In her newly released tell-all book, President Donald Trump's niece, Mary Trump, recalls that she opted not to come out to her family after hearing her grandmother call Elton John a “faggot.”
In 1999, Mary Trump was planning to secretly marry her girlfriend on a beach in Maui, she writes in Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man. A week before her planned wedding, the Trump family gathered because her grandfather, President Trump's father Fred, was on his deathbed. However, Mary Trump opted not to tell anyone about her wedding plans based on a conversation she once had with her grandmother, Fred's wife and President Trump's mother, also named Mary.
In that conversation about Princess Diana's funeral, her grandmother had declared vehemently, “It's a disgrace they're letting that little faggot Elton John sing at the service.”
“I'd realized it was better that she didn't know I was living with … a woman,” Mary Trump writes in her memoir. She went through with the wedding and raised a daughter with her wife before divorcing.
Mary Trump also referenced the incident in an interview published Thursday by the Washington Post, in which she said the president's family routinely used the n-word and anti-semitic slurs when she was growing up.
“Homophobia was never an issue because nobody ever talked about gay people, well, until my grandmother called Elton John” an anti-gay slur, she told the Post, for a story titled, “Mary Trump says the U.S. has devolved into a version of her ‘incredibly dysfunctional family.'”
Mary Trump said the Trump family exhibited “a knee-jerk anti-semitism, a knee-jerk racism.”
“Growing up, it was sort of normal to hear them use the n-word or use anti-Semitic expressions,” she said, adding that the president is “clearly racist.”
“It comes easily to him and he thinks it's going to score him points with the only people who are continuing to support him,” she said, adding that she isn't surprised by his racist language and policies.
“No, the more divisive the better, the cooler,” she said.
Mary Trump's book, which was released Tuesday after her family challenged its publication in the courts, has already set a sales record for Simon & Schuster.
