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During a private meeting at the outset of the Covid-19 pandemic, then-president Donald Trump reportedly mused aloud about whether people with disabilities would be better off dead instead of causing more expenses for their caregivers.
The shocking remark is included in a new book, by the former president’s nephew, Fred Trump III, who makes other startling claims about his uncle.
According to an excerpt of the book published by Time, Fred Trump III — the brother of psychologist and author Mary Trump and the eldest son of Donald Trump’s late older brother, Fred Trump Jr. — claims his uncle made the offensive remark during a private meeting in May 2020.
Fred Trump III writes that he, then-President Trump, then-Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar and White House Covid Task Force member Dr. Brett Giroir, along with other disability rights advocates, spent 45 minutes discussing the needs of people with disabilities at the White House.
It’s a subject he has significant experience with, he writes, because of his son, William Trump, who as an infant was diagnosed with a rare seizure disorder that has caused significant cognitive and physical damage. In the memoir, he reveals that his son was later diagnosed with “KCNQ2 mutation,” which he describes as “a genetic misfire that the doctors called a potassium channel deletion.”
Following the White House meeting, Fred Trump III said he was ushered back into the Oval Office with his uncle and Azar at Donald Trump’s request.
His uncle greeted him: “Hey, pal — how’s everything going?”
Fred Trump III told him things were “good” and thanked him for meeting.
At that point, he writes that his uncle started to speak again.
“Those people …” he said, trailing off. “The shape they’re in, all the expenses, maybe those kinds of people should just die,” he suggested, according to the book.
Fred Trump III added that at the time, he “truly did not know what to say.”
The shocking comments about people with disabilities aren’t the only ones revealed by the ex-president’s nephew.
According to a separate excerpt of the book reported on by The Guardian, Donald Trump used a vile racial slur after finding damage on a beloved Cadillac convertible in the 1970s.
He reportedly recalls how the future president was showing him a “cotillon white Cadillac Eldorado convertible” with “a giant gash, at least two feet long [and] another, shorter gash next to it” in the convertible canvas roof.
“‘Ni***rs,’ I recall him saying disgustedly. ‘Look at what the ni***rs did,’” he wrote.
He added that his uncle did not know who had damaged the car.
But when the elder Trump “saw the damage,” his nephew says he “went straight to the place where people’s minds sometimes go when they face a fresh affront. Across the racial divide.”
