah, I mean that leads me to this question, Mary, and that is, I mean, do you think Trump would stop on day one? I mean to say he would only be a dictator on the first day. I suppose if you're the dictator on the first day, you could say, well, tomorrow I'll be dictator too, because you're the dictator at that point. I mean, what do you think? Does he stop on day one?
MARY
Every day from then on will be day one, let's put it that way. He has no intention of stopping. He knows why he needs to get back into the White House. Those reasons won't disappear on a day two or day 100. So we have to take this threat incredibly seriously. And part of that threat isn't just Donald's rhetoric, it's the reception that rhetoric receives. We heard the laughing and the cheering in that audience. We hear what his sycophants and enablers like Sean Hannity, and practically every single elected member in Congress who is a Republican, is willing to put up with, is willing to allow, and is willing to support.
JIM ACOSTA
Mary, I am sure you've been paying attention to all of this too. Trump and his aides have been giving us a sneak preview into what he is planning if he's put back into the White House, including mass deportations, Muslim ban, mass firings in the federal government going after the press and so on. What do you think a second Trump term would look like?
MARY
Quite simply, and not at all hyperbolically, it would be the end of American democracy. America would become a leading autocratic nation in the world and we would, therefore, be emboldening countries like some of those you mentioned in earlier North Korea, China, but also the pro-autocratic tendencies of countries that haven't entirely lost their way but are well on their way to, like Hungary and Turkey. So it would be absolutely disastrous not just for the future of American democracy, but the future of the Western alliance and global liberal democracy. I don't think we can overstate just how incredibly dangerous a second Trump administration would be. And we need to start preparing the ground for making those arguments now.
JIM ACOSTA
Mary, I know that you have spent some time trying to think about what's going on inside your uncle's head, as difficult as that might be. But when he uses language like vermin to talk about his political opponents, I was wondering what you thought of that.
MARY
It's all of a piece with how he's always behaved. The difference now of course is that his target audience is just getting bigger and bigger and the amount of power he has is increasing. Jim, if you had told me in December of 2020 that things would be worse now than they were then, or that Donald would have more power now than he had then, I wouldn't have believed you because it was just utterly unthinkable. Look where we are. He uses that kind of rhetoric because he knows it plays with his base, but he also uses it because he doesn't care about other human beings and we cannot afford to continue to place people like that in power because the stakes are just too high. And the consequences would just be too devastating.
JIM ACOSTA
I'm sure you saw this, Axios was reporting earlier this week that Trump is likely to elevate some of his key loyalists, put him back in the administration, and people like Steve Miller, Steve Bannon, Kash Patel potentially putting some of those folks in cabinet positions and they're parroting Trump's anti-democratic rhetoric. I want to play a little bit of this for you and get you to respond.
AUDIO OF KASH PATEL ON STEVE BANNON‘S PODCAST:
We will go out and find the conspirators, not just in government, but in the media. Yes, we're going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections. We're going to come after you.
JIM ACOSTA
Mary, do you think these are empty threats, Kash Patel saying,”We're going to go after the media?”
MARY
No, not at all. Donald has been promising to do that for years, if not decades. Anytime anybody in the media slightly criticizes him or isn't willing to toe his line, he's threatened them. The difference now of course he would have the power to enact those kinds of threats, but also they've learned a lot. We can't forget that these people made a dry run for an insurrection. It didn't quite succeed on January 6th, but it's still unfolding. We don't yet know if the attempted interaction that started on January 6th or, I should say, a few months leading up to January 6th, we don't yet know if it's been successful. So we can't pretend that these are empty words and empty threats. We cannot put anything past these people. Donald Trump and everybody he surrounds him with, including fascists like Steven Miller and Steve Bannon, are willing to do anything they have to do or feel they have to do in order to stay in power no matter how illegitimately they seize that power.
JIM ACOSTA
And what did you think when you saw the Wall Street Journal poll that came out today? Our Kevin Liptak was talking about it a few moments ago. I mean Trump ahead of Biden at this point. Yes. It's only four percentage points. Yes, we're way out in front of the general election next year. Polls can go up, polls can go down and so on. But the staying power of your uncle in all of this, after everything that he said talking about being a dictator and so on day one, does that surprise you?
MARY
It doesn't surprise me. And I think one of the taglines of Donald's ascendence in American politics is that, it doesn't surprise me but that doesn't mean it isn't shocking. It's shocking, it's demoralizing, and it's a pretty devastating commentary on a significant portion of the American electorate. And I think part of what we need to do, and part of the reason I think that President Biden's statements about Donald's attacks on democracy are so important, is because we need to start educating people about what it would mean if we lost democracy. And I think right now not enough people understand what is at risk here. And I try to comfort myself by repeating that it's many, many months out, but it is a little bit hard to square the fact that people seem more concerned about Hunter Biden's indictments than about Donald's much more serious indictments and charges.
JIM ACOSTA
Mary, I do want to take a break in just a moment, but did you think Trump would still be on the political scene at this point when he left office in 2021, did you think, okay, that's it, he's done no more of this. Did you expect him to be on the political scene the way he is right now, running to get back in the White House and having a very decent shot at it?
MARY
I think for maybe two weeks after the 2020 election was called, I sort of let my guard down, but then as soon as the big lie started gaining steam and other people, including pretty much the entirety of the Republican party, started perpetuating it; and then of course, January 6th, I knew we would come to a place like this because Donald has too much at stake in terms of whether he goes to prison or becomes bankrupt. And he has too many people helping him, so why wouldn't he try to get into the White House again?
