Mary Trump says president sees illness as sign of
'unforgivable weakness'
Donald Trump’s niece tells NPR US is in a ‘horrible
place’ because president and his father saw any malaise as unacceptable
Helen
Sullivan
@helenrsullivan
Mon 5 Oct
2020 07.49 BSTFirst published on Mon 5 Oct 2020 05.27 BST
Mary Trump,
the niece of Donald Trump, has said the United States is “in the horrible place
we’re in” because members of the family, including the president, see illness
as “a display of unforgivable weakness” whether it is in themselves or others.
Speaking on
NPR’s All Things Considered, Mary Trump, who recently published a tell-all book
about her family, said: “That’s why we’re in the horrible place we’re in,
because he cannot admit to the weakness of being ill or of other people being
ill.”
She spoke
as the US president was criticised by doctors for unnecessarily exposing his
staff and his security detail to coronavirus by performing a drive-by to wave
to supporters outside Walter Reed military medical center where he is being
treated for the disease.
Mary Trump
is suing the president and two of his siblings, alleging that they cheated her
out of millions of dollars over several decades while squeezing her out of the
family business.
On Sunday,
Mary Trump said both the president and his father, Fred Trump, held the view
that illness was “unacceptable”. “Which sounds incredibly cruel, but happens to
be true,” she said.
She
recounted the way this belief affected her grandmother, who had osteoporosis,
saying that she would return from the hospital and need care and physical
therapy, but that her grandfather, Fred Trump, “was unable to tolerate it. You
know, he’d be in the room with her. And as soon as she started showing that she
was in physical pain, he would say ‘everything’s great, right. Everything’s
great.’ And he’d leave the room.”
Asked how
the reaction to illness was expressed, Mary Trump said that the attitude was
driven by the fact that her grandfather was “never sick. Ever.”
Donald
Trump entered the 2020 pandemic already practising many of the measures that
epidemiologists have been calling for – avoiding ill people, frequent
handwashing and use of alcohol gels, and eschewing handshakes.
As far back
at 1993, he told radio host Howard Stern that he suffered “germ phobia”,
admitting it “could be a psychological problem”. A year ago, the president’s
mindset was thrust into the open when he was filmed reacting strongly to
coughing in the Oval Office. “I don’t like that. If you’re going to cough,
please, leave the room,” Trump said, shaking his head.
According
to Politico, during the 2016 election campaign it was his then-spokeswoman Hope
Hicks – who possibly transmitted Covid-19 to Trump last week – who would be on
standby to offer Trump squirts of hand sanitiser.
Fred
Trump’s adherence to the philosophies of Norman Vincent Peale, an American
minister and motivational speaker who was close to the Trump family and
officiated at Trump’s first marriage, was taken to “such an extreme level that
it was toxic because it left no room for expressions of what he considered
negativity of any kind, you know, sadness, despair, being physically ill,” Mary
Trump said.
Friedrich
Trump, Mary Trump’s great grandfather and the president’s grandfather, was
killed by Spanish influenza in the 1918 pandemic, something Mary Trump said her
uncle “seems to have forgotten”.
Additional reporting by Oliver Holmes
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