Judge Maryanne Trump Barry Bashes Her Brother, The President, Behind Closed Doors

The secretly recorded audio is making the news.

Donald Trump with sister Maryanne Trump Barry and brother Robert Trump in 1990 (Photo by Sonia Moskowitz/Getty Images)

Retired federal judge Maryanne Trump Barry doesn’t think much of her brother, President Donald Trump, in secretly recorded audio reported by the Washington Post. The recordings were made by Mary Trump, author of “Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man,” (affiliate link), who recorded a series of conversations with her aunt, Judge Barry, over the course of 2018 and 2019.

According to the WaPo article, a spokesperson for Mary Trump said she began recording conversations with her family in advance of her tell-all book after suspecting dishonesty by her family in a previous legal matter over her inheritance. (New York only requires the consent of one party for recorded conversations.) And boy, did Mary Trump get some unguarded and choice comments from Judge Barry.

Here are some of the highlights:

  • “All he wants to do is appeal to his base,” Barry said in a conversation secretly recorded by her niece, Mary L. Trump. “He has no principles. None. None. And his base, I mean my God, if you were a religious person, you want to help people. Not do this.”

  • “His goddamned tweet and lying, oh my God,” she said. “I’m talking too freely, but you know. The change of stories. The lack of preparation. The lying. Holy shit.”

  • Lamenting “what they’re doing with kids at the border,” she guessed her brother “hasn’t read my immigration opinions” in court cases. In one case, she berated a judge for failing to treat an asylum applicant respectfully.
    “What has he read?” Mary Trump asked her aunt.
    “No. He doesn’t read,” Barry responded.

  • At one point Barry said to her niece, “It’s the phoniness of it all. It’s the phoniness and this cruelty. Donald is cruel.”

  • Barry told how she tried to help her brother get into college. “He was a brat,” Barry said, explaining that “I did his homework for him” and “I drove him around New York City to try to get him into college.”
    Then Barry dropped what Mary considered a bombshell: “He went to Fordham for one year [actually two years] and then he got into University of Pennsylvania because he had somebody take the exams.”
    “No way!” Mary responded. “He had somebody take his entrance exams?”
    “SATs or whatever. . . . That’s what I believe,” Barry said.

Of particular interest to the Above the Law audience will be the family dust-up over Barry’s appointment to the federal judiciary. According to the recordings, Donald Trump likes to take credit for Barry’s nomination:

“He had Roy Cohn call Reagan about needing to appoint a woman as a federal judge in New Jersey,” Barry told Mary. “Because Reagan’s running for reelection, and he was desperate for the female vote.” Then, she said, “I had the nomination,” and Donald Trump never let Barry forget it.

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But Barry isn’t here for that:

“He once tried to take credit for me,” Barry said of her brother, quoting him as saying, “Where would you be without me?”

Barry said she told her brother: “You say that one more time and I will level you.” She told Mary that it was “the only favor I ever asked for in my whole life.” She said that she deserved the nomination “on my own merit” and that she was subsequently elevated to higher judicial posts without her brother’s intervention.

In the recordings Barry also took issue with Donald’s tendency to make everything — even their father’s funeral — about himself. And that’s why she doesn’t want the President, or any of her other siblings, to speak at her own funeral:

“Donald was the only one who didn’t speak about Dad,” Barry said. She told Mary that “I don’t want any of my siblings to speak at my funeral. And that’s all about Donald and what he did at Dad’s funeral. I don’t know. It was all about him.”

“I remember,” Mary responded.

Fascinating to see what Judge Barry has to say about her brother when she doesn’t think the world is listening.

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headshotKathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, and host of The Jabot podcast. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter (@Kathryn1).