'He's incapable': Trump's niece blames president's childhood for COVID-19 response

Exclusive: Watch Mary Trump's full interview Mary Trump speaks to Todd van der Heyden about her explosive tell-all book on the life of her uncle, U.S. President Donald Trump.

toronto — U.S. President Donald Trump’s niece believes his upbringing -- particularly his experience with a cruel father -- is to blame for the country’s poor response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Mary Trump, a clinical psychologist based in New York City who released her book, “Too Much and Never Enough, How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man,” last week, said her grandfather Fred Trump taught Donald to never admit fault, which she argues has led to the country’s handling of the virus.

“In order to survive in my family, you couldn’t be kind, you couldn’t admit a mistake, you could never be wrong,” she told CTV News Channel in an exclusive interview. “All of those things were considered weakness in the Trump family.”

Mary Trump argues that in the early days of the COVID-19 infection, Trump made the decision that protecting the stock market was more important than public health and as the virus continued to escalate, he did not veer from that decision.

“He’s incapable of accepting advice that contradicts his own narrative,” she said.  “Because he’s mishandled it from the beginning, he’s incapable of course correcting because that would mean he would have to admit he was wrong.”

Mary Trump said Fred Trump’s treatment of his son shaped who the president is today in “a couple of particularly salient ways”:

“He is very much today as he was at three, and that’s a problem,” she said.

Mary Trump called her uncle “constitutionally unfit” to hold the office of the U.S. president and argues he has negatively impacted some states’ virus responses because local politicians do not want to cross him.

“More people are going to get sick and more people are going to die,” she said. “We’re in a very dangerous place in our country in the context of this disease that’s ravaging us.”

In the book, Mary Trump offers a scathing psychoanalysis of her family and blames a toxic environment within the household for raising a damaged narcissist who poses a danger to the public.

“One of my main goals in writing the book is to help people understand how longstanding and deeply ingrained his psychological issues are and help them gain access to information that they might not have had four years ago when it comes time to vote again on Nov. 3,” she said.

The book alleges that Trump hired a friend to take the SATs for him, never goes to church unless a camera is on him, and went to the movies while Fred Trump Jr. was dying.

Fred Trump Jr. died in 1981 after struggling with alcoholism.  He was 42.

Mary Trump said her relationship with the rest of her family had already been sparse, but acknowledges that her book probably ended it.

“I’m telling a truth that makes them extremely uncomfortable and it makes them look bad, but it does happen to be the truth,” she said.

In a tweet from July 17, Trump called Mary Trump a “seldom seen niece who knows little about me.” He also alleges that she violated a non-disclosure agreement to publish the book and broke the law by giving out his tax returns.

“Very little of it is true, which is something else we’ve come to expect from Donald,” Mary Trump said.

In an interview with Fox News over the weekend, Trump said that he will “have to see” the U.S. election results in November before he can accept them.

Mary Trump said she can see a situation in which the president refuses to leave the White House, despite losing the election.

“I think it depends greatly on the outcome of the election,” she said. “If he loses resoundingly, then he will do his best to spin it somehow and exit stage right, if it’s close, then we have a different scenario on our hands.”

“I think the best way to handle an outcome we’ll all regret is to make sure Joe Biden wins in a landslide.”

She is also calling on the U.S. Congress to conduct a thorough investigation into her uncle’s conduct as president.

“We need to dive deeply into everything that’s gone on, certainly in the last three years in this administration,” she said. “He’s been impeached and that happened for a reason, so my hope is Congress does its job after the election and finds out in granular detail all of the transgressions that have been made.”

Mary Trump’s book was released on July 14 and sold 950,000 copies on its first day, breaking publisher Simon & Schuster’s previous record.

With files from The Associated Press