President’s niece calls on Trump to resign in first TV interview after judge lifts restraining order

‘He already seemed very strained by the pressures,’ says Mary Trump about a conversation with her uncle in 2017

President Donald Trump‘s niece, Mary Trump, has called on her uncle to “resign” in her first televised interview since a New York judge lifted a restraining order on her speaking publicly about the president.

Speaking to ABC’s George Stephanopoulos about her book, Too Much and Never Enough, that was published on Tuesday, Ms Trump said that the president seemed stressed when she visited him at the White House in 2017.

She said that she told her uncle: “Don’t let them get you down,” in reference to his critics, but added that the president replied: “They won’t get me.”

Ms Trump told Stephanopoulos, in the interview that aired on Good Morning America on Wednesday, that in the encounter she could tell that “he already seemed very strained by the pressures.”

Ms Trump added: “You know, he’d never been in a situation before where he wasn’t entirely protected from criticism, or accountability, or things like that. And I think Michael Flynn just had to be fired, and from the get-go it hadn’t been going well, in particular.

“I just remember thinking, he seems tired, he seems — this is not what he signed up for, if he even knows what he signed up for. And I thought his response was actually more enlightening than my statement.”

Stephanopoulos then asked the 55-year-old what she would say to Mr Trump if she was in front of him in the Oval Office today. Ms Trump replied: “Resign.”

In her book, Ms Trump accused the president of cheating on his SAT’s and called him a “sociopath,” blaming the treatment he received from his father, Fred Trump.

“His personality served his father’s purpose. That’s what sociopaths do: They co-opt others and use them toward their own ends — ruthlessly and efficiently, with no tolerance for dissent or resistance,” she wrote.

White House press secretary Sarah Matthews told NBC that the allegations of abuse against the president’s father and the accusation of cheating on the SAT’s are both false.

“The president describes the relationship he had with his father as warm and said his father was very good to him,” she wrote in a statement. “He said his father was loving and not at all hard on him as a child. Also, the absurd SAT allegation is completely false.”

On Tuesday, Judge Hal B Greenwald ruled that Ms Trump could publicly promote her recently released book about the president after being previously barred from talking about the Trump family.

The president’s brother, Robert Trump, had argued that promoting the book breached a confidentiality agreement relating to the estate of the president’s father, signed by Ms Trump 19 years ago.

Mr Greenwald ruled that because the book had already been published and sold in stores across the US, the ban on Ms Trump talking about the president “would be moot.”

The president’s brother also attempted to ban the release of the book on the same grounds, but Judge Alan D Scheinkma ruled last week that the agreement did not apply to the publishers, Simon & Schuster.

Ms Trump’s book is the second in a month that focuses on the president, as former Trump administration national security adviser John Bolton‘s, tell-all memoir about his time working for the president was released in June.

The Trump administration delayed the book’s release and attempted to block its publication entirely, but were unsuccessful, and The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir was released on 23 June 2020.