- President
Donald Trump 's niece,Mary Trump , told MSNBC's Rachel Maddow on Thursday that she had witnessed her uncle use the N-word and anti-Semitic slurs. - "Of course I did," she told Maddow. "And I don't think that should surprise anybody given how virulently racist he is today."
- It followed a more general claim that such terms were commonly used in the Trump family but that did not make clear whether Donald Trump took part.
- Mary Trump has released a memoir that describes decades of Trump family dysfunction. The White House has denied the claims in the book.
President Donald Trump's niece, Mary Trump, gave a new interview with MSNBC's Rachel Maddow in which she said she had heard him use racial slurs including the N-word.
It added specificity to a claim in an earlier interview with The Washington Post in which she said such terms were often used in the Trump family but did not specify who used them.
"Growing up, it was sort of normal to hear them use the N-word or use anti-Semitic expressions," she told The Post.
—MSNBC (@MSNBC) July 16, 2020
On Thursday, Maddow asked Mary Trump whether she had specifically witnessed the president using the expressions, and she said she had.
"Of course I did," the president's niece replied. "And I don't think that should surprise anybody given how virulently racist he is today."
White House spokeswoman Sarah Matthews denied Mary Trump's claim.
"This is a book of falsehoods, plain and simple. The President doesn't use those words," Matthews said in a statement to Business Insider.
Mary Trump's new book, "Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man," was released this week despite attempts by the Trump family to block it.
In the book, Mary Trump, a clinical psychologist, describes decades of dysfunction in her family that she claims left her uncle psychologically scarred. She says he has personality traits so toxic a second term with him in office would herald the "end of American democracy."
Trump has long been accused of deliberately stirring racial grievance as an election strategy. Former employees, including a former personal attorney, Michael Cohen, have accused the president of making racist remarks in private.
Allies of the president have defended him against the charge, with Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson in July, as quoted by Politico, claiming the president had fought for "Jews and Blacks to be included in the clubs that were trying to exclude them."