Mary Trump, the president’s niece and a frequent critic, drew on her own family history this week to argue that her uncle is the last person who should be lecturing anyone about masculinity.
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In the latest edition of her newsletter, “Trump Trolls Trump,” the clinical psychologist took aim at the spectacle of Republicans posturing over who counts as manly enough, and used her firsthand knowledge of the family that raised Donald Trump to puncture it.
“I grew up in a family with Donald Trump,” she wrote, before delivering the verdict: he “knows absolutely nothing about being a real man.”
The line landed in the middle of a takedown of Sen. Ted Cruz, who had questioned the masculinity of Texas state Rep. James Talarico, joking that a stiff breeze would blow the Democrat over and mocking him over rumors of a meatless campaign and his opposition to oil and gas. Mary Trump was unimpressed with the idea of Cruz appointing himself an authority on the subject, wondering aloud what the qualification even amounts to in public office.
If masculinity were going to be defined at all, she argued, a baseline requirement ought to be defending your spouse when another man publicly insults her. That, she noted, is something Cruz never managed. She pointed back to the 2016 campaign, when Trump pushed a conspiracy theory tying Cruz’s father to the assassination of John F. Kennedy and then publicly demeaned Cruz’s wife. Cruz, she wrote, swallowed his pride and endorsed Trump anyway.
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The president, she suggested, fails the same test by an even wider margin, and she made clear she considers herself uniquely positioned to say so, having watched him up close inside the family.
The “real man” jab fits the throughline of Mary Trump’s running commentary, which casts her uncle’s behavior not as a series of gaffes but as a consistent display of who he has always been. As she has put it, nothing about him has changed.
She closed her newsletter the way she often does, framing ridicule as a political weapon: “Mockery is our superpower.”
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