Donald Trump’s sister said her brother has ‘no principles’, ‘you can’t trust him’ and he has been ‘lying’ throughout his presidency, according to secret audio recorded by the president’s niece.
Maryanne Trump Barry, 83, slammed the president for his ‘phoniness’ and called him ‘cruel’ over his controversial migrant policies where thousands of children were separated from their families and held in detention centers.
‘It’s the phoniness of it all. It’s the phoniness and this cruelty. Donald is cruel,’ she is heard saying in the recordings, obtained by the Washington Post.
The president’s older sister also dismissed Trump’s intelligence saying ‘he doesn’t read’, said he did ‘accomplish [his five bankruptcies] all by his self’ and doubled down on claims the president paid someone to take his SATs.
Maryanne made the shocking comments back in 2018 to estranged niece Mary Trump, who secretly recorded the conversation with her aunt and has since parted ways with the Trump clan following her spill-all book.
The release of the scathing audio from one of Trump’s nearest and dearest comes at a critical time in the run-up to the November election.
It casts some alarming doubt over his own family’s confidence in his capabilities in the White House, as Maryanne – and none of the rest of the Trump siblings – has never publicly criticized her younger brother or any of his policies.
Their release comes one day after Trump held a funeral service at the White House for their brother Robert who died last week – a service Maryanne appeared to be notably absent from.
Donald Trump, Maryanne Trump, and Robert Trump in 1990. Maryanne Trump Barry, 83, slammed the president for his ‘phoniness’ and called him ‘cruel’ over his controversial migrant policies where thousands of children were separated from their families and held in detention centers
Robert, Elizabeth, Freddy, Donald and Maryanne left to right. Maryanne said her brother has ‘no principles’, ‘you can’t trust him’ and he has been ‘lying’ throughout his presidency, according to secret audio recorded by the president’s niece.
Mary Trump released the never before seen and heard transcripts and audio excerpts to the Post, which she said came from 15 hours of secretly recorded conversations with her aunt in 2018 and 2019.
In one of the audio clips, Maryanne accuses her brother of having ‘no principles’ but simply making political moves to ‘appeal to his base’.
The conversation came after the president said in a May 2018 interview with Fox News that ‘maybe I’ll have to put her at the border’ about his sister who was working as a federal judge at the time, reported the Post.
At the time, Trump was enforcing heavy-handed tactics at the US border, with children torn from their parents and placed in confinement.
Maryanne made the shocking comments back in 2018 to estranged niece Mary Trump (pictured), who secretly recorded the conversation with her aunt and has since parted ways with the Trump clan following her spill-all book
Though she has not voiced her opposition to Trump’s immigration policies to date, there was a marked difference in her approach to refugees when working as a judge.
In one case, Maryanne hit out at a judge over their treatment of an asylum applicant.
‘All he wants to do is appeal to his base,’ Maryanne told her niece in the recorded phone call.
‘He has no principles. None. None. And his base, I mean my God, if you were a religious person, you want to help people. Not do this.’
Maryanne went on to slam her brother’s actions as president, singling out his ‘lying’ and his avid use of social media.
‘His goddamned tweet and lying, oh my God,’ she said.
‘I’m talking too freely, but you know. The change of stories. The lack of preparation. The lying. Holy shit.’
Maryanne slammed ‘what they’re doing with kids at the border’ and said she assumed her brother ‘hasn’t read my immigration opinions’ in court cases.
She then makes a dig at her brother’s intelligence saying he ‘doesn’t read’.
‘What has he read?’ Mary asks in the recording, to which Maryanne replies: ‘No. He doesn’t read.’
Robert Trump and his then-wife Blaine Trump, Donald Trump, their mother Mary Trump, father Fred Trump and Maryanne Trump Barry (left to right) in 1990
The audios also add weight to claims made by Mary in her tell-all memoir ‘Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man’ that Trump paid someone to take his SATs.
Mary alleges in the book that her uncle paid a friend named Joe Shapiro to take his SATs for him so he could attend the University of Pennsylvania’s famous Wharton School of Business.
She has until now refused to reveal the source of this key piece of information saying only that it was ‘somebody who would have absolutely no reason to make it up’.
But the recordings reveal Maryanne confided in her about this event in a conversation on November 1 2018.
In the conversation, Maryanne described her brother as ‘a brat’ and said she did his homework for him before someone else took his exams to get him into college.
‘He was a brat,’ she tells Mary.
‘I did his homework for him… I drove him around New York City to try to get him into college.
‘He went to Fordham for one year [this was actually two years] and then he got into University of Pennsylvania because he had somebody take the exams.’
Maryanne is heard questioning this information, saying: ‘No way! He had somebody take his entrance exams?’
Maryanne reinforces the claims: ‘SATs or whatever… That’s what I believe.’
‘I even remember the name,’ she says, before revealing their identity as Joe Shapiro.
Ex-tennis star Pam Shriver, the widow of Trump’s friend Joe Shapiro from Penn, said last week her husband never met the future president until they were at business school together – so he couldn’t have taken President Trump’s SATS.
This story is developing