During a private meeting at the outset of the Covid-19 pandemic, then-president Donald Trump mused aloud about whether people with disabilities would be better off dead instead of causing more expenses for their caregivers.
The previously unreported conversation was between the then-president and his nephew, Fred Trump III, and is detained in the younger Trump’s forthcoming book, All in the Family: The Trumps and How We Got This Way .
According to an excerpt published by Time, Fred Trump III — the brother of psychologist and author Mary Trump and the eldest son of the ex-president’s late older brother, Fred Trump Jr — Donald Trump made the offensive comment during a private meeting in May 2020 after his nephew had been part of a disability rights discussion at the White House.
The younger Trump 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, had spent 45 minutes in the Oval Office discussing the needs of people with disabilities.
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 meeting, Fred III recounts how after meeting with t he was ushered back into the Oval Office with his uncle and Azar at the then-president’s request.
His uncle greeted him: “Hey, pal — how’s everything going?”
Fred III told him things were “good” and thanked him for meeting with him.
At that point, he writes that the then-president started to speak again.
“Those people ...” Donald said, trailing off. “The shape they’re in, all the expenses, maybe those kinds of people should just die,” he recalled.
Fred 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 in the new book.
According to a separate excerpt 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.”
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