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During a private meeting at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, then-President Donald Trump reportedly said aloud that people with disabilities would rather die than incur additional costs for their caregivers.
The shocking statement is included in a new book written by former President Donald Trump’s nephew, Fred Trump III, titled “All in the Family: The Trumps and How We Got This Way,” in which he makes other startling claims about his uncle.
Fred Trump III, the brother of psychologist and author Mary Trump and the eldest son of Donald Trump’s late brother, Fred Trump Jr., claims his uncle made offensive comments during a private meeting in May 2020, according to a book excerpt published by Time magazine.
Fred Trump III wrote that then-President Trump, then-Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, White House COVID-19 Task Force member Dr. Brett Giroir, and other disability rights advocates met at the White House to discuss the needs of people with disabilities for 45 minutes.
This was a big experience for him, he writes, because his son, William Trump, was diagnosed as an infant with a rare seizure disorder that caused severe cognitive and physical damage. In his memoir, he reveals that his son was later diagnosed with a “KCNQ2 mutation,” which he describes as “a genetic malfunction that doctors called potassium channel deletion.”
Fred Trump (right) poses with his son William and wife Lisa (Courtesy of Gallery Books)
After the White House meeting, Fred Trump III said he was brought back to the Oval Office with his uncle and Secretary Azar at Donald Trump’s request.
His uncle greeted him: “Hey, how are you?”
Fred Trump III told him things were “going well” and thanked him for meeting with him.
At that point, he wrote, his uncle began speaking again.
“Those people,” he said, pausing, “their condition, all the expenses, maybe those people would be better off dead,” he suggested in the book.
Fred Trump III added that at the time he “really didn’t know what to say.”
The shocking remarks about people with disabilities are not the only ones revealed by the former president’s nephew.
According to another excerpt from the book reported by The Guardian, Donald Trump made a nasty racist remark in the 1970s after discovering damage to his beloved Cadillac convertible.
Republican presidential candidate and former US president Donald Trump holds first campaign rally with running mate J.D. Vance (Reuters)
He reportedly recalled the future president showing him “a Cotillion White Cadillac Eldorado convertible with a large scratch that was at least two feet long.” [and] There was another short cut next to it on the convertible’s canvas roof.
“‘Niggers,’ I remember him saying in disgust. ‘Look what niggers have done,'” he wrote.
He added that his uncle did not know who damaged the car.
But when his father “saw the damage,” his nephew said, he “crossed the racial divide and went straight to the place people sometimes find themselves in when faced with a new insult.”