Former federal judge Maryanne Trump Barry issued a sharp rebuke of her brother, Donald Trump, in secretly recorded conversations with her niece, shedding light on the tumultuous family dynamic. “Donald is out for Donald, period,” she said. “He has no principles.”
Such comments are among the many criticisms that Barry levels in previously unreleased transcripts and audio obtained by the Washington Post from Mary Trump, the president’s niece and author of the recent damning tell-all about her uncle and the family that made him. Questions about sourcing that followed the release of the book led Mary Trump to provide the Post with the secretly taped conversations from 2018 and 2019.
“It’s the phoniness of it all. It’s the phoniness and this cruelty. Donald is cruel,” Barry says to her niece in one of the exchanges. Deploring “what they’re doing with kids at the border,” Barry appears appalled by her brother’s behavior in office. “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.”
Among the trove of details about the president revealed in the 15 hours of face-to-face conversations is Barry’s apparent confirmation of previous allegations that the president paid a friend to take his SATs so that he could transfer into the Ivy Leagues. Barry said Trump, who initially enrolled at Fordham University, “got into University of Pennsylvania because he had somebody take the exams.” She called her brother “a brat.”
“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. The Post notes that Mary Trump has said it was not the same Joe Shapiro who went to Penn with her uncle, and that person has not surfaced.
The candid comments are notable given that Barry—unlike Mary Trump—has never publicly criticized the president and the newly surfaced recordings and transcripts provide a window into the discord between her and her brother. At one point, the former federal judge told a story about a favor she asked of Trump in the 1980s—help getting nominated for a federal judgeship—that she claims her brother has continued to hold over her head.
“He once tried to take credit for me,” Barry said of the president, quoting him as saying, “Where would you be without me?” She reportedly told her brother: “You say that one more time and I will level you.” Barry noted it to be “the only favor I ever asked for in my whole life” and told Mary that she deserved the nomination “on my own merit,” rising from the position to subsequent higher judicial posts without her brother’s help. “Donald is out for Donald, period,” Barry said, warning her niece that “you can’t trust him.”
According to Chris Bastardi, a spokesman for Mary Trump, the author started recording the conversations in 2018 after realizing that she had been misled by her relatives about the value of the family estate two decades earlier during a legal battle over her inheritance, in which she claimed to receive far less than she expected. In a statement to CNN on Saturday, Bastardi said that “Mary realized members of her family had lied in prior depositions. Anticipating litigation, she felt it prudent to tape conversations in order to protect herself. She never expected to learn much of what she heard, including the President’s sister, Federal Judge Maryanne Trump Barry, state that Donald Trump had paid someone to take an SAT exam for him.”