Donald Trump will “burn it all down” if he doesn’t get his way, after being indicted on seven counts related to his handling of classified documents, according to his niece and critic Mary Trump.
In a blog post titled “On the Precipice of Worse,” Mary Trump, 58, wrote there is “nothing he won’t do to get away with his crimes,” adding that “it will get worse before it gets better.”
Donald Trump, the first former U.S. president to face federal charges, has been ordered to appear before a Miami courthouse on Tuesday. Earlier this year, he was charged with 34 counts of falsifying business records in a separate case, connected with allegations he orchestrated the payment of hush money to pornographic actress Stormy Daniels in 2016, which he has denied.
Polling indicates Donald Trump is the frontrunner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, meaning the court cases could play a major role in the upcoming presidential election campaign. Legal experts have said he can still run for office, even if convicted.
In her Substack blog post, Mary Trump wrote: “Donald Trump has been indicted again, for the second time in less than two months. This time the charges (seven counts—at least for now—will be read in Federal Court in Miami next Tuesday) are more serious, relating as they do to the fact that Donald stole classified and highly sensitive documents that belong to the United States government—that is, to the people.
“I didn’t use the word ‘allegedly’ before ‘stole’ because we know he took the documents from the White House after he no longer had legitimate access to them; we know that he refused to return them even [though] the National Archive asked him repeatedly and deferentially; we know that he lied about having returned everything; and we know that if anybody else in this country had done something similar—or even significantly less egregious—that person would have been arrested, handcuffed, and imprisoned a very long time ago.”
Donald Trump has denied any wrongdoing in his handling of classified documents, describing the case as “election interference” and “a continuation of the greatest witch hunt of all time,” on his Truth Social website.
The former president previously suggested he had declassified all the documents the FBI discovered when they raided his Mar-a-Lago estate in August 2022, stating a president can do this “even by thinking about it.”
Referring to her estranged uncle, Mary Trump concluded: “There is nothing he won’t do to get away with his crimes. He will turn his followers against the rest of us, he will threaten to destroy the Republican Party if it doesn’t do his bidding (and it will do his bidding). If none of that works, he will burn it all down.”
Newsweek has contacted Donald Trump for comment via his official website.
Trump’s second indictment sparked condemnation from Republican presidential candidate Vikek Ramaswamy, who tweeted: “I never thought we’d see the day when the U.S. President deputizes the DOJ [Department of Justice] to arrest his lead rival in the middle of an election.”
However, Asa Hutchinson, the former governor of Arkansas, described Trump as having a “wilful disregard for the Constitution” and urged him to halt his presidential campaign, whilst noting the former president is “entitled the presumption of innocence.”
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