When President Donald Trump calls a rival stupid, corrupt or criminal, the psychologist in his own family hears a description of her uncle.
Mary Trump, a clinical psychologist and the daughter of the president’s late brother Fred Trump Jr., made that argument in her newsletter, “The Good in Us,” on Friday, Oct. 16, 2026, where she wrote that “every accusation Donald makes is really a confession.”
Why She Says It Isn’t Hypocrisy
What her uncle is doing, in her reading, is projection — the defense mechanism in which a person pins traits they can’t accept in themselves onto somebody else. She drew a line between that and simple hypocrisy, noting that projection usually runs beneath a person’s own awareness.
“When Donald says that somebody is stupid, has a low IQ, or is corrupt, criminal, or traitorous, he is literally talking about himself,” she wrote. “He just isn’t aware of it because acknowledging those shortcomings in himself is unthinkable to him.”
She traced the reflex back two generations, to her grandfather Fred Trump Sr., who in her telling sorted the world into winners and losers and held the losers in deep contempt. Her own father landed in that second category, she wrote. Fred Trump Jr. died in 1981 at 42, and his younger brother, she argued, learned early that any flash of weakness had to be buried. It is the same family portrait she drew in her 2020 bestseller, “Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man,” in which she wrote that her uncle’s ego is a fragile thing requiring constant propping up.
The Rivals He Wants Behind Bars
The pattern shows up most clearly, she argued, in two places: his refusal to accept the 2020 election result and his repeated calls to jail opponents, a roster that includes former special counsel Jack Smith, Hillary Clinton, former Presidents Joe Biden and Barack Obama, and New York Attorney General Letitia James. When investigators turn toward him, she wrote, he recasts them as the criminals.
“Donald, stop looking in a mirror when you say these things,” she wrote.
The numbers behind the 2020 half of her argument are considerable. A Reuters count found the president repeated his false claim of a 2020 win at least 107 times in the six months to May; the review, published Tuesday, May 26, found he raised it in at least six meetings with foreign leaders and posted it seven times in a single day in April. Courts and state officials found no evidence of mass fraud that year, and Biden won by about seven million votes. The same day her newsletter landed, Trump repeated the claim at a Georgia rally, three days after the state opened early voting on Tuesday, Oct. 13.
Space Force Uniforms and an Upside-Down Iran
This is not her first long-distance assessment of the year. After a weekend in which Trump flooded Truth Social with AI-generated images — trading stocks from the Resolute Desk, modeling Space Force uniforms, dropping bombs from a space station, and an upside-down map of Iran rendered in orange and shaped into his own profile — she took to X on Sept. 6.
“Donald is decompensating in real time—just look at the insanity he’s posted on social media today,” she posted, renewing her demand that Republicans invoke the 25th Amendment and faulting lawmakers for leaving him in place. She first made that call in January 2021, in an interview with the Observer.
The Aide With the Mini Printer
In an interview with former CNN correspondent Jim Acosta reported Aug. 28, Mary Trump, 61, turned her attention to executive assistant Natalie Harp, 35, who earned the nickname “human printer” by trailing the 80-year-old president with a mini printer and a steady supply of flattering news clips on a taxpayer-funded salary of $150,000. The arrangement, she said, makes her uncle look like a pathetic, frail and needy old man, and she called Harp a national security threat. Harp’s leaked letters to the president, she added, read to her as a cry for help. The White House has previously described Harp as loyal and hard-working.
Her newsletter post went out 18 days before a midterm vote that will decide control of Congress, and she ended it on a point about audience. The country, she argued, is not really the one her uncle is working so hard to persuade. He is, in her view, trying to convince himself.
