“All he wants to do is appeal to his base,” Barry said in a conversation secretly recorded by her niece, Mary L. Trump. “He has no principles. None. None. And his base, I mean my God, if you were a religious person, you want to help people. Not do this.”
Barry, 83, was aghast at how her 74-year-old brother operated as president. “His goddamned tweet and lying, oh my God,” she said. “I’m talking too freely, but you know. The change of stories. The lack of preparation. The lying. Holy shit.”
Maryanne Trump Barry: ‘I’m talking too freely’Lamenting “what they’re doing with kids at the border,” she guessed her brother “hasn’t read my immigration opinions” in court cases. In one case, she berated a judge for failing to treat an asylum applicant respectfully.
“What has he read?” Mary Trump asked her aunt.
“No. He doesn’t read,” Barry responded.
In the weeks since Mary Trump’s tell-all book about her uncle has been released, she’s been questioned about the source of some of the information, such as her allegation that Trump paid a friend to take his SATs to enable him to transfer into the University of Pennsylvania. Nowhere in the book does she say that she recorded conversations with her aunt.
In response to a question from The Washington Post about how she knew the president paid someone to take the SATs, Mary Trump revealed that she had surreptitiously taped 15 hours of face-to-face conversations with Barry in 2018 and 2019. She provided The Post with previously unreleased transcripts and audio excerpts, which include exchanges that are not in her book.
Barry has never spoken publicly about disagreements with the president, and her extraordinarily candid comments in the recordings mark the most critical comments known to have been made about him by one of his siblings. No one else in the family except Mary Trump has publicly rebuked the president.
The transcripts reveal the depths of discord between the president and his sister, illuminating a rift that began when she asked her brother for a favor in the 1980s, which Trump has frequently used to try to take credit for her success.
At one point Barry said to her niece, “It’s the phoniness of it all. It’s the phoniness and this cruelty. Donald is cruel.”
Mary Trump, 55, told The Post recently that her uncle is unfit to be president and she plans to do “everything in my power” to elect Joe Biden. Her father, Fred Trump Jr., died of an alcohol-related illness when she was 16 in 1981. In her book, she says Donald Trump and his father mistreated her father.
The Post sought comment about the tapes from Barry and White House officials on Friday and Saturday and did not receive a response. After this story posted online Saturday night, the White House issued this statement from the president that said in full: “Every day it’s something else, who cares. I miss my brother, and I’ll continue to work hard for the American people. Not everyone agrees, but the results are obvious. Our country will soon be stronger than ever before!”
‘He was a brat’
The allegation that the president paid someone to take his SATs, which was one of the most publicized allegations in Mary Trump’s book “Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created The World’s Most Dangerous Man,” stems from a conversation that Barry had with her niece on Nov. 1, 2018.
Barry told how she tried to help her brother get into college. “He was a brat,” Barry said, explaining that “I did his homework for him” and “I drove him around New York City to try to get him into college.”
Then Barry dropped what Mary considered a bombshell: “He went to Fordham for one year [actually two years] and then he got into University of Pennsylvania because he had somebody take the exams.”
Maryanne Trump Barry: ‘He had someone take his exams’“No way!” Mary responded. “He had somebody take his entrance exams?”
“SATs or whatever. . . . That’s what I believe,” Barry said. “I even remember the name.” That person was Joe Shapiro, Barry said.
Donald Trump was friends with a person at Penn named Joe Shapiro, who is deceased. Shapiro’s widow and sister told The Post last month that he never took a test for anybody, including Trump. Mary Trump has said it was a different Joe Shapiro, but that person has not surfaced.
During a Post Live interview last month, Mary Trump was asked whether the source of her information was Barry. “I prefer not to say who it is,” she responded. “It’s somebody who would have absolutely no reason to make it up.”
Chris Bastardi, a spokesman for Mary Trump, said that she began taping conversations in 2018 with Barry after concluding that her relatives had lied about the value of the family estate two decades earlier during a legal battle over her inheritance, in which she received far less than she expected.
