In a new book, Donald Trump’s nephew recalls the future US president, at the start of his New York real estate career, surveying damage to a beloved car and furiously using the N-word.
The shocking scene appears in All in the Family: The Trumps and How We Got This Way by Fred C Trump III, which will be published in the US next Tuesday. The Guardian obtained a copy.
“‘Niggers,’ I recall him saying disgustedly. ‘Look what the niggers did,’” Fred Trump writes, describing his uncle’s racist outburst.
In the midst of a tumultuous election, in which Trump faces Kamala Harris, the first woman of color to be vice-president, the book may prove explosive.
Allegations of racism have followed Trump through his life in business and politics.
Rumours persist that tape exists of Trump using the N-word during his time on The Apprentice, the hit NBC TV show that propelled him towards politics, though none have emerged. Omarosa Manigault Newman, a Black contestant, has said she has heard such a tape. Trump denies it.
Since winning the Republican nomination for president in 2016, through four years in the White House and in his third presidential campaign, Trump has repeatedly used racist language and has faced accusations of race-baiting. He has vehemently denied all such accusations.
On Wednesday, in a statement to the New York Times, Trump’s spokesperson, Steven Cheung, called Trump III’s account “completely fabricated, and total fake news of the highest order”, adding: “Anyone who knows President Trump knows he would never use such language, and false stories like this have been thoroughly debunked.”
Nonetheless, Trump III describes in detail a stunning moment he says happened in the early 1970s at the house of his grandparents, Donald Trump’s parents, in Queens, New York.
It was “just a normal afternoon for pre-teen me”, Trump III writes, but then his uncle arrived.
“Donald was pissed,” Trump III writes. “Boy, was he pissed.”
Trump says his uncle showed him his “cotillon white Cadillac Eldorado convertible”. In its retractable canvas top, “there was a giant gash, at least two feet long [and] another, shorter gash next to it”.
“‘Niggers,’ I recall him saying disgustedly. ‘Look at what the niggers did.’
“‘I knew that was a bad word.’”
His uncle, Trump III writes, had not seen whoever damaged his car. Instead, he “saw the damage, then went straight to the place where people’s minds sometimes go when they face a fresh affront. Across the racial divide.”
Fred C Trump III is a successful New York real estate executive – outside the Trump firm – and, because of his experiences as a parent, a campaigner in support of the intellectually and developmentally disabled.
He is not the first Trump to write a book about growing up in a family led by Fred Trump Sr, a New York construction and real estate magnate, and containing the future president.
In 2020, Fred C Trump III’s sister, Mary Trump, published the bestseller Too Much and Never Enough. Promoting that book, she said her uncle was “clearly racist”, adding that she had heard him using racist language, “and I don’t think that should surprise anybody given how virulently racist he is today”.
Mary Trump will release another memoir this year, about the sad life and early death of her and Fred C Trump III’s father, Fred Trump Jr, the oldest son who nonetheless saw his younger brother take over the family business.
When Fred Trump Sr died, Trump III and his sister were in effect disinherited by their uncles and aunts, before reaching a settlement.
In 2020, when Mary Trump released her memoir and Donald Trump tried to block it, her brother distanced himself from the project. But this June, when Simon & Schuster announced Fred Trump III’s own book, it promised “candid and revealing … never-before-told stories” that would shed “light into the darker corner of the Trump empire”.
The publisher also said Fred Trump III was motivated to write by the 2024 election, and suggested his book might “shape the decision of a nation”.
The book spares little in its portrayal of Trump attitudes about race.
Of Queens in the 1960s and 70s, Fred Trump III says it was “one of the most diverse places on the planet” but also one of contrast, between Jamaica Estates, the affluent white neighborhood where the Trumps lived and areas where majority people of color lived.
“If something bad happened” to residents of Jamaica Estates, Fred Trump III writes, “they were the ones who did it. Almost certainly, it was them.”
He considers a key question: “So, was Donald a racist?”
Noting that “people have been asking for decades”, Fred Trump III say his uncle used the N-word at a time when he says “people said all kinds of crude, thoughtless, prejudiced things”, adding: “Maybe everyone in Queens was a racist then.”
Trump III says he did not hear his grandfather, Fred Trump Sr, use the N-word, but did hear him “sometimes say schvartze, the Yiddish slur for Black people, and his tenants were uniformly white. That had to mean something, didn’t it?”
In 1973, Fred Trump Sr, Donald Trump and the Trump company were sued by the US justice department, alleging racial discrimination at New York housing developments.
Fred Trump III writes: “This was a painful period for the company and therefore for Donald … all the publicity was bad publicity. The ‘r’ word – racist – was thrown around.”
The Trumps counter-sued and the case was settled “with no admission of guilt”, as Donald Trump has said.
Trump III also addresses his grandfather’s apparent arrest at a Ku Klux Klan rally in 1927, which he says surprised the family when it was recently reported.
Detailing an incident in his own childhood in which he says three “tough-looking Black kids” stole his bike, Fred Trump III says his Uncle Donald demanded one of the kids be “punished” and locked up.
He then cites another flashpoint in Donald Trump’s adult life: the day in 1989 when he “took out full-page ads in the New York City newspapers, demanding harsh [in fact capital] punishment for the Central Park Five”, Black teenagers wrongfully imprisoned over the rape of a white woman.
“I couldn’t say I was surprised,” Fred Trump III writes. “Suddenly, I was right back … in Queens.”
