President Donald Trump’s estranged niece, Mary Trump, says the controversy over her uncle’s construction of a new White House ballroom fits a long-running pattern that she knows all too well.
In an exclusive conversation on our Substack series Katie Couric Live, Mary said her family’s generational impulses of entitlement and control are on full display once again — this time with her uncle’s demolition of the East Wing, which historically housed the first lady’s office and a visitors’ entrance. The space is being torn down to make room for a lavish new ballroom.
“Destruction and cruelty — those are both Trump family traits,” she told Katie. “Starting, of course, with the patriarch, my grandfather Fred, who was a sociopath.”
To illustrate her point, Mary shared a story from the 1960s, when her grandfather, Fred Trump, bought the land beneath Steeplechase Park, a beloved Coney Island amusement park that had been a fixture of New York life for decades. Locals hoped to see it preserved as a landmark, but Fred had other plans: He wanted to raze the site and redevelop it for housing. When zoning laws prevented him from doing so, he staged a garish publicity stunt, complete with models in bikinis, bricks for sale, and crowds encouraged to smash the stained-glass windows of the park’s main pavilion. The spectacle, Mary said, “really revealed my grandfather to be who he was” — someone who would rather destroy something beautiful than let anyone else control it.
Mary says she sees the same destructive streak in her uncle today. “As always, with anything awful Donald does, I’m never surprised,” she said. “There’s no such thing as worst — he will always get worse, especially when the Republican Party keeps giving him cover.”
Mary called the East Wing demolition a symbol of unchecked power. “[The president is] a civil servant who lives at taxpayer expense in the White House,” she said. “He doesn’t own it. Why is he allowed to do whatever he wants? It’s a disgrace.”
For Mary, the East Wing demolition — and the projected $350 million ballroom renovation she calls “an obscene project” — is about more than architecture. She sees it as emblematic of a mindset that’s corroding the country’s institutions.
“Unless it’s made out of gold — actual gold — the term ‘quid pro quo’ comes to mind,” she said, questioning why top corporate executives from Apple, Meta, and Google are donating to such a costly project.
Mary says that erosion of boundaries isn’t limited to the White House. She pointed to a new Pentagon order reportedly requiring all 50 states and U.S. territories to train about 23,500 National Guard members as “quick reaction forces” for nationwide crowd control — including tactics like baton use, shields, tasers, and pepper spray — with full readiness expected by early 2026. Critics warn the move could normalize a militarized police force or even set the stage for federal intervention in elections under the guise of combating civil unrest.
“First of all, my dad was a second lieutenant in the National Guard, and the egregious misuse of Guardsmen kind of breaks my heart,” Mary said. “They’re there to help American citizens in times of need — natural disasters or what have you — not to police U.S. citizens the way Donald is requiring them to. To me, this sounds like preparation for declaring martial law.”
To Mary, it’s another sign of creeping authoritarianism. “The longer Donald and his regime are allowed to go unchecked, the more their actions become normalized,” Mary said. “People start accepting more and more transgressions — and before you know it, they’ve gotten used to the idea that their constitutional rights are being chipped away.”
For more of Mary’s analysis on her family’s history and her uncle’s tactics, check out the full episode of Katie Couric Live below — which also includes can’t-miss conversations with journalist Jim Acosta and Joyce Vance, author of Giving Up Is Unforgivable: A Manual for Keeping a Democracy.
