FAMILY VALUES

Trump Relative Exposes His ‘Very Odd’ Attachment to Ivanka

The president had little interest in raising his children unless it involved his eldest daughter, his niece has claimed.

Donald Trump’s parenting style took an unsettlingly singular focus, according to a new assessment from inside his own family.

Mary Trump, the clinical psychologist and outspoken niece of the president, offered a scathing critique of her uncle’s approach to fatherhood, singling out his unusually intense focus on Ivanka Trump.

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Tom Latchem

Mary Trump pulled back the curtain on a podcast on Thursday, before sharing a transcript on her Substack.

“He was an entirely hands-off father,” Mary Trump claimed during an appearance on the British podcast The Rest Is Politics, hosted by former U.K. government official Alastair Campbell and former parliamentarian Rory Stewart. “He had no real interest in his children.”

Except, she claimed, when it came to his eldest daughter as she grew older.

“When Ivanka got older, he had this very odd attachment to her, but I cannot exactly say that it was paternal,” Mary Trump explained. “She was constantly sitting on his lap, and I cannot really explain it, but I found it odd and off-putting.”

The observation adds to an uncomfortable history of public remarks the president has made regarding Ivanka over the decades.

During a 2004 appearance on The Howard Stern Show, Donald Trump gave the radio host permission to refer to his daughter as a “piece of a--.”

Two years later on the same show, when Stern suggested Ivanka Trump looked “more voluptuous than ever” and asked if she had undergone breast implant surgery, her father declared that she had “always been very voluptuous” and asserted that he would know if she had gotten work done.

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That same year, during an appearance on daytime talk show The View, Donald Trump was asked what he and Ivanka had in common.

He joked, “I was going to say sex, but I can’t relate,” before adding that if she were not his daughter, “perhaps I’d be dating her.” Years later, in a 2015 interview with Rolling Stone, he remarked on her physical appearance, “What a beauty, that one. If I weren’t happily married and, you know, her father...”

The behavior is reported to have carried straight into the West Wing. Former Department of Homeland Security official Miles Taylor alleged in his 2023 book Blowback that Donald Trump repeatedly made crude remarks about Ivanka’s body in front of senior White House staff, forcing then-Chief of Staff John Kelly to step in and remind the president that he was discussing his own daughter.

Taylor wrote: “Aides said he talked about Ivanka Trump’s breasts, her backside, and what it might be like to have sex with her, remarks that once led [then chief of staff] John Kelly to remind the president that Ivanka was his daughter. Afterward, Kelly retold the story to me in visible disgust. Trump, he said, was ‘a very, very evil man.’”

The pattern resurfaced at a White House Christmas reception in December 2025, when the president paused his remarks after spotting an audience member he thought resembled his daughter and asked the woman to turn around for the news cameras as a “great compliment.”

Mary Trump noted that she saw little of her younger cousins growing up, seeing them mostly at Thanksgiving and Christmas gatherings given the age gap—Donald Trump Jr. is 12 years her junior, while Ivanka Trump is 16 years younger. But she claimed her uncle maintained virtually no emotional connection to his kids, “certainly not to the two older boys.”

Instead, she traced that emotional coldness back to family patriarch Fred Trump Sr., who lacked empathy, she claimed. She claimed the elder Trump “systematically” broke down his eldest son, Fred Trump Jr., who died at 42.

“The lesson he learned was do not be anything like Freddy,” Mary Trump said. “Do not be kind. Do not be empathetic. Do not be sensitive.”

“With his sons and their wealth, that is just a reflection,” she noted. “It just reflects well of him if they are really rich too.”

Mary’s comments follow her blistering Substack post from earlier this month targeting her uncle’s close relationship with 35-year-old executive assistant Natalie Harp, who has become a constant presence in the 80-year-old president’s daily orbit.

“One thing that constantly mystifies me is the extent to which people on the right overlook just how creepy all of this is,” Mary Trump wrote. “It’s dysfunctional to the point of deviance.”

The White House has been asked to comment on Mary Trump’s claims.

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