President Donald Trump's effort to reframe the recently reported decoy Air Force One debacle in his favor ran into pushback from within his own family on Monday. His niece, psychologist Mary L. Trump, who has written several books about her family including the 2020 bestseller "Too Much and Never Enough," rejected the president's account, arguing that not only was he not the brave hero of the story, but that he is a "loser" — and that "everybody" knows it.

Last week, it was revealed that following a recent visit to Turkey, Trump had secretly switched planes before departing. Due to "low confidence" intelligence warning of a possible missile attack against the president by Iran, he was shuttled from Air Force One to a military plane via a food service container. The "low confidence" label is a standard analytic designation used by U.S. intelligence agencies when the underlying information is fragmentary or not fully corroborated. The disclosure raised accusations that Trump had fled while leaving unaware journalists and staffers in danger — a characterization he attempted to deflect by asserting, "I think actually the plane that I flew on was at greater risk because that would be the plane that they would be more likely to go for."

"How credible is this?" Mary Trump wondered in response to her uncle's claim. "Donald snuck off of Air Force One, got into a catering truck, secretly got onto another plane, all so he could be put at greater risk."

"Yeah," she continued in a mocking tone. "I think I was at greater risk because I know that sneaking off like a coward without telling anybody, and being in the back of a food service cart to run away, makes me look like the weak, pathetic loser everybody knows I am, and I cannot let that narrative stand."

She was far from the only commentator to take issue with the president's explanation. Barack Obama's former speechwriter Jon Favreau, for example, called the claim "the dumbest thing possible." Speaking on the podcast Pod Save America — the flagship show of Crooked Media, the company Favreau co-founded with fellow Obama administration alumni — Favreau declared, "Yeah, they'd be more likely to go for the plane you were on. Of course. Which is why they tried to put you on another plane that they didn't know about... I don't know why I say that in such a shocked way, but like that is it's just like new levels of Trump being a dips——."

"It is very, very funny that he hid in a catering cart," co-host Dan Pfeiffer, who served as Obama's White House communications director, noted.

For her part, Mary Trump is a frequent critic of her uncle's presidency. She recently took to social media to declare that he is terrible at what he loves most: golf. A week before that, she shared a clip of Trump admitting he was in the dark about news regarding China, claiming it was further evidence that he "doesn't know what's going on." That came on the heels of her assertion that the president is afflicted with an "undiagnosed condition" resulting in cognitive decline.