Mary Trump, a niece of President Donald Trump, said on Friday that the president is “trapped” in a world of sad lies — a mindset she traced to his father, Fred Trump, and one she argued is aggravated by a legion of flacks willing to feed his delusions.

On her Friday podcast, she described a pattern she called unmistakable. A trained clinical psychologist and the author of the 2020 best-selling memoir Too Much and Never Enough, which laid out her account of how Fred Trump shaped his son, she has been an outspoken critic from within the president’s own family, and her podcast has become a regular outlet for that commentary. Because she speaks as both a member of the president’s family and a mental-health professional, her remarks tend to draw attention beyond conventional political commentary — a dual vantage point she leaned on throughout the episode.

“How many times have we watched the Congressional hearing in which somebody in Donald’s orbit has been asked a direct question only to watch them look down at their notes for the person or institution they’re supposed to blame in order to deflect, instead of answering the question?” she said. “The pattern is unmistakable. When confronted with an uncomfortable question Donald or somebody in his orbit always redirects the accusation outward.”

At times, she said, projection and deflection are combined, with the questioner coming under attack. She pointed to the president’s habit of telling female reporters they do not smile enough, and of calling a reporter “piggy,” as well as his tendency to brand people he dislikes “stupid, nasty, crooked or corrupt.” In her view, such tactics shift attention away from questions the president prefers not to answer — and from the fact that he fails to answer them.

“Projection is a very basic and quite common defense mechanism in which a person attributes thoughts, feelings, impulses and characteristics they find unacceptable in themselves to somebody else,” she said, adding that the behavior is not simple hypocrisy because projection is “unconscious” much of the time.

“When Donald says that somebody is ‘stupid’ or ‘low IQ’ or ‘corrupt’ or ‘criminal’ or ‘traitorous,’ he’s literally talking about himself,” said the president’s niece, who added that she recognized the behavior in her uncle early in life. “He just isn’t aware of it because acknowledging those shortcomings about himself is unthinkable to him. Acknowledging those shortcomings would be to admit that he is nothing he claims to be, which is smart, strong, sophisticated, successful. The list goes on.”

Projection, she said, lets a person disown their own problems — especially humiliating ones.

Mary Trump said her uncle was trained early by his father, Fred, to regard vulnerability, dependence and failure as dangerous, and that Donald learned to deny those feelings and bury those characteristics — traits she said remain especially prominent in the president, whom she described as broken and ailing.

“Donald doesn’t have to convince the entire country of his delusional framework because the truth of the matter is it’s really just himself he’s trying to convince,” she said, adding that “there’s a significant minority of people who are willing to go along with his delusional framework … because he is also expert at convincing very weak people that they’re responsible for assuaging his pain and supporting him, no matter what.”

“Even if it’s to the detriment of their country and, quite frankly, their own detriment,” she concluded.

Her remarks were reported by Alternet.