“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.
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:
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.
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.”
Charles Rex Arbogast/AAP
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:
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
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.”
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:
Things could be tense on the gold 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 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.
‘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 – each of them”.
Charles Rex Arbogast/AAP
Much like his domineering father, Donald Trump, “whose ferocious ambition and drive had to compensate for a lack of compassion, subtlety, and book smarts”, 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
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.
‘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:
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.
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.