Under New York law, it is legal to tape a conversation with the consent of one party, which in this case was Mary Trump.
The inheritance dispute was settled privately in 2001, but Mary Trump has said she was duped into an agreement because the family said the estate was worth $30 million and she later believed the value was closer to $1 billion.
Bastardi said she recorded the conversations with Barry to gain information that would show she had been misled by the family about the estate’s value. “She hoped to prove this, as is often done, by recording words contrary to their sworn statements. She never expected to learn much of what she heard,” Bastardi said.
He said that Mary believed the information was particularly relevant given the federal charges that have been brought this year against prominent individuals who took “unethical steps to get their children into college.”
The president has said he got into what was then called the Wharton School of Finance at Penn — which he called one of “the hardest schools to get in to” — because he is a “super genius.” The Post reported last year, however, that Mary’s father, Fred Jr., was close friends with a Penn admissions official. That official, James Nolan, told The Post that Fred Jr. asked him to interview his brother for admission, which he did. He was granted a place at the school, which Nolan said was “not very difficult” because more than half of applicants at the time were accepted, compared with last year’s 7.4 percent rate.
The Trump siblings have been publicly supportive of the president. The president’s other sister, Elizabeth, has stayed out of the public eye. The president’s younger brother, Robert, who died on Aug. 15, said in 2016 he supported his brother “one thousand percent.”
In 1999, when family patriarch Fred Sr. died, Barry joined with Donald and Robert in a lawsuit to prevent Mary from getting a larger amount of the inheritance. Mary had said in a probate case that she and her brother should have received an amount closer to what would have gone to their father, if he had lived.
On another matter apparently related to Fred Sr.’s will, Barry told her niece that she and Donald had a rift so serious that “he didn’t talk to me for two years.”
Barry received her undergraduate degree from Mount Holyoke College, a master’s from Columbia University and a law degree from Hofstra University. After being a homemaker for 13 years, and having eschewed the Trump family’s real estate business, she became one of only two women out of 62 lawyers in the office of the United States Attorney in New Jersey, where she worked from 1974 to 1983.
Barry has avoided talking publicly about her brother’s presidency while she was on the federal bench. In a rare public appearance, she used empathetic language far removed from her brother’s tough rhetoric.
“Success can be as simple as the warm feeling you get when you smile at a stranger, someone you know must be lonely, and having that stranger return your smile,” Barry said in a speech to graduates of Fairfield University in Connecticut in 2011.
The president, meanwhile, has publicly spoken glowingly of his sister, saying in 2016 that, “We do have different views a little bit,” while adding, “She’s a very, very highly respected judge.”
‘I will level you’
In one of the taped conversations, however, Barry revealed how a deep animosity developed between her and her brother.
She recalled how she turned to him for help when she wanted to be nominated by then-President Ronald Reagan for a federal judgeship. She believed that help could come from his attorney: Roy Cohn, who had played an infamous role in the 1950s as chief counsel to Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-Wis.) on the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. Cohn was “like kissing buddies” with Reagan, she said.
“He had Roy Cohn call Reagan about needing to appoint a woman as a federal judge in New Jersey,” Barry told Mary. “Because Reagan’s running for reelection, and he was desperate for the female vote.” Then, she said, “I had the nomination,” and Donald Trump never let Barry forget it.
According to a recent documentary film, “Where’s My Roy Cohn?” Cohn had been in regular touch with Reagan. Donald Trump met with Reagan at the White House on Aug. 4, 1983, according to presidential records. Reagan talked with Barry on Sept. 13, 1983, and nominated her the following day, according to Reagan’s daily diary.
“He once tried to take credit for me,” Barry said of her brother, quoting him as saying, “Where would you be without me?”
Barry said she told her brother: “You say that one more time and I will level you.” She told Mary that it was “the only favor I ever asked for in my whole life.” She said that she deserved the nomination “on my own merit” and that she was subsequently elevated to higher judicial posts without her brother’s intervention.
