As told by Fred C. Trump III, the former president’s nephew, in “All in the Family: The Trumps and How We Got this Way,” it goes like this: Someone had slashed a two-foot gash in the soft-top of his Uncle Donald’s beloved Cadillac Eldorado convertible. Donald Trump was furious. He called over his young nephew to take a look.
Though Donald Trump could not have known who did it, he “disgustedly” blamed Black people, twice using the n-word to describe those he believed to be the culprits.
“I knew that was a bad word,” Fred Trump, who spells out the pejorative in full in his book, recalls thinking at the time.
Fred Trump’s vividly detailed recollection of that day — which he writes took place when he was a “preteen” in the early 1970s, when Uncle Donald was in his mid- to late 20s — prompts him to ponder whether his uncle was “a racist.” The author cuts his uncle a bit of a break, noting that, in those days, “people said all kinds of crude, thoughtless, prejudiced things.” He also does some equivocating, hyperbolically writing that, “in one way or another, maybe everyone in Queens was a racist then.”
Fred’s inclusion of the anecdote would have had much greater punch if he could have shown a pattern of racially inappropriate remarks by his uncle in private family encounters. After all, he writes at great length about the many, and frequently toxic, Trump gatherings he attended with Uncle Donald over the years. He dedicates an entire chapter to race and throws out enough examples to make it clear that he leans toward “yes” when it comes to the question of racism in his family — but he doesn’t quite say it directly.
He recounts how his grandfather, the family patriarch, Frederick C. Trump Sr., would use a Yiddish word considered an anti-Black slur. He also revisits the well-plowed Justice Department accusations of discrimination against Black lease applicants at Trump-owned apartments, which ended in the 1970s with a consent decree and no admission of guilt; and he touches on Donald Trump’s over-the-top demands for harsh punishment for the Black and Latino youths known as the Central Park Five, who were wrongfully convicted of assaulting a White female jogger in the late 1980s. He even dips back to the 1920s to recount the lesser-known incident of his grandfather being arrested for failing to disperse at a Ku Klux Klan rally.
But in rooting around — literally and figuratively — he finds no Klan robes in his grandfather’s closets and no racist literature, and he doesn’t share any other instances of the n-word being used in the family. Though he does remind us where Woody Guthrie, the renowned folk singer who lived in a Trump-owned apartment in the 1950s, stood on the Trump race question. Guthrie’s song “Old Man Trump” features the lyrics: “I suppose that Old Man Trump knows just how much racial hate / He stirred up in that bloodpot of human hearts.”
Just raising the question about Trump and race in the midst of a presidential campaign adds to a narrative that the former president’s detractors have repeated for years, in no small part because of the words he uses to describe people of color, particularly Latino migrants. An alleged instance of racist language used to describe African Americans — even one from decades ago — is the sort of thing that will draw interest at a time when the Democratic ticket’s support among Black voters had been slipping with Biden as the presumptive nominee and Trump’s, while still lagging far behind, had been improving.
The author of “All in the Family” is the son of Donald Trump’s older brother, Fred Trump Jr., or “Freddie,” as he was known, who died in 1981 at the age of 42 after a life marred by alcoholism and unrealized dreams of a career as a commercial airline pilot. He is the second of Freddie’s children to write a book about the family. In 2020, his younger sister, Mary Trump — who holds a doctoral degree in clinical psychology — wrote a bestseller, “Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man.” (Mary’s next memoir, “Who Could Ever Love You,” is being published in September.)
Putting out a book is a departure for Fred, one of the lesser-known members of the extended Trump family, who writes that he had been “stubbornly quiet, even as those around me took their potshots.” At times, “All in the Family” — which bogs down when the author’s life and real estate career are the subjects, but is pretty juicily entertaining when he writes about his aunts and uncles — reads like a cathartic exercise.
Fred writes of engaging in an effort to try to understand the roots of Trumpian dysfunction so he can “move past all that stuff” inherent in having such a polarizing last name. He realizes, though, that his less-than-flattering portrait of the family — of his years of trying to maintain relationships with his difficult relatives — might make things “tense” the next time he runs into Uncle Donald on the golf course. Fred, who is the father of a son, William, with developmental disabilities, also writes that shedding his low profile is a way to leverage his famous name to advocate for people like William.
In trying to puzzle out his complicated family, Fred, now 61, writes with some bemusement about his German immigrant great-grandfather, Friedrich Heinrich Trump, whom he dubs “Fred Zero,” sailing off to America in the late 1880s to avoid the military draft and eventually owning brothels in Alaska. He quips that Friedrich’s escape from military duty means that his Uncle Donald was not the first Trump to sidestep military service, a reference to Donald Trump avoiding the Vietnam War draft by dubiously claiming that he had bone spurs.
While not as scathing as his sister Mary’s book, “All in the Family” still presents a dishy portrait of generations of the Trump family as chronically toxic, narcissistic, conniving and cruel. He attributes the roots of much of that to the environment created by his domineering grandfather, Fred Trump, the real estate magnate whose empire would eventually be headed by Uncle Donald. Many of the traits now so associated with the former president — the tendency to pit people against one another and braggadocio — appeared first in the family patriarch.
