Mary Trump, a psychologist and the niece of President Donald Trump, said Thursday that an anecdote from the president's childhood explains how he grew up to be a "brat and bully," pointing to generational trauma that she argued has contributed to his becoming a "sociopath."

It is an argument she has advanced before. Her 2020 memoir, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man, made the case that Fred Trump's treatment of his children shaped the future president's character. The book became a bestseller, survived a court attempt by her uncle Robert Trump to block its publication, and was publicly disputed by the president's campaign at the time.

She made the remarks while speaking with political columnist David Rothkopf, describing a household in which the future president was left largely unsupervised as a young child while his mother, Mary Anne MacLeod Trump, was seriously ill.

"The problem for all of us right now is that when Donald was very young, my grandmother, his primary caregiver, was essentially absent," Mary Trump explained. "She was very ill, which left it to my grandfather, who was a sociopath, to care for his five children. At that time, Donald was ignored and left alone. We're all reaping the damage that was done and never undone. Over time, he became a brat and a bully, and nobody ever reined him in."

"It's pathological at this point," she continued, noting that she is also troubled by the aides and Republicans who have enabled his "temper tantrums."

In her view, the willingness of those around the president to accommodate his behavior has outlasted any political rationale. "There was a time when one could make sense of it from the perspective that these are petty people who need to cling to power or maintain proximity to it," she said. "But now that Donald seems more of a liability, their behavior hasn't changed, suggesting two camps exist: those who are cowardly and afraid and can't muster a critical mass to stand up against him, and true believers who have drunk the Kool-Aid."

Rothkopf pressed on that point. "We hear the term enabler a lot, but 'enabler' is too passive," he said. "If someone is an enabler of a known sociopath, it's worse, right?"

"Oh, they're co-conspirators," Mary Trump asserted. "They are equally responsible for all of this. You mentioned a known sociopath; he's doing the damage a sociopath could do. The crimes he has openly committed and acknowledged are known to us. We know how many times he has been in the Epstein Files. We know that he pardons frauds and covers up for pedophiles. As you said, that doesn't touch the damage he's inflicting through his crazy policies."

It is not the first time Mary Trump has suggested that her grandfather contributed to her uncle's questionable mental health, or that she has drawn parallels between the two men's decline. "Alzheimer's runs in my family," she said in early September. "I sometimes see similarities Donald and my grandfather, Fred Trump, who developed Alzheimer's sometime in his late seventies or early eighties, which is to say when he was around Donald's age."

"What they have in common is that they do not always seem oriented to time and place," she added. "The first time I saw this with my grandfather, we were at an event in Brooklyn at which he and my grandmother were being honored … My grandfather was standing next to my uncle Rob when he grabbed Rob's arm and suddenly looked like a deer in the headlights. I had never seen my grandfather look like that before. He looked terrified, as if he had no idea where he was or who he was with. I'm beginning to see that look in Donald's eyes sometimes."