Mary Trump Says Trump's Insults Are a 'Confession', Citing at Least 107 False 2020 Claims in Six Months

Mary Trump, the president's niece and a clinical psychologist, says Donald Trump's favourite insults describe him. In her newsletter, The Good in Us, on Friday 16 October, she wrote that 'every accusation Donald makes is really a confession.' Her post appeared 18 days before the midterm vote that decides who runs Congress.

Mary Trump calls the pattern projection, a defence mechanism in which people attribute their unwanted traits to others. She cites a Reuters count of her uncle's false claim of a 2020 win. The total reached at least 107 in the six months to May. On 16 October, Trump repeated the claim at a rally in Georgia.

The Family History Behind Her Argument

Mary Trump wrote a 2020 family memoir, Too Much and Never Enough, and has criticised her uncle for years. She lists the words he aims at rivals, such as corrupt, crooked, fake, and rigged. Projection often happens without the person knowing it, she says, which is why she does not call it hypocrisy. She traces the pattern to her grandfather, Fred Trump Sr., who split people into winners and losers.

In Mary Trump's telling, her father, Fred Trump Jr., was among those losers. Donald saw what happened to his brother, who died in 1981, and learned to hide his feelings. The same reflex shows now in how her uncle talks about Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, and former special counsel Jack Smith. When investigators look into Trump himself, she writes, he calls them criminals and calls the judges' ruling against him corrupt.

What Republican Voters Believe About 2020

Reuters published its review, built from Trump's public appearances, interviews, and posts, on Tuesday, 26 May. He mentioned the claim almost every day. He raised it in at least six meetings with foreign leaders and at White House Hanukkah and Christmas events. On one Saturday in April, he posted it seven times. A Reuters/Ipsos poll that month measured how far the claim had spread among Americans, as the chart below shows.

Courts and state officials found no evidence of mass fraud in 2020, and Federal Election Commission figures show Biden won by about seven million votes. Election experts said the claim could help Trump challenge Republican losses in November. Alexandra Chandler of the nonpartisan group Protect Democracy told Reuters in May: 'He's not looking back; this is about the midterms.' On Thursday, 15 October, White House spokeswoman Lauren Bis told HuffPost that Trump is right and every legal vote must count.

Republican Pushback Before Polling Day

Some Republicans have pushed back in public. In May, Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy lost his Republican primary after Trump declined to endorse him, then said as he conceded: 'You don't claim the election was stolen.' Cassidy had backed Trump's impeachment after the attack on the Capitol on 6 January 2021.

Mary Trump writes that her uncle is mainly trying to convince himself, while a large minority of Americans go along with him. She argues that those supporters stay loyal even when it hurts them. Georgia opened early voting on Tuesday, 13 October, three weeks before voters fill all 435 House seats.