“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
It turns out Donald wanted his nearly ten-year-old nephew to take a look at the car parked in the driveway: his white convertible Cadillac Eldorado. There was “a giant gash, at least two feet long, in the canvas roof. There was another, shorter gash next to it.”
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:
Having made it clear he has no time for such language, Fred turns to the elephant in the room. “So, was Donald a racist?”
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”. He continues: “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.”
Indeed, as Jennifer Ho points out, Trump’s comments, which evoke memories of his “birtherism” attacks on Barack Obama, “tapped into 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 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:
Not like his sister
Fred C. Trump III. Simon & Schuster
Equivocations of this sort are the order of the day in Fred’s frustrating, yet undeniably heartfelt account of the Trump clan. It 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 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
Unlike Mary, Fred is determined, in spite of everything, to maintain vaguely cordial relations with the rest of the Trumps. In part, this explains the measured approach and tone of his memoir, which is characterised by a curious mix of cliché, cruelty and compassion.
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:
‘A win was a win was a win’
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”.
Much like his domineering father, Donald Trump, “whose ferocious ambition and drive had to compensate for a lack of compassion, subtlety, and books”, has a tendency to view life as a series of zero-sum conflicts and cash grabs. From an early age, Fred understood that to his uncle
‘Maybe you should just let him die’
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:
It was the worst thing the Trumps could possibly do because Fred’s youngest child, 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 most callous and contentious moment in Fred’s memoir. Decades later, having settled the lawsuit and somehow managed to make peace with his family’s actions, Fred describes how, over the course of a phone call with his uncle (by now US president), the issue of William’s ongoing medical expenses were brought up.
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 does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.