Donald Trump’s team refutes racism revelations in new family memoir

“Donald was furious. Boy, was he furious.”

That’s how Fred C. Trump III describes the moment in the early 1970s when his uncle, Donald J. Trump, “stomped back” into the family home in Queens, New York.

As Fred III tells in his memoir, All In The Family, it was a bucolic day.

Kicking a soccer ball around the backyard before taking a break for a Coke with Gam. Just a normal afternoon for my pre-teen years. However, I remember it like it was yesterday because of what happened next.

It turns out Donald wanted his nearly 10-year-old nephew to take a look at the car parked in the driveway: his white Cadillac Eldorado convertible. There was “a giant gash, at least two feet long, in the canvas roof. There was another, shorter gash next to it.”

Review: All In The Family: The Trumps and How We Got This Way – Fred C. Trump III (Simon & Schuster)

Fred recalls his uncle, in a fit of rage, uttering the N-word twice in rapid succession, with no evidence for his accusations or regard for the impact of his words:

Donald had not seen who had done this. (…) He returned to the spot where he had left his beloved Eldorado, saw the damage, and then went straight to the place where people’s minds sometimes go when faced with a new affront.

After making it clear that he has no time for that kind of language, Fred moves on to the main topic: “So, Donald was racist?”

Racially charged comments

Stephen Chueng, a spokesman for Trump’s 2024 presidential election campaign, clearly doesn’t think so. In a recent statement to ABC News, Cheung strongly refuted Fred III’s claims, dismissing them as fabricated and “fake news of the highest order.”

Moreover, according to Cheung’s outraged opinion, it is simply inconceivable that “such a blatantly disgusting lie could be published in the media.” He continues: “Anyone who knows President Trump knows that he would never use such language, and false stories like this have been thoroughly debunked.”

This rings a bit disingenuous, given Trump’s racist-tinged comments about Kamala Harris’s ethnicity at the National Association of Black Journalists convention. “I didn’t know she was black until a few years ago when she became black and now she wants to be known as black. So, I don’t know, is she Indian or is she black?”

And today, at a press conference at Mar-a-Lago, Trump said of his presidential opponent: “Well, uh, she’s a woman. She represents certain groups of people.”

Indeed, as Jennifer Ho points out, Trump’s comments, which evoke memories of his attacks on Barack Obama, “dwell on the long history of racism in America, where some white people have defined racial categories and policed ​​the boundaries of race.”

In any case, Cheung certainly hasn’t spent much time with Trump’s former political adviser, the entertainer (and convicted felon) Steve Bannon. According to journalist Michael Wolff, Bannon believed his former employer was not anti-Semitic, but “was much less certain that Trump wasn’t racist. He hadn’t heard Trump use the word “black,” but he could easily imagine him doing so.”

In the end, Fred covers his back. “This was Queens in the early 70s,” he insists:

People said all sorts of rude, thoughtless, prejudiced things back then. There’s no need to list them here. In one way or another, maybe everyone in Queens was racist back then. Like many things in life, it was partly a matter of situation and degree.

Not like her sister

Such misunderstandings are the order of the day in Fred’s frustrating but undeniably candid account of the Trump clan. The account comes four years after the publication of Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man (2020), written by Fred’s younger sister, Mary L. Trump.

Mary’s score-settling comments did not go down well with the Trumps. Fred acknowledges this in the final sections of his book. The collective reaction was one of unbridled fury. Fred’s uncle Robert tried to block the publication of Mary’s book, citing a breach of confidentiality.

Fred is at pains to differentiate his view of things from his sister’s. “The book reflected Mary’s point of view, and she had every right to do so. It just wasn’t mine.”

Unlike Mary, Fred is determined, despite everything, to maintain a vaguely cordial relationship with the rest of the Trumps. This partly explains the measured approach and tone of his memoirs, which are characterized by a curious mix of clichés, cruelty and compassion.

While it doesn’t contain much revelatory material or much information, it does offer a fresh perspective on the dynamics of a family whose name, for better or worse, has somehow become inextricably linked to the fate of a nation. “As goes the Trump family,” Fred argues, “so goes America.”

Fred is well aware that his name “is extraordinarily polarising and becoming more so.” He also appreciates that his book has the potential to stir things up in the family:

The next time Uncle Donald shows up in his cart, things could get tense on the golf course. And I am certainly a flawed messenger. I have my flaws, plenty of them. No In this family… or any other? The difference between me and my relatives is that none of them will admit it, and I just did.

‘A victory was a victory was a victory’

The family portrait he paints is far from flattering. “Who planted the seeds of narcissism? When did triumph become everything? How did loyalty to Trump become a one-way street?”

These are some of the questions Fred poses at the beginning of his memoir, which begins 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 brought the family name to Manhattan and gave it that glossy 1980s sheen.”

Fred’s grandfather, with whom he shares his first name, “was an old-fashioned patriarch, presiding over a large, boisterous family, whose members he managed to dominate and sometimes pit against each other.” Moreover, according to Fred, it is impossible to explain the personalities of his grandfather’s five children without understanding “what he did for – and to – his family.” to – each one of them.”

Like his domineering father, Donald Trump, “whose fierce ambition and drive had to compensate for a lack of compassion, subtlety and books,” he has a tendency to view life as a series of zero-sum conflicts and money grabs. From an early age, Fred understood that to his uncle.

A win was a win, whether or not the other person knew the game was going on. There was nothing that couldn’t be turned into a competition, and nothing more satisfying than one more win. And for Donald to be the winner, someone else had to lose.

“Maybe you should let him die”

As a case in point, Fred references the fierce dispute that erupted over his grandfather’s will in 1999. All In The Family details how his uncle Donald, who had recently suffered a series of massive financial blows, led not one, but two attempts to cut Fred and Mary out of the Trump estate.

Upon discovering that they had effectively been disinherited, the brothers, as Fred recounts, took legal action. To say that the response to the suit, again led by Uncle Donald, was cruel would be an understatement. Fred recalls receiving the news that his health insurance, which his grandfather had provided for the entire family, was being cut off:

Of all the cruel, low, heartless, merciless things my own relatives could do to me, my wife and my children, this was worse than anything I could imagine. I guess that was the point.

It was the worst thing the Trumps could do because Fred’s youngest son, William, who was born in 1999, has a lifelong neurological disability and requires full-time medical care and assistance.

This brings us to what is arguably the cruelest and most contentious moment in Fred’s memoir. Decades later, after he has settled the lawsuit and somehow managed to make peace with his family’s actions, Fred describes how, in the course of a phone call with his uncle (now President of the U.S.), the subject of William’s ongoing medical expenses was raised.

He remembers his uncle taking a second to assess the situation, before heaving a sigh and telling him that William “doesn’t recognize you. Maybe you should just let him die and move to Florida.”

As shocking as this statement may seem, what is even more depressing is that Donald Trump, who, as Fred admits, had long contributed to William’s medical expenses, is doubling his efforts.

In 2020, Fred Trump visited the White House with other advocates for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. After the meeting in the Oval Office was over and the visitors had left, Donald called Fred back into the room. He was cheerful. Fred imagined he was “touched by what the doctor and the advocates at the meeting had just shared.”

But then his uncle said, “These people… what state they are in, all the expenses, maybe these kind of people should die.” Horrified, Fred reflects, “He was talking about expenses. We were talking about human lives.”

It’s no surprise, then, that Fred says he’ll be voting for Harris in November.