Mary Trump weighed in Wednesday night on text messages sent by her cousin, Donald Trump Jr., to former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows on Jan. 6.
MSNBC host Joy Reid played a video of Trump Jr. celebrating with Meadows in a tent at former president Donald Trump's "Stop the Steal" rally prior to the Capitol insurrection. Then she played a clip of Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyoming) reading Trump Jr's messages to Meadows during the riot at a hearing this week on whether to hold Meadows in contempt.
"He's got to condemn this sh*t ASAP," Trump Jr. reportedly wrote to Meadows, referring to his father. "We need an Oval Office address. He has to lead now. It has gone too far, and gotten out of hand."
After playing the clip, Reid asked Mary Trump, "What is that about?"
"Well, obviously they were really happy with how things were going until it got out of control, and they wanted to distance themselves from it," Mary Trump said. "Donnie is a weak person, and this always amazes me, because I always thought that Donald was the weakest person I've ever known in my life, but it turns out that he has a very real skill in attracting even weaker people to him, which is I guess what happens with bullies who are given more power than they merit, unfortunately."
Mary Trump added that she thinks her cousin realized "that he made the wrong bet." Referring to the fact that Trump Jr. sent the messages to Meadows instead of contacting his father directly, Mary Trump said he also recognized "that he holds no sway with his father, and that he was not going to have the backbone to deliver a message to Donald that he knew his father did not want to hear."
Reid responded by calling Trump Jr. "pathetic," and saying that "he'll do almost anything to get in his father's favor, which he seems to shower only on Ivanka and not on anyone else."
"He made his decision a long time ago to go all in," Mary Trump said of her cousin. "Instead of being an independent person with a life independent of his father, he was going to toe the party line and run the errands and be there as a supporting character in order to be at least adjacent to the money and power."
But she added that it hasn't worked out.
"I don't think he's gotten anything out of it, and very much like his father, the people who are his supporters are people he wouldn't be seen dead with outside of politics," she said. "What is more worrisome is that it extends far beyond Donnie to almost the entirety of the Republican Party at this point."
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Mary Trump on MSNBCwww.youtube.com
