"President Donald Trump on Friday broke his silence on a tell-all book that dives into the president's upbringing and family life..."

"... distancing himself from his author niece and calling her a 'mess.' 'Mary Trump, a seldom seen niece who knows little about me, says untruthful things about my wonderful parents (who couldn’t stand her!) and me, and violated her NDA,' Trump wrote on Twitter. 'She’s a mess! Many books have been written about me, some good, some bad. Both happily and sadly, there will be more to come!'... Speaking with CNN's Chris Cuomo hours after Trump's tweet, Mary Trump [said] that she and her grandmother were 'very close.' 'My grandfather didn't really have positive feelings for anybody except perhaps Donald'.... During the explosive interview with Maddow [on Thursday], Mary Trump said that she had heard the president and other members of their family use anti-Semitic language and a derogatory slur on Black people."

From "A seldom seen niece': Trump fires back at Mary Trump over tell-all book/The author, in turn, delivers a live rebuttal on cable television" (Politico).

I'd thought that Trump was going to keep silent about Mary Trump — that silence would be an eloquent way to suggest that he knows a lot about her — leaving us to imagine that she may have mental health problems or complicated grudges and that Trump is honoring his beloved dead brother by leaving his daughter in a special sacred circle of immunity from his otherwise free-wheeling attacks.

And maybe that was what he'd decided to do but he had to reverse his position after the Maddow interview, because the poison of the accusation of racist speech requires an immediate antidote.

But was that an effective antidote? It's a hell of a thing to say to someone — your grandparents couldn't stand you.

I know I discarded the racist-speech accusation immediately because it's just about individual words that were used — used or mentioned? — in private. I need at least sentences — not isolated words — to have any idea whether what was said was even bad.

Here's the Rachel Maddow segment:



By the way: "When you ask a normal, right-handed person about something he's supposed to have seen, if he looks upward and to his left, he's truly accessing his memory of the incident... However, if he looks upward and to his right, he's accessing his imagination, and he's inventing an answer." Mary Trump repeatedly looked up and to the right to "see" the answers to the questions she was asked. I don't know if she's right-handed.