Nephew Says Trump Suggested Some Disabled People ‘Should Just Die’
In a new memoir, Fred C. Trump III claims his uncle, Donald J. Trump, made cruel and racist comments.
“In 2020, a few months before the last election, former President Donald J. Trump’s niece, Mary Trump, published a book about her uncle and how awful and psychologically warped she found him to be. At the time, her brother, Fred C. Trump III, put out a statement slamming his sister for such treachery.
Now, he’s wielding the knife. Next week, he will publish “All in the Family: The Trumps and How We Got to Be This Way,” a tell-all that puts the former president in a harsh light. The New York Times obtained a copy.
Fred and Mary Trump are the children of Fred Trump Jr., Donald’s older brother who struggled with alcoholism and died of a heart attack in 1981, when he was 42.
Fred Trump, 61, describes himself as fairly close to his uncle. He attended the 2017 inauguration (he writes that he had a better seat than John McCain) and visited the White House several times (the book includes a picture of its author sitting behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office).
Once, while in the Oval Office, the elder Mr. Trump insisted that his nephew stay in the room for a phone call he was about to have with King Abdullah of Jordan. He put the call on speakerphone, so his nephew could hear the king thank Mr. Trump for killing an Islamic State leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. “I killed him,” the former president boasted in front of his nephew, according to the book. “I killed him like a dog.”
But another White House meeting left the author with a chill, and, it is implied, the reason for writing the book.
Fred Trump’s son was born with a rare medical condition that led to developmental and intellectual disabilities. His care had been paid for in part with help from the family. After Mr. Trump was elected, Fred Trump wanted to use his connection to the White House for good. With the help of Ivanka Trump, his cousin, and Ben Carson, at the time the housing and urban development secretary, he was able to convene a group of advocates for a meeting with his uncle. The president “seemed engaged, especially when several people in our group spoke about the heart-wrenching and expensive efforts they’d made to care for their profoundly disabled family members,” he writes.
After the meeting, Fred Trump claims, his uncle pulled him aside and said, “maybe those kinds of people should just die,” given “the shape they’re in, all the expenses.”
The remark wasn’t a one-off, according to Fred Trump. A couple of years later, when he called his uncle for help because the medical fund that paid for his son’s care was running out of money, Fred Trump claims his uncle said: “I don’t know. He doesn’t recognize you. Maybe you should just let him die and move down to Florida.”
“Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised to hear Donald say that,” he writes. “It wasn’t far off from what he’d said that day in the Oval Office after our meeting with the advocates. Only that time, it was other people’s children who should die. This time, it was my son.”
Another scathing anecdote in the book occurred decades earlier, in the 1970s, when the author claims to have heard his uncle use a racial slur after his car had been damaged and he was searching for someone to blame.
“‘Look what the niggers did,’” Fred Trump writes, quoting his uncle.
The author describes the former president as a product of an Archie Bunker-like, “us-versus-them” upbringing in Queens, but then notes: “Drunk or sober, my father never used the N-word, not that I ever heard. And neither had I.”
Steven Cheung, a Trump campaign spokesman, called Fred Trump’s account “completely fabricated and total fake news of the highest order.”
“Anyone who knows President Trump knows he would never use such language, and false stories like this have been thoroughly debunked,” he said. Mr. Trump has previously been accused of using the slur while he was the host of his television reality show. He has denied it.
Fred Trump paints a somewhat nuanced portrait of his uncle, including details that suggest their relationship was often warm. They would watch “The Twilight Zone” together and play catch. When Fred Trump’s blue Schwinn bicycle was stolen, it was his uncle who took him to the precinct to demand the police do something, he writes.
The elder Mr. Trump would take his nephew golfing. When Fred Trump wanted help finding an engagement ring, his uncle told him to “Go see Ralph Destino. He’s the president of Cartier. He’ll help you pick something out.”
Donald and his ex-wife, Ivana, arrived at Fred Trump’s wedding in a limo (it was too rainy to land a helicopter), and Fred had decent relationships with some of his cousins, Donald Jr., Eric, and Ivanka (he attended her wedding to Jared Kushner).
One thing the book makes clear is that, in the Trump family, score-settling and feuding is a way of life. “Blood went only so far in this family,” he writes, “as far as the dollar signs.”
Fred Trump’s account retreads the well-documented fight that occurred after his uncle teamed up with two of his siblings to cut him and his sister out of their grandfather’s will. The legal battle that ensued was vicious and public, chronicled in the pages of the city’s tabloids.
And yet, once it was all settled, Fred writes that his uncle invited him to go golfing. “We’re through, right?” he asked him. When his nephew said they were, the elder Mr. Trump gave him a hug. (Then, according to the book, he stepped away and added, “Your lawyer never should have said that thing about your grandfather’s toupee.”)
Fred Trump writes that, when his uncle was running for president in 2016, the elder Mr. Trump’s sister, a federal judge named Maryanne Trump Barry, wanted to publish an opinion essay disparaging her brother, but ultimately decided against it.
And Fred Trump describes his fury toward his sister, Mary, for blindsiding him with her book. “Mary didn’t speak for me any more than anyone else in the family did,” he writes. “I hated that people kept assuming that.”
Fred Trump says he voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020. His uncle’s divisive presidency made it harder to be a Trump, he writes. (He claims to have woken up one day to find dead chickens strewed across his Connecticut lawn.)
In one peculiar scene at the end of the book, he recounts going to see his uncle after he had left the White House, because he was having trouble finding work. (Fred worked in commercial real estate, but not for the Trump Organization.) He told his uncle that their family’s name was now too “toxic,” and the former president “gave a small jolt” at hearing that.
As he turned to walk out, he claims his uncle admonished him: “Don’t ever say that the Trump name is toxic. Never say that.”
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