In Conversation with April Ryan

13 March, 2026

[Transcript edited for clarity and flow]

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Check Out April’s Channel HERE

Mary Trump: I had the great good fortune of getting to hang out with the awesome journalist April Ryan over at her place, The Tea. We covered a lot of territory, including the current state of American journalism and how we are going to get out of this mess. Anyway, I hope you enjoy it. I certainly did.

April Ryan: I want to welcome someone who I have admired for her courage. I think she is a bad sister. Yes, she is. She’s smiling and laughing, but she’s a bad sister. She’s my first Women’s History Month guest. She’s somebody you know. Bring those people in, because she’s getting ready to knock the pot over. I don’t see her with her cup, but we’re going to knock the pot over today. Her name happens to be Mary Trump. Yes, the one and only Mary Trump. Mary Trump, thank you for coming to The Tea, sipping tea with me and knocking the pot over. I know you’re going to knock the pot over.

Mary Trump: April, you’re making me blush. It is so wonderful to be here with you. The honor is truly all mine. I have admired you and your work for a long time, and just to be able to hang out with you is incredibly cool. So thank you.

April Ryan: Oh, we are going to hang, my dear sister. We’re going to hang. That’s all we do here at The Tea. We hang and we laugh. We tell the truth. Sometimes when you’re with your friends and family, we call it laugh and lie. No, we laugh and tell the truth, shame the devil, and knock the pot over.

So, Mary, you have a book coming out, Who Could Ever Love You, in 2024; Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man, from 2020; and then you have two other books. In this moment, and let’s be clear, you have been ostracized by your family for telling the truth. If you don’t know, she’s related to the President of the United States, and she calls him by his first name, and probably some other stuff too, but that’s a whole other thing.

So talk to us. First, let’s talk about that piece right there: you being ostracized from them. Is it freeing for you to tell the truth about who you know this man to be from your family relationship?

Mary Trump: Yeah. Listen, I think we labor under this illusion that because you’re biologically related to people, they should be allowed to treat you badly. And I just have never quite seen it that way. If people are your family members, they should actually treat you better than they treat other people. They should be there to protect you, look out for you, and help you out if you need help. And that, of course, was not at all the case in my family.

When I saw what Donald was doing to our country during his first term, which I knew would happen, I just didn’t know the details, I felt that it would have been deeply irresponsible for me not to say something. Not because I had any interest in getting into some kind of confrontation with him, because as my uncle, we had nothing to do with each other anymore, and that was done with.

As an American citizen, I felt an obligation to my country, and it would have felt cowardly for me not to say anything. Obviously, there was no way at all for me to know how it was going to play out. So I’m very glad I did what I did, and yet clearly we have a long way to go here.

April Ryan: And there’s a cost to you. You’ve lost your family because you’ve spoken out against Donald Trump. I mean, you are ostracized.

Mary Trump: Yeah. And listen, I think my family has always been an extraordinarily dysfunctional system. It’s very hard to explain because I kind of grew up in it and it seemed normal. I can’t tell you how many times somebody has asked me, “So what was it like growing up in that family?” It’s like, I don’t know. It was normal because all of us grow up in our families, and what’s the point of comparison?

April Ryan: If it was normal then, is it normal? What you saw then of your uncle, does it seem like the same person today?

Mary Trump: Yeah, and that’s the thing. Donald has always been the same person. He’s never evolved, but he’s degrading, obviously, over time. He’s worse in some ways, but at his core, he’s the same person.

And I think I was never really close with anybody in my father’s family because they wouldn’t let me be. They hated my mom and they had contempt for my father, and I was Freddy’s daughter, and I was a girl, so that didn’t help either because they’re all very misogynistic. So it wasn’t like I was losing much. I hadn’t had a relationship with them in a long time. And again, it just felt like the thing I needed to do to have any kind of self-respect and to feel like I had done whatever small part I could do to help inform the American people about what they were choosing, potentially.

April Ryan: As a kid, I had one uncle—I mean, I had a couple on both sides of my family. When I was a kid, one uncle took me to spaghetti dinners. That was my Uncle Tommy, God bless him, rest his soul. And then my Uncle Paul on my mother’s side used to come from Philadelphia and give me pennies out of his pocket. Once he had a child, that stopped, and I kind of got mad that the child came. But was Donald Trump that uncle to you?

Mary Trump: No. No. Again, part of it is that there was a very weird split in my family. My grandmother only dealt with the daughters and my grandfather only dealt with the sons. I tried to hang with my brother and my cousin and my uncles, but one, I was the youngest, and two, I was a girl, so they didn’t really want me around, but I would try.

