Extract from The Guardian
The niece of the US president fears he could wreak more damage to democracy
Two weeks before the election, Mary Trump described her uncle Donald’s campaign to me in stark terms: “He knows he’s in desperate shape, so he’s going to burn it all down, sow more chaos and division…[and] if he’s going down, he’s going to take us all down with him.” In the Observer’s Biden/Harris victory edition, as she considered the loser’s remaining weeks in office, her tone was still edgy. “I worry about what Donald’s going to do in that time to lash out.”
The storming of the Capitol still shocked her. “What struck me first was how degrading it was. That amount of desecration. The tawdriness of it. Tawdriness is who Donald is, but playing out in the halls of Congress.” She describes the people vandalising offices, carrying Confederate flags, wearing Camp Auschwitz T-shirts – and yet Trump’s message to them was how much they were loved.
“It was the last four years in real time, distilled to its very essence, proving how much the very worst people among us have been so enabled and emboldened. It hit me later that the next people in line for the presidency were in the same room, and how unfathomably dangerous that was.”
The ramifications need addressing now, she says. “This is not a time to deliberate. It’s time to act quickly.” She believes the 25th amendment should be invoked, not that she thinks it will be by Mike Pence (“because he’s the biggest coward on the planet”). Cabinet members resigning this week are not doing so because they “cared about what happened on Wednesday” either, she thinks, but because they’re trying to avoid the political fallout.
What legacy will this leave for Republicans? “If they don’t vote to convict him, they will own this disaster for ever. It will burn them down.”
The Biden administration also has to act quickly after inauguration, she says, or it too “will be tainted”, and not just by last week’s events. Prompt investigations should begin into the human rights violations at the Mexican border, for example, and into whether last week’s riots were coordinated and planned.
“Every person that stormed – or should I say, strolled, and meandered, with impunity, arrogance and disdain – into the Capitol needs to be arrested, indicted, convicted and given serious sentences,” she adds. “They desecrated the foundations of our democracy.”
The instability of her uncle right now remains the most pressing issue. “Remember: this is the man who tried to invalidate mail-in ballots in the middle of a pandemic. This is the man who forced resignations of high-level officers in the Pentagon, replacing them with sycophants. This is why, for six hours on Wednesday, the Pentagon blocked the National Guard from containing an insurrectionist mob. Our system failed miserably because this man’s been allowed to dismantle every institution this country counts on.”
And it’s not that her uncle believes he won legitimately, she argues. “He’s never had a legitimate win in his life. All that matters is getting the win, no matter if there’s an asterisk next to it.”
With this in mind, we shouldn’t underestimate him. “In less than two weeks, he won’t have the Oval Office to protect him from lawsuits, bankruptcies and criminal indictments. I don’t know what he’s going to do, but we need to understand he’s capable of doing anything. And the clock is ticking.”
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