WASHINGTON — Mary Trump says that if she were in the Oval Office today, she would call on President Donald Trump, her uncle, to resign from office.
That’s a much different message than the one she relayed to him in April 2017 when she visited the White House.
In an interview with ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos to promote her new tell-all book about Trump, Mary Trump said that when she was in the Oval Office four months into her uncle’s presidency, she told him, “Don’t let them get you down.”
“He already seemed very strained by the pressures," she said in an interview with “Good Morning America, which aired Wednesday. "You know, he’d never been in a situation before where he wasn’t entirely protected from criticism, or accountability, or things like that. And I think Michael Flynn had just had to be fired, and from the get-go it hadn’t been going well, in particular."
“I just remember thinking, he seems tired, he seems — this is not what he signed up for, if he even knows what he signed up for. And I thought his response was actually more enlightening than my statement," Trump continued. "And he said, ‘They won’t get me.’ And so far, looks like he’s right.”
Asked what she would say to her uncle if she were in the Oval Office today, she responded, “Resign.”
Mary Trump, who tweeted on the night of the 2016 election that it was one of the worst nights of her life, told ABC News that her uncle is "utterly incapable of leading this country, and it's dangerous to allow him to do so."
During the interview, she also claimed that Trump was raised in a “dysfunctional” family where “money stood in” for acts of love.
“I’m a Trump. Everything is about money in this family,” she said, adding that she was different from them. “Money stood in for everything else. It was literally the only currency that the family trafficked in.”
Her book, “Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man," was released on Tuesday after a judge dismissed a legal challenge from the president's brother, Robert Trump, to its publication.
The book paints a harsh portrait of Trump and his family's history. Among the allegations, Mary Trump wrote that her uncle had someone else take the SAT for him, which helped him transfer from Fordham University to the University of Pennsylvania — a claim that a White House spokesperson called "completely false."
"I've been told this by people in my family. I am absolutely confident that it's true," Trump told ABC, adding that she never met him and isn't sure if he's still alive. "
"In terms of documentation now, I can't prove it, but I can certainly say with a hundred percent certainty that I was told the story by a source very close to Donald," she said.
In the book, Trump portrays the president's father, Fred Trump, as emotionally abusive and as having caused lasting damage to both her father, Fred Trump Jr., and to the future president, his younger brother.
"The only reason Donald escaped the same fate is that his personality served his father's purpose. That's what sociopaths do: They co-opt others and use them toward their own ends — ruthlessly and efficiently, with no tolerance for dissent or resistance," she wrote.
White House deputy press secretary Sarah Matthews pushed back on some of the allegations in the book amid initial news reports on its contents.
"The president describes the relationship he had with his father as warm and said his father was very good to him," Matthews said in a statement. "He said his father was loving and not at all hard on him as a child. Also, the absurd SAT allegation is completely false."
