Mary L. Trump, a psychologist and the niece of President Donald Trump, warned on Wednesday that powerful Republicans have "enabled" her uncle's "creepy" behavior toward women, arguing in a new essay that he has displayed a "familiar pattern" in his comments about young women and girls. Trump, whose 2020 memoir about her family, Too Much and Never Enough, became a bestseller, has been one of the most prominent critics of her uncle from within his own family.

Her article, published on her Substack, opens with an anecdote from 1994, when Trump and his second wife, Marla Maples, appeared on the television show Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. According to her account, when the host asked Trump what his then one-year-old daughter, Tiffany, had inherited from his wife, "First, he said her legs. Then he gestured to his chest and said, 'We don't know about this part yet.'"

According to Mary Trump, "In the 1990s and aughts, he repeatedly made inappropriate and creepy statements about his daughters in which he sexualized them and made them targets of his vile musings, especially Ivanka." She cited a number of such incidents, including one particularly notorious remark in which her uncle declared, "if Ivanka weren't my daughter, perhaps I would be dating her."

In her assessment, that behavior has not changed in the three decades since. "It turns out that you just cannot keep a good sex offender down, because these are the actual words that came out of Donald's mouth the other day," she wrote, before quoting the president's recent comments. During a lengthy rant about crime, Trump said: "Now these young beautiful girls, these young, beautiful girls, these young, beautiful girls in the White House, they come in. Now, I'm not supposed to say beautiful, but what the hell? These young, these gorgeous, beautiful girls."

"Look at what we've done, America," Mary Trump wrote. "In 2016, 62 million of us voted for Donald despite his having admitted on tape that he routinely sexually harassed and assaulted women with impunity because he could. In 2024, 78 million Americans voted to elect a man who only 18 months earlier had been found liable by a jury of his peers for sexually abusing E. Jean Carroll."

The verdict she referenced came in May 2023, when a civil jury in federal court in Manhattan found Trump liable for sexually abusing E. Jean Carroll, an advice columnist who said he assaulted her in the mid-1990s; Trump has denied the allegations. The tape she cited is the 2005 Access Hollywood recording, released by The Washington Post weeks before the 2016 election, in which Trump was heard making lewd comments about women — remarks he apologized for at the time and later characterized as "locker room talk."

She continued: "Undoubtedly, many of those people cast their vote for him despite that verdict, but we need to look squarely in the face of the fact that many of them also voted for him because of it…Somehow, for the vast majority of Republican politicians and tens of millions of Republican voters, none of that was disqualifying."

In Mary Trump's view, her uncle has revealed "just how deeply misogynistic" the country is and has "shown us that a not insignificant minority of men in this country aspire to get away with the kind of crimes Jeffrey Epstein and Andrew Tate got away with for a very long time."

She closed with a reminder that "many Republicans with power enabled" her uncle, arguing that he has reinforced the idea that men are "entitled to use women and young girls however they want to and with no consequences. And why should there be any consequences, as far as they're concerned? Because look who's President of the United States of America."