Old audio from 2020 is circulating again. It captures a private phone call between Donald Trump’s older sister, former federal judge Maryanne Trump Barry, and Trump’s niece, Mary Trump. The recording is from around 2019, and Maryanne did not hold back at all.
In the call, she complained about Trump’s nonstop tweeting and what she called his constant lying. She said his stories always changed and that he never prepared for anything. She also criticized how the Trump administration treated migrant children at the border. She said he had always been this way.
Maryanne talked about Trump’s childhood and called him a brat. She said she believed he cheated his way into the University of Pennsylvania by having someone else take his entrance exams. She said Trump only cares about himself. In her own words, “Donald is out for Donald.” She also said he had no principles at all.
A lot of what she said lines up with Trump’s actions during and after his first presidency. She mentioned cruelty toward migrant families, which matches the family separation policy that became widely known. She also talked about him playing to his base, which has been a big part of his political strategy. Her comments about lying and not preparing match years of fact checking during both his campaigns and presidency.
This was one of the rare times someone from Trump’s own family openly said they did not trust him. It was even more shocking because Maryanne almost never spoke publicly about her brother.
That same year, Trump’s niece, Mary, released her book titled Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man. In it, she describes Trump’s upbringing and says the family’s wealth and attitude shaped his sense of entitlement. Maryanne’s claim about someone taking Trump’s exams fits with the picture Mary painted in her book, although the man Maryanne named, Joe Shapiro, is no longer alive and his family denied it.
Maryanne passed away in 2023. Her private words and Mary’s book show that people inside Trump’s own family had been sounding alarms for a long time. But with Trump returning to office for a second, non-consecutive term, it seems many people either did not hear the warnings or chose to ignore them.