Mary Trump, the daughter of Donald Trump’s late brother, Fred Trump Jr, said the phrase is pretty innocent to “normal people”, but it means something different in her family
Donald Trump’s niece has claimed a five-word comment he once made sent a “chill” down her spine as she knew its true meaning.
Mary Trump, the daughter of US President Trump’s late brother, Fred Trump Jr., is a vocal critic of her uncle. She produces videos about his presidency on the Mary Trump Media YouTube channel.
In a recent video titled ‘Mary Trump’s chilling story of Trump’s cruelty,’ she played a clip from a 2020 interview on Axios on HBO, in which reporter Jonathan Swan grilled Trump on his last administration’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic.
Trump described the crisis as “under control”, to which Swan replied: “How? A thousand Americans are dying a day.” Yet, the US President had followed up by saying: “They are dying. That’s true. And you – it is what it is.”
Mary said: “So, why, when Donald said, ‘It is what it is’, did that send a chill down my spine? Well, for normal people, that phrase means something like, ‘Things are terrible. Sadly, there’s nothing I can do about it, so it is what it is.
“‘We just have to accept it and move on’. In my family, that is not at all what it meant. What that phrase meant was, ‘Yeah, you’re going through a bad time. I could help you, but I don’t give a s**t’.”
Mary offered a real-world example, taking viewers back to the day of her father Fred Trump Jr. ‘s funeral in 1981. Mary, who was 16 at the time, said the family was gathered in the ‘breakfast room’, where they had most of their meals.
She recalled that they had been preparing to leave for the “crematorium-chapel” at the time as she knew her father wanted to be cremated. However, she overheard the adults discussing the plan.
They intended to bury Fred Jr’s ashes in the family plot, but this “horrified” her as she also knew that he wanted to be cremated and wanted his ashes spread in the Atlantic Ocean, off Montauk, New York State.
Mary said she “wasn’t quite ready to talk” to her grandfather, Fred Trump, about it because he was a “slightly intimidating, scary man”, and she had “no relationship” with her aunts.
She learned that Donald had entered a room they called the ‘library’ to take a phone call, so she went off to find him. Once she saw her uncle, she explained her concerns to him and asked if he could mention it to her grandfather to change his mind.
Mary said: “And Donald said to me. He shrugged first and then he said, ‘It is what it is, honeybunch’, and then he proceeded to make his phone call.”
