Mary Trump, a psychologist and the niece of President Donald Trump, warned on Friday that her uncle's impaired sense of empathy is leaving "every single one of us worse off" as the nation slides toward what she described as chaos and cruelty. As the daughter of the president's late brother Fred Trump Jr., she has spent years publicly dissecting the family dynamics she says shaped her uncle.

"Empathy is being attacked as something that is not necessary, that is somehow antithetical to human greatness, when of course the opposite is true," Trump said on her podcast. "Our ability to be empathetic is one of the greatest things about being human, and the inability to be empathetic is an egregious failing."

In her view, the dismissal of empathy has taken hold in the president's orbit because her uncle "wields his cruelty with such Joy, and he loves humiliating people who are less powerful than he is." She pointed to his recent attacks on an adult victim of abuse, a target she said he has singled out because she is a Democrat.

How, she asked, did "Donald become such a creature?" Her answer pointed to the president's father, Fred Trump, whom she described as a paragon of cruelty in his own right. It is a history she has told before: her 2020 best seller "Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man" examined the Trump household in detail, and relatives fought unsuccessfully in court to block its release.

Mary Trump then turned to her own father, Fred Trump Jr., the president's brother, who she said was a passionate TWA (Trans World Airlines) commercial pilot in the 1960s and a boat captain. According to her, he turned to flying after Fred Trump made clear that he would inherit none of the family's real estate empire.

Fred Jr. struggled with severe alcoholism and smoked two packs of cigarettes a day, which led to open-heart surgery in the late 1970s. While recovering, he was forced to move back in with his neglectful father. He nonetheless sobered up, quit smoking and petitioned the Federal Aviation Administration to renew his pilot's license in hopes of reclaiming his dream.

Rather than supporting that recovery, Fred Trump forced his son back into the family company — not as an executive, but on a maintenance crew, fixing toilets, painting and landscaping. Mary Trump said the assignment was carried out in front of former subordinates to deliberately humiliate him, and that the systematic degradation broke his spirit. He relapsed into heavy drinking and smoking with no intervention from his siblings, including Donald Trump, who personally benefited from his displacement. She said her father died in the early 1980s, destroyed and neglected.

But here's the thing," she said. "He was destroyed for the things that made him the best of them. He was destroyed for the things that make all of us better as people: his empathy, his kindness, his sensitivity, his generosity, and his passions."

"Donald is also a destroyed human being," she added, "but he is a destroyed human being that was of great use to his father. And he is a destroyed human being because he lacks all of the things my father had that led to his destruction."

She then turned to the present, asking: "So, what kind of person stands up and supports a man who paid for this despicable video in which an estranged mother … to say she's a liar, even though we know there's documentary evidence that [candidate] Amy Acton was indeed [violated] over 30 years ago by her stepfather, and her estranged mother supported it?" Acton, a Democrat running for governor in Ohio and the state's former top health official, is the figure Mary Trump pointed to earlier in describing the president's attacks on an adult victim of abuse.

"That kind of person is Donald Trump. He is the most powerful person in the United States of America … and every single one of us is worse off because of his brand of cruelty, and his love of humiliation," she said.

"It is his complete and utter lack of empathy that make all of us less," she concluded.