3 hours Ago By Parul Chandra
In a family that could sometimes seem like the cast of a 1950s sitcom, my uncle Donald had a role of his own. He was the obnoxious one. And it’s true.
Many of Donald’s adult traits—his determination, his short fuse–first displayed themselves in his childhood.” The person being described in this rather unflattering manner is none other than the mercurial Donald J Trump, now all set to occupy the White House once again. Describing him thus is his nephew Fred C Trump III, in his memoir All In The Family: The Trumps and How We Got This Way, published a few months before his uncle won a second presidential term.
The memoir reinforces the unsavoury traits of both the family and uncle Donald, a hugely successful real estate Moghul, until he stepped into politics to turn things upside down. The Trump family, as also uncle Donald, are portrayed as being mean-spirited, despite the wealth and means at their command. There is also a sense of dysfunctionality that comes through, with the author recalling how people would often tell him, “The Trump name is toxic.
” Neither the family nor Donald Trump emerge unscathed as Fred gently twists the knife into both—be it their general lack of empathy, their lack of scruples in seeking to usurp his and his sister Mary’s share of inheritance in their grandfather’s estate, and even their downright heartlessness as they seek to cut-off the medical insurance of Fred’s severely disabled son, William. “Of all the cruel, low-down, vicious, heartless things my own relatives could do to me, my wife and my children, this was worse than anything I could possibly imagine,” he writes. But it’s not merely the move to cut-off William’s insurance cover that will leave you slack-jawed.
It’s also uncle Donald’s callous remarks when Fred went to meet him regarding depleting funds for William’s medical treatment. “He doesn’t recognise you. Maybe you should let him die and move down to Florida,” is what the uncle told his nephew.
If uncle Donald comes across as cold-hearted, so do his siblings as they go along with his efforts to prevent the author’s family from getting its share of their grandfather’s estate. Fred writes of his uncle: “Cutting off our share of the family fortune didn’t seem to cause Donald a second of anxiety or guilt”. Sister Mary has already documented the Trump family’s dysfunctionality and uncle Donald’s personality in her own memoir, Too Much And Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man.
Fred adds to the mix. Having seen uncle Donald from close quarters right since childhood during regular visits to his grandparents mansion in New York city, Fred’s portrayal of his uncle is of a man who was ruthlessly ambitious, churlish, odious, unscrupulous and not averse to speaking untruths to meet his ends. It’s no surprise that Donald Trump’s recent presidential campaign was also peppered with untruths—the most preposterous one being his claim that Haitian immigrants were eating people’s pets! That the world has seen Donald Trump display these characteristics in good measure since he came into the limelight—first as a flamboyant property tycoon, and then as the US President from 2017 to 2021—goes without saying.
These personality traits had their origins in his upbringing, going by the memoir. Donald, the fourth of five children of family patriarch Frederick Trump and his Scottish wife Mary, learned early “he could get away with things even as a child”. His penchant for half-truths and outright lies also comes through as the author narrates episodes from his life long before he became the President.
Fred writes it was at the New York Military Academy, a school that Donald Trump was packed off to by his father, hoping to instill some discipline in his recalcitrant son, that his uncle “transitioned from simply obnoxious to thoroughly brash”. Later, uncle Trump managed his admission to Ivy League business school Wharton despite his “spotty academic record” with help from grandpa who went along with him for the on-campus interview. The patriarch chatted up the admissions staff, mentioning his multifarious projects and hinting at the donations the school could get.
Voila! Trump entered the portals of Wharton. The memoir also shares in great detail how uncle Donald managed to repeatedly dodge military service during the Vietnam war, getting five deferments, four for attending college and the final one for bone spurs. Again, it was his father who came to the rescue, arranging for him a certificate from a podiatrist, a tenant in one of his buildings, to certify that the youngster was suffering from bone spurs.
“Bone spurs? No one in the family had ever heard of Donald’s bone spurs. No one had ever seen him hobbling. No one had ever heard him complain,” notes his nephew.
And then adds caustically, “Donald had a get-out-of-war free card,” which was to later earn him the tag of “draft dodger” from his political rivals. Charges that the President-elect is also racist are alluded to in his use of the N-word when he found his car vandalised as a youngster. Blacks, without any proof whatsoever, were blamed by him.
Fred, however, appears to equivocate in saying that in those days “people said all kinds of crude, thoughtless, prejudiced things”. The use of racially charged remarks, of course, was one of the hallmarks of Trump’s recent presidential campaign. The memoir also leaves you with an unmistakable sense of irony as far as Trump’s strident anti-immigration stance is concerned, given that he himself is the grandson of illegal German immigrants to the US.
Trump has now reaffirmed his plans to go ahead with his mass deportation programme when he takes over the Oval Office in January. The nephew’s portrayal of the next US President as a mean, mendacious, transactional, self-serving person could be dismissed as the rant of an embittered man. Curiously, he remains in touch with his uncle and even attended his presidential inaugural for the first term.
The world more or less already knows what Donald Trump embodies, as it waits for his second presidential tenure with bated breath for the upheavals in the offing..