“Donald is out for Donald, period,” Barry said.
Mary questioned Barry about what he had accomplished on his own.
“I don’t know,” Barry said.
“Nothing,” Mary responded.
“Well he has five bankruptcies,” Barry said. (Trump’s companies filed for six corporate bankruptcies but he has never declared personal bankruptcy.)
“Good point. He did accomplish those all by his self,” Mary said.
“Yes, he did. Yes, he did. You can’t trust him,” Barry said.
Maryanne said on another occasion that her brother kept asking about Fox News. One day, Barry said, the president called her and said, “Did you watch Fox News?”
“No,” Barry said she told the president.
“Why not?” he said.
“I don’t watch much television at all,” Barry said she responded.
“What do you do?” the president asked.
“I read,” Barry replied.
“What do you read?” the president said.
“Books,” Barry said.
The president was incredulous. “You don’t watch Fox?”
Around the same time the conversations were being conducted, an internal investigation was underway of whether Barry violated judicial conduct rules regarding her role in working with her siblings in determining their tax liability. The investigation stemmed in part from an action that Mary Trump had taken: She had provided boxes of family tax records to the New York Times, which published a Pulitzer Prize-winning report in 2018 that found the president had engaged in suspect tax schemes that increased the family wealth.
Barry retired shortly after the investigation was launched, which ended the probe.
One of the most emotional conversations between Mary and her aunt occurred when they discussed the 1999 funeral of the family patriarch, Fred Sr., at Marble Collegiate Church on Fifth Avenue in New York City. During that ceremony, Donald spoke more about his own accomplishments than his father’s life, Barry said.
“Donald was the only one who didn’t speak about Dad,” Barry said. She told Mary that “I don’t want any of my siblings to speak at my funeral. And that’s all about Donald and what he did at Dad’s funeral. I don’t know. It was all about him.”
“I remember,” Mary responded.
Mary Trump said she has not talked to her aunt since the book was published. She said in the Post Live interview that she would not be surprised “if she never contacted me, and I think that’s fair. I understand why she would not want to.”
The Princess vs. the Portrait in Trumpworld
The first family serves up a malarkey buffet.
As long as the Trumps were hijacking the White House for their convention finale, they may as well have built a golden escalator from the Truman Balcony to the South Lawn.
That way, Ivanka could have made her power move with true Trumpian flair. In every other sense, she went for it. With her blond mane rippling, she was full-on MAGA, shoving the amped-up Don Jr. and fortissimo Kimberly Guilfoyle out of the way and positioning herself as the heir to her father’s political dynasty.
The night was so Borgia, it made sense to end it with opera. (Or they could have just played the “Succession” theme song.)
The old joke that if Trump became president, he’d slap his name on the White House almost came true during the egomania jubilee, when fireworks spelled out the name “Trump.”
Ivanka must realize now that she and Jared can never go back to their life as New York society darlings. So why not double down on Washington and lay the groundwork for a presidential run of her own?
Now that her father has turned the Republican Party into a political machine bearing her last name, she must feel entitled to jump into the driver’s seat when papa is done with it.
Her speech Thursday night was about him but it was also pointedly about “I.”
“Four years ago, I introduced to you a builder …” “Tonight, I stand before you …” “When Jared and I moved with our three young children to Washington, we didn’t exactly know what we were in for …” “I’ve seen in Washington, it’s easy for politicians to survive if they silence their convictions …” “I couldn’t believe so many politicians actually prefer to complain …” “I was shocked to see …” “I am more certain than ever before …” “I’ve been with my father …” “I sat with him in the Oval Office …” “I was with my father when …” “I promised that …” “I said that Americans needed …”
“Four years ago, I told you I would fight alongside my father, and four years later, here I am.’’
Yes, there she was, daddy’s little girl, on her imaginary escalator. The pungent aroma of the S.N.L. Ivanka perfume, “Complicit,” wafted across the lawn on the balmy night. All the dynamics that make Donald Trump’s administration, and the way he runs the country, so chaotic — the backbiting, the warring factions, the grifting, the neglect, the power grabs — were echoed in the family portrait on display this past week.