“Everything that was ever done by anyone around him,” Fred writes about his grandfather, “he always figured he was the one who had really done it.”
Fred lays no small amount of blame for his father’s troubles on his grandfather pushing him to join the family business. Though his father chafed at joining the business, according to his son, he was the one who came up with the idea of putting the Trump name on a large development — a decision his grandfather initially resisted. The airing of that fact is sure to rankle his Uncle Donald, who loves to take credit for almost everything and to present himself as a business savant.
“Did my father create a monster with that branding suggestion of his?” Fred Trump writes. “Later, of course, his younger brother would run away with the idea. Before you knew it, we’d have Trump Tower, Trump University, Trump sneakers, and Trump Bibles.”
A Trump family gathering sounds like it must have been a nightmare — almost as if they were in competition with each other to see who could be the meanest. One moment, Grandma Mary Anne would go ballistic because Fred showed up with Pepsi when she’d told him to bring Coke. Then Donald’s sister, Maryanne Trump Barry, would belittle Freddie’s wife, Linda, “with a special ruthlessness,” and in later years diss the family of Donald’s then-fiancée, Marla Maples.
“They’re not simple,” Fred recalls Aunt Maryanne saying when the Maples family arrived for Donald’s and Marla’s wedding. “They’re simpletons.”
There really doesn’t seem to be any occasion, as Fred remembers it, when the Trumps couldn’t find reason to be cruel to others and themselves. The fight over his grandfather’s will has been well chronicled, but it’s the private conversations Fred recounts that seem so jarring. For those who don’t remember, Fred and Mary filed a lawsuit upon learning that they had been cut out of their father’s share of the family fortune after his grandfather’s death in 1999. The lawsuit, which was tabloid newspaper gold, was settled in 2001 for an undisclosed amount. But the mess leading up to that settlement was a fiasco Fred calls “the Trumpiest story ever.”
During the legal fight, Fred got a call from his grandmother. She had a message for him: “I hope you die penniless just like your father did.”
Fred concluded that the contretemps with the will was a money grab in which his Uncle Donald “manipulated” his grandfather to change his will to have more cash to stem his mounting debts from a string of failing businesses.
“We were collateral damage of his selfish but typical scheme,” Fred writes.
Now, at this point, it would seem to follow that Fred and Uncle Donald would be quits. Well, no, as it turns out. In the strange I-love-you, I-love-you-not universe of the Trump family, the story veers in another direction — sort of. A year after the lawsuit ended, Uncle Donald invited his nephew to be an honorary member of one of his golf clubs. They played a round together.
In 2009, nephew Fred even turned to Uncle Donald for money. Indeed, we learn that Donald and his living siblings — Maryanne, Robert and Elizabeth — established a medical fund to help cover the costs of care and treatments for Fred’s son, who had been battling debilitating seizures.
Nothing in this book offers a better insight into Donald Trump’s heart and mind — at least from the vantage point of his nephew — than the snatches of conversations about Fred’s son and about disabilities writ large. What comes through is a portrait of a man who sees himself as a superior being — right down to his DNA.
It begins with that first conversation about the medical fund. Uncle Donald wanted to know something about his nephew’s son, Fred writes: “What’s the problem with him, anyway? Like what’s wrong with him?”
When his nephew told him that the doctors didn’t really know, but that it’s “some kind of genetic thing,” Uncle Donald was taken aback.
“Not in our family,” Fred recalls his uncle saying. “There’s nothing wrong with our genes.”
What’s interesting, and somewhat unexpected, is that Uncle Donald — whom Fred had essentially accused of stealing from him and his sister — turns out to be the most generous contributor to the fund, the only sibling who consistently pumped money into it.
And yet, Fred also remembers a moment of great cruelty when he once reached out about the costs of his son’s care.
“I don’t know,” Uncle Donald told him. “He doesn’t recognize you. Maybe you should just let him die and move down to Florida.”
Fred, who had always voted for Democrats, cast a ballot for Hillary Clinton in 2016 and for Biden in 2020, but he maintained contact with his uncle even after Biden won the election, including seeking help with his real estate career, because he said he was losing work due to having the last name Trump.
Fred was not surprised when his uncle refused to accept the 2020 election results.
“He couldn’t handle being called a loser,” Fred writes.
But the nephew goes beyond that — not just labeling his uncle a sore loser, but also, in a sense, a coward. Uncle Donald had told the crowd that he’d join them to march on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, while Congress was preparing to certify the election results. But he didn’t do so, instead returning to the White House to watch as a violent, insurrectionist mob broke into the Capitol.
It reminded Fred Trump of a story his Uncle Robert had told him: Uncle Donald was taunting a player he’d beaten in a golf game, and the man slugged him in the face.
“That was the fight,” Fred writes. “A lot of tough talk, not too many punches.”
Manuel Roig-Franzia is a Washington Post staff writer and The Post’s former bureau chief in Miami and Mexico City.
All in the Family
The Trumps and How We Got This Way
