Mary Trump said she had a very visceral reaction to one particular line that her uncle, Donald Trump, said during his time in office.
The ex-president’s niece said hearing her uncle downplay the soaring Covid-19 death toll in September 2020 to Axios’ Jonathan Swan with the line “it is what it is” sent “a chill down my spine,” per an excerpt from her new book, “The Reckoning,” that was published by Insider on Thursday.
It was “a popular expression in my family” and “whenever my grandfather, my aunt, or one of my uncles had said it, it was always with a cruel indifference to somebody else in despair,” she wrote, per Insider.
“Donald had said it to me at my grandparents’ house in Queens when I’d asked him why my grandfather insisted that my father’s ashes were to be buried in the family plot instead of scattered off the coast of Montauk, as he’d wanted,” she recalled. Mary Trump’s father, Fred Trump Jr., died in 1981 when she was 16.
“It is what it is, honeybunch,” her uncle reportedly replied.
Mary Trump has become a fierce critic of her relative, once saying he had “blood on his hands” and was “directly responsible for the deaths of thousands of Americans” because of his catastrophic handling of the coronavirus pandemic.
Earlier this week, she suggested he may run for president again in 2024.