Mary Trump on Sunday fiercely condemned her uncle Donald Trump’s politicization of the California wildfires, saying “one of the most frustrating things” about the president-elect’s conduct is that “none of it is surprising.”
Trump has lobbed insults at and spread falsehoods about President Joe Biden and California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) as the blazes have raged.
As of Monday morning, the death toll stood at 24. A significant number of schools, homes and businesses have been burned to the ground.
“Donald is no longer an unknown quantity,” the clinical psychologist wrote of her relative, of whom she has been a yearslong critic, in the latest edition of her email newsletter “The Good In Us.”
“After four years of his first administration, we are all too familiar with the sort of chaos he brings to already fraught situations,” Mary Trump continued.
“He has, in fact, a long, sordid history of making things worse,” she added, before noting how her uncle had “demonstrated his unique combination of ignorance, indifference, and cruelty” during multiple natural disasters during his presidency and after being voted out of office in 2020.
Mary Trump later explained her uncle’s playbook:
“What we can expect, because we’ve seen time and time again: If you need help in a crisis, but you do not kiss Donald’s ass sufficiently, he will not help you. He will use the crisis to perpetuate misinformation and conspiracy theories which will lead to a greater loss of life. He will blame the victims. He will divide us against each other.”
It echoed comments from Nicole Hemmer — an expert on conservative and right-wing media and an associate professor of history at Vanderbilt University ― who last week explained how Trump “takes these moments that used to be a time when people began to come together a little bit, at least in that period of immediate disaster when there’s shock and horror” and seeks to make political capital.