Mary Trump on whether she ever heard the president use a racial slur: 'Of course I did'
President Donald Trump's niece said she has heard her uncle use racial and anti-Semitic slurs.
"Oh, yeah, of course I did," Mary Trump said in an interview airing Thursday night on "The Rachel Maddow Show" on MSNBC. "And I don't think that should surprise anybody given how virulently racist he is today."
Asked specifically whether she had ever heard the president use the N-word, Trump said, "Yeah."
"And anti-Semitic slurs, specifically?" Maddow asked. "Yes," Trump answered.
Trump said such language was "perfectly commonplace" among the family's older generations. "I didn't share their ideas about race and Judaism at all," she said. "But, you know, growing up with that being perfectly normal, you don't think twice about it."
Trump, who's promoting her best-selling book, "Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man," had said in an earlier interview with The Washington Post that racism was rampant in the family when she was a child.
"Growing up, it was sort of normal to hear them use the N-word or use anti-Semitic expressions," she said.
Asked whether she believed she was in personal danger by publishing the book, Trump said no.
"I'm taking appropriate precautions, certainly, because I'm not deluded about potential scenarios," she said. "He is in a position of great power, and I know my family to be quite vindictive."
Trump said that if her uncle is re-elected, it would "absolutely be the end of the American experiment. I don't believe there's any coming back from this."
If he suffers a "crushing" defeat in November, she said, the better chance there is for a "peaceful transition of power."
A White House spokesperson told MSNBC that Trump's book is "a book of falsehoods, plain and simple. The president doesn't use those words."
White House chief of staff Mark Meadows told reporters that he has known the president for 3½ years and that "not once have I heard anything like that."
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Former White House aide Omarosa Manigault Newman, who is Black, has said she'd heard a tape of the president using the racial slur during filming for NBC's "The Apprentice," a revelation that she said "confirmed that he is truly a racist."
The White House said at the time that Newman's account was made up to promote her tell-all book "Unhinged: An Insider's Account of the Trump White House."
"Instead of telling the truth about all the good President Trump and his administration are doing to make America safe and prosperous, this book is riddled with lies and false accusations," Sarah Sanders, who was then the White House press secretary, said at the time.
