Donald Trump, that darling of white evangelical Christians, is a heartless racist who thinks disabled children should be left to die, according to a new book by his nephew, Fred C. Trump III.
Alexander Howard, Senior Lecturer, Discipline of English and Writing, University of Sydney, Australia, assesses these claims in an article in The Conversation. His article is reprinted here under a Creative Commons license, reformatted for stylistic consistency:
‘Fake news of the highest order’: Donald Trump team refutes racism revelations in new family memoir
Alexander Howard, University of Sydney
“Donald was pissed. Boy, was he pissed.”
This is how Fred C. Trump III describes the moment, sometime in the early 1970s, when his uncle, Donald J. Trump, “came stomping” back into the family home in Queens, New York.
As Fred III puts it in his memoir, All In The Family, he had spent a bucolic day
kicking a soccer ball in the backyard before taking a break for a Coke with Gam. Just a normal afternoon for preteen me. Yet I remember it like it was yesterday because of what happened next.
Review: All In The Family: The Trumps and How We Got This Way – Fred C. Trump III (Simon & Schuster)
Fred remembers his uncle, in a fit of pique, uttering the N-word twice in quick succession – without proof of his accusations, nor regard for the impact of his words:
Donald hadn’t seen whoever had done this. […] He returned to where he’d left his beloved Eldorado, saw the damage, then went straight to the place where people’s minds sometimes go when they face a fresh affront.
Racially charged remarks
Stephen Chueng, Trump’s 2024 presidential electoral campaign spokesperson, clearly doesn’t think so. In a recent statement to ABC News, Cheung flatly refuted Fred III’s claims, dismissing them as fabricated and “fake news of the highest order”.
Moreover, in Cheung’s performatively outraged estimation, it simply beggars belief that "a lie so blatantly disgusting can be printed in media. Anyone who knows President Trump knows he would never use such language, and false stories like this have been thoroughly debunked."
This rings a bit hollow, given Trump’s racially charged remarks about Kamala Harris’s ethnicity at the National Association of Black Journalists convention. "I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black and now she wants to be known as Black. So, I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black?" And today, from a Mar-a-Lago press conference, Trump said of his presidential opponent: "Well … uh, she’s a woman. She represents certain groups of people."
Former President Donald Trump speaks with Rachel Scott, senior congressional correspondent for ABC News, during a Q&A session at the National Association of Black Journalists' yearly convention in Chicago, Illinois, on July 31, 2024.
Scott Olson/Getty Images.
In any case, Cheung surely hasn’t spent much time with Trump’s onetime political advisor, cheerleader (and convicted felon) Steve Bannon. According to journalist Michael Wolff, Bannon believed his former employer wasn’t antisemitic, but “he was much less confident that Trump wasn’t a racist. He had not heard Trump use the N-word but could easily imagine him doing so.”
In the end, Fred hedges his bets. “This was Queens in the early 1970s,” he insists:
Back then, people said all kinds of crude, thoughtless, prejudiced things. I don’t need to list them here. In one way or another, maybe everyone in Queens was a racist then. Like many things in life, it was partly a matter of situation and degree.
Not like his sister
Fred C. Trump III.
Simon & Schuster
Mary’s score-settling invective did not go down well with the Trumps. Fred acknowledges this in the closing sections of his book. The collective reaction was unbridled fury. Fred’s uncle, Robert, attempted to block the publication of Mary’s book, citing a breach of confidentiality.
Fred is at pains to distinguish his take on things from that of his sister. “The book was Mary’s point of view, which she had every right to. It just wasn’t mine.”
Mary Trump.
Simon & Schuster
While it doesn’t contain all that much in the way of revelatory material or insight, it does offer a fresh perspective on the dynamics of a family whose name has, for better or worse, somehow become inextricably linked with the fate of a nation. “As go the Trumps,” Fred argues, “so goes America.”
Fred is all too aware that he has a name “that is extraordinarily polarizing, and keeps getting more so”. He also appreciates that his book has the potential to ruffle family feathers:
Things could be tense on the golf course the next time Uncle Donald rolls up in his cart. And I am certainly a flawed messenger. I have my faults – many of them. Who doesn’t in this family … or any other? The difference between me and my relatives is that none of them will admit that, and I just did.
The family portrait he paints is far from flattering. “Who planted the seeds of narcissism? When did winning become everything? How did Trump loyalty become such a one-way street?”
These are some of the questions Fred poses at the outset of his memoir, which opens on the day of his grandfather’s funeral. “My father’s father was the Trump who first defined what it meant to be a Trump,” Fred says, “long before Uncle Donald marched the family name into Manhattan and gave it that shiny 1980s glow”.
Fred’s grandfather, with whom he shares a first name, “was an old-style patriarch, presiding over a large, rambunctious family, whose members he managed to dominate and sometimes pit against each other”. Moreover, in Fred’s reckoning, it is impossible to explain the personalities of his grandfather’s five children without understanding “what he did for – and to – each of them”.
Donald Trump with first wife, Ivana and his Father, Fred Trump (January 1988)
Getty/Jeffrey Asher.
...a win was a win was a win, whether or not the other person even knew the game was on. There was nothing that couldn’t be turned into a competition and nothing more satisfying than yet another win. And for Donald to be the winner, someone else had to lose.
As a case in point, Fred gestures to the ferocious dispute that erupted over his grandfather’s will in 1999. All In The Family details how his Uncle Donald, who had recently suffered a number of massive financial hits, spearheaded not one, but two attempts to cut Fred and Mary out of the Trump estate.
Discovering they had been effectively disinherited, the siblings, as Fred recounts, launched legal action. To say the response – led again by Uncle Donald – to the lawsuit was callous would be underselling things. Fred recalls receiving word that his medical insurance, which his grandfather had provided to all of the family, was being cut off:
Of all the cruel, low-down, vicious, heartless things my own relatives could do to me, my wife, and my children, this was worse than anything else I could possibly imagine. Which, I suppose was the point.
He recalls his uncle taking a second to assess the situation, before letting out a sigh and telling him that William “doesn’t recognize you. Maybe you should just let him die and move down to Florida.”
Shocking as that statement is, the most depressing thing is that Donald Trump, who, as Fred acknowledges, had long contributed to William’s medical expenses, doubles down.
In 2020, Fred Trump visited the White House with fellow advocates for people with developmental and intellectual disabilities. After the Oval Office meeting had finished and the visitors had left, Donald called Fred back to the room. He was cheerful. Fred imagined he was “touched by what the doctor and advocates in the meeting had just shared”.
But then his uncle said: “These people … the shape they’re in, all the expenses, maybe those kinds of people should just die.” Horrified, Fred reflects: “He was talking about expenses. We were talking about human lives.”
Little wonder, then, that Fred says he’ll vote for Harris in November.
Alexander Howard, Senior Lecturer, Discipline of English and Writing, University of Sydney
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
But what we shouldn’t be surprised at anymore is the way the far-right, white evangelical Christians are prepared to abandon any principle to get what they think will be a compliant placeman in the White House, who'll do their bidding in return for declarations of adoration and large wads of money into his campaign funds.
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