Mary Trump issues new warning after Donald picks vice president

Former President Donald Trump’s estranged niece Mary Trump warned on Monday that the former president’s new running mate is a “hypocritical bully and revanchist sycophant.”

The former president announced GOP Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio as his vice presidential pick on Monday, just two days after surviving an assassination attempt during a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. Trump and Vance officially became the Republican Party’s presidential and vice presidential nominees a short time later at the Republican National Convention (RNC) on Monday afternoon.

Mary Trump, an outspoken and frequent critic of her uncle, also lamented Trump-appointed Judge Aileen Cannon’s decision to dismiss the ex-president’s federal classified documents case in a newsletter on Monday, before suggesting that her uncle picked Vance because he would be willing to illegally overturn an election, which former Vice President Mike Pence failed to do so on January 6, 2021, on Trump’s behalf. Trump has previously claimed without evidence that the 2020 election was stolen from him due to widespread voter fraud.

“Not long after Cannon’s corrupt gift to him, Donald announced the selection of Ohio Senator J.D. Vance as his running mate,” Mary Trump wrote. “If his goal was to pick a hypocritical bully and revanchist sycophant, he could not have made a better choice.”

In a decision on Monday, Cannon ruled that the appointment of Jack Smith as the Department of Justice’s special counsel was unconstitutional. The former president pleaded not guilty to Smith’s June 2023 indictment where it’s alleged he retained classified materials after he left the White House in January 2021 and then obstructed the federal attempt to retrieve them from his Mar-a-Lago resort residence in Palm Beach, Florida.

Mary Trump added on Monday: “Clearly, Vance thinks he’s immune to the kind of consequences suffered by Donald’s former Vice President—you know, the guy who almost got hanged by Donald’s mob—but I’d still suggest that Vance watch his back.”

Pence initially provoked the ire of Donald Trump supporters by refusing to engage in the former president’s alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 election, ultimately making him a target during the U.S. Capitol riot when some rioters chanted “hang Mike Pence.”

Mary Trump argued that Vance became the GOP’s vice presidential nominee because “Donald didn’t want to take a chance that his new running mate would ever put the country first like Pence did,” while adding that a “guardrail” had been eliminated due to Vance’s selection.

“Vance and Cannon are birds of a feather,” she concluded. “And there are so many more like them just waiting for their moment to enter the fray. That’s why we can’t be silent now. That’s why we fight. Let’s all unify around that.”

Newsweek reached out for comment to the Trump campaign via email on Monday night.

Vance is a former Trump critic who made a series of disparaging comments about the then-future president during his 2016 campaign, including declaring himself “a Never Trump guy” during an interview with Charlie Rose.

“I can’t stomach Trump,” Vance told NPR in 2016. “I think that he’s noxious and is leading the white working class to a very dark place.”

Vance has transformed himself into a staunch supporter of Trump since entering politics, having been endorsed by the former president during his successful 2022 U.S. Senate run.

Shortly after the shooting on Saturday, the senator claimed in a social media post that President Joe Biden’s “rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.”

Mary Trump wrote in her newsletter that Republicans were attempting to blame Democrats and convince the country to “unify around fascism” following her uncle’s assassination attempt, which she also described as “deeply wrong and un-American.”

“Like most Americans, I too want the national temperature to be lowered,” she wrote. “I want to see the violent rhetoric to stop. And I want to see our nation unified. But the other side seems to be saying that, in order for that to happen, we’re not allowed to talk about Donald’s record of lawlessness, cruelty, and incompetence and we must make concessions to the would-be dictator.”

“Republicans tried to shame their critics into silence by making false and increasingly incendiary claims that it was Democrats who are responsible for creating the context in which Saturday’s shooting took place,” she continued, before noting that the ex-president also called for the dismissal of all legal matters against him. “That’s not how you unify the country or lower the temperature.”

In a primetime national address from the Oval Office on Sunday evening, Biden urged Americans to reject political violence.

“There is no place in America for this kind of violence or for any violence for that matter,” he said. “Period. No exceptions. We can’t allow this violence to be normalized.”