Mary Trump, a psychologist and author who is the niece of former Republican President Donald Trump, lashed out at actress Susan Sarandon, calling her a "complete idiot" for discouraging her fans from voting for Democrats, an act Trump said helped usher her uncle into the executive office in 2016.
Sarandon made public her support for Bernie Sanders, the Vermont Independent Senator who ran against former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2016 and indicated she and other Sanders supporters would not support Clinton if she was named the Democratic nominee.
At the time, Sarandon suggested having Donald Trump in office would disrupt the "status quo" and noted "some people feel that Donald Trump will bring the revolution immediately," a statement that prompted many to accuse her of minimizing the concerns of marginalized groups who rightfully feared the impacts of a Trump presidency.
In the last month, Sarandon made headlines again, this time for suggesting Democrats' anger over the all but certain dismantling of reproductive rights is little more than fearmongering.
Sarandon suggested Democrats' "only strategy is scaring you into voting blue," criticizing the party for "sitting on their hands for the last two years."
These statements were no doubt on the mind of Mary Trump, who criticized Sarandon during an interview with the MeidasTouch podcast last month.
Mary Trump said:
"She’s a complete idiot. She doesn’t know what she’s talking about, and if anybody can say with a straight face that the Democrats are the problem, I don’t know what to tell them.”
“She was pretty decent in a couple of movies a couple of decades ago, but politically she’s a moron.”
“I cannot even tell you how much it enrages me. She's an idiot, but she thinks she’s some wise shaman or something.”
Her statements reignited the anger many continue to feel toward the Thelma and Louise actress.
They feel Sarandon—a rich White woman—used her platform to deny Clinton a win that would have spared the United States much of the political upheaval of the last six years.
Mary Trump has vocally opposed her own family members.
In 2020, she published a book about her uncle and family titled Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man, which became a nationwide bestseller.
She says in the book that she was the anonymous source who revealed the Trump family’s tax returns to The New York Times. The Times later won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for its reporting on the matter.
Although the Trump family took legal action to block the book’s release, they were ultimately unsuccessful. In 2020, then-President Trump told Axios reporter Jonathan Swan that Mary Trump was “not allowed” to write the book because she was bound by a nondisclosure agreement.
Then-President Trump referred to a nondisclosure agreement his brother Robert Trump said Mary Trump signed regarding a 1999 lawsuit surrounding the Trump family estate. A judge later found that Mary Trump was not bound by the nondisclosure agreement.
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