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The lesbian author also opens up about the difficult process of coming out to her family, after her grandmother called Elton John the f word.
It's been a big week for Mary Trump, the lesbian niece of Donald Trump.
As of yesterday, her family tell-all, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man, sold 950,000 copies on its first day, according to its publisher, Simon & Schuster.
The figure is a record for the publishing house, beating Bob Woodward's Fear, which sold 900,000 copies by the end of its first day, James Comey's A Higher Loyalty, which sold 600,000, and Michel Wolff's Fire & Fury, which sold 1.7 million in its first month.
In the book, Trump opens up about the barriers she faced in coming out to her family following disturbing comments her grandmother made in the wake of Princess Diana's death in 1997, when she reportedly said it was a "disgrace they're letting that little faggot Elton John sing" at Diana's service.
Trump, a psychologist by trade, detailed in the book that she married her wife soon after the comment was made and realized "it was better that [my grandmother] didn't know I was living with a woman."
She and her wife are still together and live in New York City with their daughter.
The lesbian author has been revealing more details about the president's inner workings on a promotional tour for the book. Last night, she sat down with Rachel Maddow and spoke candidly about Donald Trump's history of racist and anti-Semitic rhetoric.
When asked by Maddow if she's ever heard the president say the n word, Trump replied, "Of course I did," adding, "I don't think that should surprise anybody given how virulently racist he is today."
She also replied "yes" when Maddow asked if she'd heard the president use anti-Semitic slurs.
The White House gave a statement to MSNBC following the interview that the president "doesn't use those words," adding that Mary Trump's book was full of "falsehoods."
Additionally, in the interview Mary expresses that she'd hoped her uncle would surround himself by intelligent people so they would protect the country against his "worst impulses," to which she acknowledged, "Clearly I was wrong..."
"I can't say that there was a last straw because there had been so many straws," she told Maddow of the thought process of deciding to write the book. "But certainly the horrors at the border -- you know, the separating of children from their parents; the torture, the kidnapping, and the incarceration of them in cages, was unthinkable, unbearable, and when an opportunity presented itself to me to do something, I needed to take a leap."
"I want people to understand what a failure of leadership this is, and the reason he's failing at it is because he's incapable of succeeding at it," she added of the pandemic response. "More people are getting sick, and more people are going to die. Instead of taking it seriously, instead of standing aside and letting the experts take over, Donald is hawking black beans. It would be absurd if it weren't so devastating."
Watch clips from the interview below:
