Mary Trump, the President's Niece, Lists Four Counts in Pre-Midterm Essay Questioning Uncle's Motives
Mary Trump, the niece of U.S. President Donald Trump, published a long essay on her Substack newsletter The Good in Us on October 28, six days before the November 3 midterm elections. In the essay she listed four counts against her uncle, asking whether he is protecting the election or protecting his own power and his family's business, and called the election a "five alarm fire" and "indeed the most important election of our lifetimes."
Mary Trump is the daughter of Fred Trump Jr., the president's late elder brother. A clinical psychologist and the author of Too Much and Never Enough, she has long been a public critic of her uncle. The essay is titled "SCAM: Donald's Plan to Rig the Midterms," with the subtitle "All Hands on Deck: Vote on November 3."
The first count concerns the family's money. "For Donald and those enriching themselves through their proximity to his power, the stakes are not simply political. They are financial," she wrote. She said the Trump family has made billions through its business and cryptocurrency ventures, while wealthy allies and donors have benefited from an administration that makes decisions based on how much money it can make them and their cronies, and that holding onto power means holding onto the machinery that makes that arrangement possible.
The second count is a decade of election-fraud claims. Citing a July 17, 2026 analysis by Roll Call, she noted that Donald Trump mentioned election fraud 3,062 times between June 2015 and July 2026, 554 of them after he returned to the White House in January 2025, and that Reuters counted at least 107 repetitions, between November 2025 and May 2026, of the claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. When he claims elections are fraudulent, she wrote, "what he really means is any election that Democrats win"; when Republicans win, "those elections were suddenly free and fair." After the 2020 election, she noted, Trump and his allies filed 62 lawsuits challenging the results and lost 61 of them.
The third count is a Department of Homeland Security voter-investigation program disclosed by a whistleblower. She wrote that on September 14 an anonymous federal whistleblower detailed a DHS program called the Unlawful Voter Initiative, under which federal employees were reassigned to investigate people suspected of being ineligible to vote, received less than two hours of training, and were told to review 40 people a day, roughly 12 minutes per person. Federal court records show DHS issued guidance on August 31 directing investigators to prioritize field operations in nine states, including Georgia, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Senator Alex Padilla of California and Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer demanded that DHS shut the program down, and on October 21 Federal Judge Araceli Martinez Olguin issued a preliminary injunction restricting certain DHS election investigations in nine states. She also cited an October 20 Washington Post report that about 10 current and former national security officials had been privately advising governors, election administrators, and members of Congress about possible interference by the administration in the midterms.
The fourth count is the Justice Department. The department has demanded voter registration records from states across the country and filed 31 related lawsuits. On October 15 it sued California after the state refused to investigate more than 20,000 registered voters the department had flagged as likely noncitizens, giving the state 48 hours to review the list and seeking to have those ballots withheld until citizenship could be verified. In a preliminary review of 200 names, Los Angeles County found that 112 registrations had already been canceled or were inactive. She also pointed to Attorney General Todd Blanche, who on October 22 was asked whether the Justice Department might try to prevent states from certifying their results and replied: "It is not DOJ's intention to, and it's never our intention to improperly interfere with elections or the state confirmation process or certification process. But to say that there's no circumstances that we would ever do that, of course I'm not going to say that." Mary Trump wrote that Blanche would not rule it out because "his boss is not the American people. His boss is Donald."
"Clearly, openly, and right in our faces, the Trump regime is making it plain that it will do anything in its power to steal this election from the American people," she wrote. She closed with an appeal to vote: "This is a five alarm fire, and it is indeed the most important election of our lifetimes. Midterm Election Day is November 3, and I need you to act like your rights depend on it, because they do. Please vote."
As of publication, neither President Trump nor his team had publicly responded to the essay.
Related: Noncitizen Voter Lists Expand to Five States as Courts Twice Decline to Block California Ballots
Source: GSM · USA (original Chinese edition)
Photo: 图：玛丽·特朗普2024年8月22日在芝加哥民主党全国代表大会会场外（Jon Kline 摄，经 Wikimedia Commons，CC BY-SA 4.0）。 / Mary Trump outside the Democratic National Convention in Chicago on August 22, 2024 (Jon Kline via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0).