The most dramatic tableau Thursday night was not the president’s somniferous speech, but Ivanka’s scorching moment with the Day-Glo-garbed Melania.
After her speech, the first daughter strode past the first lady to greet her father. Melania, who had first smiled broadly at Ivanka, suddenly went stony.
The exchange was particularly loaded given the context: Melania’s former BFF and aide, Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, is beginning to dish on her new tell-all about the first lady, which includes accounts of conversations in which Melania mocks Ivanka.
It has been reported that Melania calls Ivanka “the princess” — Trump singled out his favorite child in his convention speech — and Ivanka has reportedly called Melania “the portrait.”
After many tugs of war, Melania has resigned herself to the fact that Jared and Ivanka run the White House. The basic view in the building is that Ivanka has wrestled Melania to a draw.
Wolkoff writes that Melania was so annoyed by her stepdaughter’s attempts to, as she saw it, infringe on her role in planning the Inauguration that she launched “Operation Block Ivanka.”
“Melania was not thrilled about Ivanka’s steering the schedule and would not allow it,’’ Wolkoff writes in a New York magazine excerpt. “Neither was she happy to hear that Ivanka insisted on walking in the Pennsylvania Avenue parade with her children.’’
The Portrait decided to try to exclude the Princess from the portrait — the “special moment” of the swearing-in.
“Yes, Operation Block Ivanka was petty,’’ Wolkoff writes. “Melania was in on this mission. But in our minds, Ivanka shouldn’t have made herself the center of attention in her father’s inauguration.”
On Ivanka’s other flank is Don Jr., who was never as favored by their father but who has morphed from family dunce to one of Trumpworld’s most effective battering rams.
Junior, as Jason Zengerle writes in The New York Times Magazine this week, “is wagering that by going all in on his father’s presidency and the tribal passions it has unleashed, he can claim his own durable place in American politics.” He has come to represent “the emotional center of the MAGA universe,’’ Jason Miller, a Trump campaign adviser, told Zengerle.
The convention speeches from Trump’s other children, Tiffany and Eric, lacked the sort of warmth and affection seen in the sweet and personal video of Joe Biden’s granddaughters.
The Trump kids’ speeches could have been given by anyone, they were so devoid of humanizing anecdotes.
Even worse, they were trying to sell a version of Donald Trump that was a total fiction. The plan, with the family and other speakers, was to push the idea that Trump is caring and informed behind the scenes — “colorblind and gender neutral,’’ as Ivanka said at the last convention.
As W. did at his convention in 2000, Trump offered a panoply of Blacks and Latinos — though some of them have said they did not know they were going to be a part of the Trump convention. With W., you could look out at the audience and see the falsity of it, since the audience was full of white fat cats. Republicans were fortunate that for the first three nights, they did not have an audience of delegates, donors and apparatchiks that would pull the curtain back on the party’s hypocrisy; though you could see a front row of white fat-cat men during Thursday’s speeches at the White House.
With hilarious euphemisms, the family also painted the potty-mouthed patriarch’s outrageous behavior and degrading language as simply colorful.
“We all know Donald Trump makes no secrets about how he feels about things,’’ Melania said. “Total honesty is what we as citizens deserve from our president. Whether you like it or not, you always know what he’s thinking.’’ And that, she said with a straight face, is because he’s “an authentic person.”
Ivanka chimed in: “Dad, people attack you for being unconventional, but I love you for being real.”
It was impossible for this to ring true, given that the president’s own sister was heard describing Trump in secret recordings made by his rogue niece, Mary Trump, as “a brat” and a liar with “no principles.” (Or, as Trump’s children would say, a totally honest people’s champion with strong convictions.)
In New Hampshire on Friday night, the president considered his dynastic possibilities. “I want to see the first woman president also,” he said, but called Kamala Harris “not competent.”
“They’re all saying, ‘We want Ivanka,’’’ he said.