AUDIO OF DONALD OUTSIDE JUDGE ENGORON’S NYC COURTROOM
[My expert witness] reviewed fully the documents that this horrendous Attorney General put forth, and he found absolutely no fraud, accounting fraud of any kind. This is a highly respected man. I don't know him, but he's an expert witness and he found no fraud whatsoever. He found no accounting fraud whatsoever. And like everyone else, he said, what are we doing here? What are we doing here? This is a political witch hunt.
JIM ACOSTA
And we're back with Mary Trump to talk about her uncle's legal problems that he's in the middle of right now. Mary, I did want to bump in from our commercial break with that audio because you hear your uncle there talking about this civil fraud trial that's underway in New York. He's expected to testify on Monday. He's been sort of repeating the same excuses over and over again saying that the banks weren't cheated. The banks were very happy with what he's done and how his businesses are great and so on. But at the heart of this case is how he and his company are accused of inflating the value of various assets in his empire, his business empire, his real estate empire. I'm just curious what you think about this, Mary. How important is all of this to him? And what do you think about the very real possibility that his businesses could just go up in smoke depending on what this judge decides to do?
MARY
Well, first of all, what Donald does not seem to understand, his expert witness notwithstanding, is that, as far as I'm aware—I'm not a lawyer—but as far as I'm aware, the matter of whether or not fraud was committed has already been adjudicated by the judge, and he's the only one whose opinion matters here. But because this is so important to Donald, he's going to keep pushing that narrative. In fact, I think we can say safely that there is literally nothing more important to him, certainly in terms of his legal woes, than this civil trial in New York because it gets at the heart of everything he's pretended he was for his entire life. A loss here despite, the serious financial implications, which are of course extraordinarily important to him, would also mean that it has finally been proven, if not to him, at least to many other people, that he is not now and never has been anything he's claimed to be. He's not a business savant; he's not a brilliant entrepreneur or a phenomenally successful real estate developer. He's a fraud who was enabled by my grandfather for his entire adult life, who essentially will be known as the one person most responsible for squandering his father's very real empire, which Donald had absolutely nothing to do with building.
JIM ACOSTA
Mary, I'm sure you've been following this as we have as well, but all through these trials and the process of these court cases that are on the horizon for Trump when it comes to January 6th, whether it's the federal case, the one down in Georgia, the documents case, I mean, one of the through lines in all of this is how Trump has been going after judges and prosecutors and the special counsel, and he's even talked about the clerk and the New York Civil Fraud trial. What is going on there? I mean, what are your thoughts on all of that? I mean, this is just who he is. This is what he does,
MARY
It's who he is and it's what he does. But we also need to be very clear. The reason he gets away with it and continues to do it is because he's allowed to. Nobody else, nobody else in his position would be allowed to continue attacking people, endangering the lives of people, and he has actual power. If an average person on the street was in this kind of legal jeopardy and started attacking court officers, they don't have millions of people hanging on their every word. We have court officers and prosecutors and families getting very serious death threats because of Donald's rhetoric. At this point, we need to be very concerned about stochastic terrorism, and yet nobody is willing to rein him in. And I believe part of that must be because they want to protect the case from his inevitable appeal, but it's still incredibly galling that he is allowed to behave this way because it is so dangerous, and it just shows you what a double standard there is when it comes to justice in this country.
JIM ACOSTA
At the end of the day. Mary, what do you think happens? I know it's hard to predict things this far out and your uncle, despite what folks might want to say about him, he has defied predictions over and over again. How does this country weather this storm? Does it weather this storm or does Trump get back into the White House and win and make these cases go away? What do you think happens?
MARY
I think it is almost certainly inevitable that he will be the Republican nominee barring unforeseen circumstances. So it will be a contest again between President Biden and Donald Trump. So given that, I think it's going to depend in part on the legal calendar when he has to show up which trials are going forward. But I think at the end of the day, unfortunately, too much time was allowed to pass. Too much has been allowed to get normalized. Too many lies have been injected into the bloodstream of the American voter. Way too many people think that Joe Biden didn't win legitimately. Way too many people don't take January 6th seriously anymore. So we have a lot of work to do, one, educating people, and two, just getting to the basic work of protecting democracy and helping people understand just how unbelievable it is that we're even at this place.
The idea that somebody like Donald Trump got elected once is bad enough, but the idea that he could be elected again is something that no American should want. And I think we need to make the case that this would be bad for all Americans except those who Donald chooses to enrich and empower in a second administration. I think also though, we need to be very honest about one of the biggest reasons we're here. This has been decades in the making, between gerrymandering and voter suppression and voter subversion. Democrats have to outperform Republicans in very significant ways and that cannot continue. It is unsustainable that every election in our lifetime be the most important election in our lifetime. It is unsustainable that every election is a choice between saving American democracy or falling into an autocracy. So hopefully we can get that message out because Donald is good at very few things and one of them is finding weaknesses in the system and weaknesses in people, and he will exploit those to the fullest extent that he can.
JIM ACOSTA
Alright, Mary Trump, it was great to talk to you. Thanks for giving us a little extra time in your day today. We'd love to have you back soon, but in the meantime, thanks very much. We appreciate it.
MARY
Thank you, Jim.
Also, Happy Caturday!
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