Whenever Donald was at my grandparents’ house, because we spent most of our weekends there, and whenever he and my uncle Rob came in from the city, we’d play either soccer or throw baseball in the backyard. So yes, I would play ball with them. But Donald, despite the fact that he was 20 years older than I was and I was five, would still throw the ball as hard as he possibly could.

April Ryan: What? Oh my God. The male version of Cruella de Vil. Okay. Anyway, let me ask you this. Are any members of the Trump family military?

Mary Trump: My dad. My dad was a second lieutenant in the National Guard. In college, he participated in ROTC. So when he graduated, he was automatically a second lieutenant, and he was very proud of that. But because my family, and my grandfather in particular, didn’t really have any respect at all for that kind of service, my dad never really talked about it.

But I do know from my mom that this was in the early ’60s, so he was very worried that he was going to be sent to Vietnam, which leads me to believe that if he had been, he would have gone, unlike his younger brother. So again, my dad, I don’t know for how long he served, but he did. Nobody else in my family did.

April Ryan: Was it frowned upon?

Mary Trump: Yeah. Yes. And now, again, whether it’s because it was my dad doing it or whether it was because my grandfather just had no use for anything outside of making lots of money doing real estate, I can’t be sure. But by the same token, my dad was a professional pilot for TWA at the dawn of the jet age, and that was derided and frowned upon as well.

April Ryan: So Mary, that leads me into your comments—war of choice. You are very hard on this war.

Mary Trump: Oh yeah. Yeah.

April Ryan: So talk to me about that because I kept saying, is anyone in their family someone who served in the military? It’s good to know his brother did, but your grandfather frowned upon it. So tell me about this contradiction that you had with Donald Trump, your uncle, when it comes to this war.

Mary Trump: Well, again, when you grow up raised by a father who doesn’t believe in or care about service and has no use for generosity or altruism, it isn’t really unsurprising that we end up with somebody like Donald. But it’s tragic that the commander-in-chief is not simply somebody who never served, because I don’t think that’s a requirement to be president. I don’t. I think there are other ways to serve your country. But he’s never served his country in any way, shape, or form.

And as he’s demonstrated time and time again, he has contempt for service members. He has contempt for their sacrifices. He is completely frivolous about the way he’s going about this. There’s no real rationale for this war of choice.

He had nothing meaningful or comforting to say after we lost six service members over the weekend. And four of them returned to the air base this morning and not one person from the Trump regime was there to greet the remains. Not Donald, not the vice president, not the Secretary of Defense—nobody. And that is such a disgrace. It sends such a horrific message because not only can he not tell us why we are sacrificing blood and treasure, he’s not going to do anything to help us get through it when we lose our own soldiers. He is an utter disgrace.

April Ryan: Mary, I’m so glad you brought that up because I had the honor to witness the most solemn moment ever in my life at Andrews Air Force Base, the peaceful transfer of remains after Benghazi. Colin Powell was there. Hillary Clinton was there. Susan Rice was there. Everyone was there. It was my pool day and we didn’t know where we were going or what was happening. It happened. It was the most—I get chills thinking about it.

You serve your country, and when you lose—there’s no greater offering than to serve your country and then to die for your country. And for the president and his staff and others from other administrations and other parties across the aisle to come and say thank you—then this president, y’all, I’m done.

Mary Trump: Well, and what’s worse is that in announcing the loss of life because of his choices and his decisions, he literally said, “Well, we’ll lose more people. That’s the way it is.” Oh, really? Is it? He has no sense of what sacrifice means, no sense of solemnity, and he’s more interested in his gold drapes and his obscenely expensive ballroom than he is in the well-being of our soldiers.

April Ryan: No, and a new statue in the Rose Garden and all. I mean, you’ve got SNAP benefits that are on hold, or they’re trying to figure that out. People are still paying costly amounts for health insurance, and he’s up here tearing down stuff, building up stuff. People are hurting. Again, it’s let them eat cake. I keep saying this—it’s Marie Antoinette. He is the male version of Marie Antoinette. Let’s just put a gown on him and put him back in that time. He’s thumbing his nose. It feels like he doesn’t care.

Was this the attitude in your family? I know about the “C” for coloreds on the housing applications and all this other stuff with the Central Park Five, now the Exonerated Five, but was this the attitude in your family?

Mary Trump: Yeah. They were, to a person, deeply racist and misogynistic and probably homophobic, but it wasn’t really discussed back then. And my grandfather in particular was a very selfish, cheap person. This is somebody who benefited enormously from government contracts, hundreds of millions of dollars in government contracts, and yet did everything in his power to avoid paying taxes because nobody else deserved anything.

And this is one of the many problems of having put into power a guy who thinks that money is more important than everything else, because in my family, money stood in for everything. Literally, it was the only currency. It mattered more than love or affection or respect. And when that’s the way you live your life, you look at everything as a zero-sum game. The more I have, the less you have, so I’m better. I am literally and metaphorically worth more. If I give you something, then I’m worth less.

