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A lot of unexpected things have happened in the life of Fred Trump.
The son of Donald J’s handsome late older brother, Fred was disinherited of the family fortune by a technicality in his grandfather’s will. He and his wife, after a normal pregnancy and birth, discovered their third child suffered from severe rare disabilities requiring 24/7 care.
Then Fred watched his uncle become president. And that same uncle, while in office and standing in the White House, suggested disabled Americans like Fred’s son – his own great-nephew, William – should perhaps be left to “just die,” the 61-year-old author claims.
So now Fred’s written a new book outlining all of it. And he’s found himself at the heart of US election 2024 debate – a lightning rod, arguably – as he uses his platform and famous (or infamous) name to advocate for disabled rights, while airing Trump family secrets amid his uncle’s third presidential campaign.
Publishers told Fred that a book solely about William and disability wouldn’t sell. So the Connecticut father of three made the hard decision to open a window into historic Trump circle inner-workings for All in the Family: The Trumps and How We Got This Way.
“Did I think I would have a relationship with my family after this? No,” he tells The Independent of the extended Trump clan. “Is it too important for me to let that go by the boards? Yeah.”
Fred has been fighting for disability rights for a quarter-century, since William was born the day after patriarch Frederick Christ Trump’s funeral in June 1999. Fred Jr, the real estate magnate’s passionate oldest son and namesake, had died 18 years beforehand at the age of 42, leaving behind an ex-wife, son and daughter – after spurning the family business for a failed aviation career and losing a long battle against alcohol.
Fred wrote the new book “to honor my father, who was a caring and charismatic guy, and William, who’s the most courageous and inspirational person I’ve ever met who has opened the door for me to advocate on behalf of people with intellectual and developmental disabilities,” he tells The Independent.
“But I found that I couldn’t tell that story without telling the Trump family story – a complicated, sometimes cruel family. And you can’t tell the story of the Trump family without telling the Donald story.”
It was neither bombastic Donald nor any of his surviving siblings, however, who was asked to give the eulogy at the Trump patriarch’s 1999 funeral; instead, it was Fred, son of the ill-fated renegade second oldest.
Imagine his surprise, then, when Fred and his sister were informed soon afterwards that their grandfather’s will left his fortune only to his surviving children – cutting out the kids born to errant Freddie.
Fred and his sister, Mary, believed undue pressure had been placed on their ailing, dementia-suffering grandfather by his four children; Donald gets particular blame in the new book. The pair sued, sparking a public and vicious court battle that ended in an undisclosed 2001 settlement. (“It was better than where we started,” Fred writes in All in the Family. “But it was nowhere near what my grandfather intended as a one-fifth split for all five families.”)
As the saga dominated headlines, though, Fred was battling more personal family pain at home. He and his wife, Lisa, had welcomed a son and daughter before rejoicing at her third smooth-sailing pregnancy, culminating in the June 1999 birth of William.
Everything was fine for 18 hours – until the eight-pound, six-ounce boy began having seizures. That was the first indicator of a range of physical and developmental problems William would face throughout his life; only at the age of 15 was the cause narrowed to a potassium channel deletion.
He required round-the-clock care from the moment he left the hospital and endures ongoing health battles to this day. Now 25, William lives in a care home 20 minutes from his parents.
As Fred and Lisa struggled to meet William’s needs, relationships with the wider Trump family were ebbing and flowing – against the backdrop of the businessman’s meteoric rise as star of The Apprentice. The couple weren’t invited to Trump’s 2007 wedding to Melania, nor were they informed of the birth of Don Jr’s first child – but by 2009, faced with William’s mounting medical costs, they scheduled a meeting with Donald.
He sent them to his older sister, Maryanne, after which Fred’s aunts and uncles agreed to set up a medical fund for their great-nephew. Relations warmed; Fred and Lisa attended Ivanka’s wedding later in the year. By the time Trump won the presidency, they were invited to the inauguration as family guests.
But family isn’t everything: Fred voted for Hillary Clinton.
He was hopeful, however, that the presidential connection could magnify their disability rights advocacy, bringing a group of advocates to meet with then-housing secretary Ben Carson and other White House officials. Fred was surprised and heartened that his uncle attended himself and seemed engaged and interested – until the President sent his assistant to call Fred back in after the meeting.
