In a pair of blog posts responding to Donald Trump’s address to Congress, the president’s niece, Mary Trump, lamented that the American experiment has failed.

Her initial piece called her uncle’s speech “grotesque” and “a stunning and brazen display of American carnage.”

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She said the president said “exactly what we should have expected,” but that actually seeing the words come out of his mouth was a shock to the system.

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“The endless mendacity; the incalculable cruelty and unceasing violence; the assaults on our allies, on the most vulnerable among us, on our rights, on our home–it was difficult to take. The ways in which Donald downed the American people in vile poison that is his vision of America, and indeed, of humanity, is something I will never forget.”

In a follow-up post, Mary Trump clarified what she meant when she wrote that “America is over.”

“Donald’s speech, the WWE of it all, along with the capitulation of the fascist Republican Party and the muted acquiescence of the Democrats… [confirmed that] American democracy fell on the wrong side of the knife, and we failed the American experiment.”

She said her outlook is bleak because the speech “was, in its totality, bleak.”

But she also emphasized that she didn’t mean the fight was over “or that anything is hopeless.”

“This is about finding ourselves in a moment in which right now the most important thing we can do, not as Democrats, but as people who believe in American democracy, who believe that the American experiment must somehow be resurrected, is to understand the urgency and necessity of bearing witness to what is happening around us,” she wrote.

“Looking straight at what faces us is the only way to find our footing and get out [sic] bearings. Only then can we, together, find the most effective way of moving forward. Because ultimately, in this instance, bearing witness is not enough. We must place ourselves in a position to change the course of history. And we can do that by doing our jobs as Americans who believe in saving democracy—by not giving up and refusing always to give in.”

Trump’s 99-minute address to the joint session of Congress on Tuesday night included attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts as well as on the trans community. He accused schools that support trans students of “child abuse” and also declared that “our country will be woke no longer.” He celebrated the removal of the “poison of critical race theory” from public schools and bragged about his executive order declaring there are only two genders.

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