And that is how Donald Trump treats the United States Treasury, as if it were his pocketbook. So if you stop funding USAID, then somehow he’s saving money. Meanwhile, in addition to leading to the completely avoidable deaths of 700,000 people, including 400,000 children, you’re also taking money away from American farmers because USAID paid American farmers to send their goods overseas to prevent people from starving to death.

April Ryan: Come on. That’s right. Preach it, Mary Trump. Come on. The worship service of Mary Trump.

Before I let you go, and I’m so thankful that you’re here, you don’t know—I’ve been enamored with you since you first started speaking out. That’s hard. We all have family dynamics, trust me, I do too. But to do this so publicly against the President of the United States and at a cost, I’m just so thankful for you.

I want you to hear what some of the people are saying. Someone said, “Humanity first.” Tamara says, “If the Nazis talked about owning the libs, then MAGA probably would support it.” Omar said, “Sadly, most American voters did not listen to you in 2024, Mary.” Sue says, “I’m a white grandma here to keep supporting by thanking and joining Black women in organizations that for decades have shown up to fight for our rights, rights which now we battle to restore and constitutionalize.” Lori says, “My family was also toxic, but once they dug their heels into MAGA, I discarded them from my life. Final straw for me was my sister defending her right to fly the Confederate flag.” Ooh. And then she said, in all caps, “Bah.” Yeah, we survive. So what do you say to these comments?

Mary Trump: I agree with all of them. There are lines that we need to draw. There are things that we need to recognize are utterly unacceptable, even if they’re coming from family members we love and care about, because we’re human beings and we cannot allow people—maybe especially our family—to think that it’s okay to be so hateful, so narrow-minded, so limited in our ability to care for other people.

It’s going to degrade all of us. It’s poisoning this country. And I think our way forward, if we are going to have a shot at rehabilitating ourselves, is to dig deep into kindness and compassion and empathy because those things now are being devalued by the people in charge, and it’s not landing us in a good place. So we need to take all of that back and hope that it’s going to see us through to better times.

April Ryan: Barbara R. says, “Thank you, Mary Trump, for speaking out against hate.” And also, I want to ask you really fast: what do you think about Noem? You talked about the misogyny. Kristi Noem does not look like she used to. She looks like she went through the Trump factory machine and came out looking like they all look.

Mary Trump: Like they all look.

April Ryan: Yeah, they all look. It’s the same look. What do you think about him doing that to her? Even though she may be out at the end of the month, he finally let her go. I mean, it’s a win for Democrats.

Mary Trump: Maybe. Don’t get me wrong, she’s horrible, but he’s replacing her, or he’s trying to replace her, with Markwayne Mullin, who will be less obviously awful but still do whatever he’s told. So I don’t necessarily think that it’s going to end well for us.

And also, the reason she was fired isn’t because under her watch ICE agents murdered American citizens on American soil. Donald likes that. It’s because she was putting the spotlight on herself. And I think also she didn’t act like Pam Bondi in the hearing yesterday. She made concessions, and that’s just not allowed. So I think either way, we’re in really bad shape when it comes to the Department of Homeland Security.

April Ryan: And she never said if she was having an affair with Corey Lewandowski.

Mary Trump: Well, she would have had to lie under oath.

April Ryan: Right. She never said no. She has a bed on that plane and they talked about the Mile High Club and all that other stuff. I know the president didn’t like that.

So look, everybody, there are a lot of hearts. Mary Trump, I told you we were only going to be on for a certain point. I thank you because we’ve got to get—

Mary Trump: I can talk to you all day, but we’ll do this again for sure.

April Ryan: Yeah, I would love to. People are giving you so many hearts. They are loving you. We appreciate it. And you get love over here. Don’t worry about the family. I’ll have you over for Thanksgiving turkey, for Christmas dinner. We can watch Santa Claus. I got you, sis. I got you.

Mary Trump: Sounds amazing. April, you are so wonderful. I just love hanging out with you. So thank you so much for everything you do because you too have been through it and have sacrificed and have practiced journalism in such a professional, profound way that more people should be emulating. So thank you for your courage.

April Ryan: Thank you, Mary Trump. You have brightened my whole Women’s History Month. You brighten my year. I’m getting chills from you. If it means something coming from a shero, honey, from one shero to the other, thank you, my sister.

Mary Trump: Thank you.

April Ryan: Thank you, Mary Trump. I’ll talk to you soon. Thank you.

Mary Trump: All right. Take care. Thanks, everybody. Please like and share this video. And if you believe in our mission, please subscribe to the Mary Trump Media Channel. Thanks.

Check Out April’s Channel HERE