Donald Trump’s Niece, Mary Trump, Says Getting Kicked Off Twitter Is Worse For Him Than Losing the Election

Photo by ALEX EDELMAN/AFP via Getty Images.

Mary Trump, the clinical psychologist niece of former President Donald Trump who wrote scathing tell-all book about him, told Business Insider that she believes he is more upset about being kicked off Twitter and losing the chance to host the 2022 PGA championship, than he is about losing the 2020 election to President Joe Biden.

“I think that being banned from Twitter and having the PGA take their tournament away from his golf courses are probably the worst things that have happened to him in the last four years,” she said. “How is he managing without Twitter? Because even he must realize that people really aren’t paying attention to him in the same way.”

Since he was permanently suspended from Twitter, the former president has been reduced to sending out sharply-worded press releases that often echo the tone of his previous acerbic tweets — and are usually dutifully reported by the press — but don’t have anywhere near the reach or impact that his social media megaphone used to have.

New York Times’ Washington correspondent Maggie Haberman had made a similar report back in January, saying that her sources told her that Trump was “gutted” by the cancellation of the golf tournament, and his anger over that was a “different order of magnitude” than it was about his second impeachment.

A lot has happened in the last week, including the president losing his Twitter feed, impeachment coming to the fore and the PGA withdrawing from Trump National. He’s “gutted” by the PGA move, a person close to the White House says.

— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) January 11, 2021

He’s angry about impeachment, people who have spoken to him say. But the reaction to the PGA decision was different order of magnitude.

— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) January 11, 2021

Will Donald Trump run for president again? His niece was skeptical, viewing any chatter of a Trump 2024 campaign as just another tactic to “keep grifting” from his supporters.

“It’s all about maintaining the grip on power,” she said. “He thinks on some level it’s going to allow him to continue to operate with impunity as he has done his whole life, and also it’s going to allow him to keep grifting money off of people.”