“Those people … the shape they’re in, all the expenses, maybe those kinds of people should just die,” Fred quotes Uncle Donald as saying in the book.
Stunned and speechless, Fred turned and walked away – but Trump was only to repeat those sentiments even more personally hurtfully not long after. In August 2020, Fred called his uncle about William’s waning medical fund.
“I don’t know,” Trump sighed, according to Fred’s book. “He doesn’t recognize you. Maybe you should just let him die and move down to Florida.”
Fred, horrified, responded that William could recognize him – and remains aghast years later, just weeks after the publication of his book. Fred hasn’t heard personally from his uncle and cousins since its release.
“How could one human being say that about another human being, least of all his grand-nephew?” an incredulous Fred asks The Independent. “ I don’t know where that cruelty comes from, that deep, horrible cruelty … forget about William being my son, he was their brother’s grandson.”
Trump, in a typical statement highlighting his contributions to William’s fund, literally used the words “this is the thanks I get” after Fred went public. His son Eric also defended him.
“They never disputed that he said that, by the way,” Fred tells The Independent.
He’s made peace with sacrificing any future salvaging of their relationships if it means he can shine a spotlight on the needs of the disabled: better training for medical staff, better housing options, better pay for caregivers whose compensation, he writes, is too often “demeaning.”
“I have a national platform,” Fred says. “And I don’t mean to call people with disabilities the underdog, but, in many cases … these are people that are voiceless.
“There’s nobody out there just shouting from the rooftops, if you will, saying this needs to be done.”
He’s hopeful that Trump’s attitude towards the disabled – including those within his own family – might reveal his alleged true colors for some voters, though he’s fully aware of Trump’s inexplicably teflon history.
“He has this amazing ability … of just deflecting – Oh, I didn’t mean it that way, I wasn’t mocking that reporter, what are you talking about?” Fred says. “It’s almost that simple – that he is able to just get away with stuff.”
Fred’s been observing Uncle Donald his whole life; he was seven and in front of the television with the rest of the family as they nervously watched the 1969 draft lottery. Donald – already temporarily saved by a podiatrist note about previously unmentioned bone spurs – escaped with a high number.
Fred was also in front of the TV as a child with Donald when the older Trump goaded him into hitting the youngest, Uncle Rob – who immediately slapped his nephew in the face. Donald laughed so hard he struggled to breathe, according to Fred’s book.
To the ardent Trump supporters who claim the 45th President is mistreated by the media, that he’s kind and thoughtful in person or one-on-one, his nephew has a simple answer.
“They don’t know him like I do,” he tells The Independent.
“My book is unlike any other book ever written about Donald, including my sister’s,” Fred says, noting Mary’s 2020 release – which Uncle Rob unsuccessfully sought to legally stop. (Fred and Mary, incidentally, have not spoken in four years, he tells The Independent.)
“I knew Donald during his formative years, his school years, his business years, his political years,” Fred says. “I like to joke that he was the first one to put a golf club in my hand. So there are journalists who wrote books about him; there are people that work with him for a short amount of time, and they think they know everything about him.
“No,” he says. “I knew about him. I know him. We spent so much time over the years … so I look at it from a different perspective.”
And, despite the detailed and sometimes damning personal accounts in the book, Fred says he took great pains to avoid touching upon any rumor and scandal.
“We were very careful, and we butted heads with the publisher a lot about this,” he says. “We kept all gossip out of it.”
As he boasts about the pushback he gave against “gossip,” Fred’s Queens accent and attitude shine through – calling to mind his uncle’s distinctive oratory delivery style.
“Noooo way are we doing that,” Fred says he told publishers, emphasis on the drawn-out and deliberate “No.”
“That’s not the way we’re gonna do it.”.
He still clearly cares for his uncle; while no one reached out after the July assassination attempt, Fred asked the 45th President’s assistant to “please let Donald know that Lisa and the kids and I are thinking about him.”
She told him she would, Fred says.
If Trump is re-elected, his nephew also has no problem – even after the book – approaching him again about disability rights advocacy.
“I’ll reach out to him,” he tells The Independent. “I have no fear.”
