Donald Trump repeatedly used the n-word in a racist tirade over some car damage, according to a forthcoming memoir from his nephew, Fred C. Trump III.
In All in the Family: The Trumps and How We Got This Way, Trump III describes a moment in the early 1970s, when he was a preteen at his grandparents’ Queens house one afternoon and his uncle showed up. The Guardian obtained an early copy of the book, due to be released next week.
“Donald was pissed. Boy, was he pissed,” Trump III wrote. Trump showed his nephew his white Cadillac Eldorado convertible with a “giant gash, at least two feet long” in its canvas roof, and “another, shorter gash next to it.”
“‘N—s,’ I recall him saying disgustedly. ‘Look what the n—s did,’” Trump III quoted his uncle as saying. He added that Trump hadn’t actually seen where the damage to his car came from, but jumped “straight to the place where people’s minds sometimes go when they face a fresh affront. Across the racial divide.”
Trump III wrote that Queens was “one of the most diverse places on the planet” but that Jamaica Estates, where the Trumps lived, was affluent and largely white, and prejudice was common.
In Jamaica Estates, “If something bad happened,” Trump III writes, “they were the ones who did it. Almost certainly, it was them.”
Point-blank, Trump III asked in the book, “So, was Donald a racist?”
While “people have been asking for decades,” Trump III wrote, he noted that his uncle used the racial slur back when, he said, “people said all kinds of crude, thoughtless, prejudiced things,” adding, “Maybe everyone in Queens was a racist then.”
Trump has been accused of racism long before and since his entry into politics. In the 1970s, he and his father were sued by the federal government for discriminatory housing practices. When he was a casino owner, Black employees were ushered off the floors whenever Trump and his wife paid a visit. In the late 1980s, he sought the death penalty for the Central Park Five (who were found to be innocent), and as president he attacked NFL players kneeling in protest of racial inequality and refused to condemn white supremacists.
Recently, a producer on Trump’s reality show, The Apprentice, recounted a 2004 incident where Trump refused to hire Kwame Jackson, the Black finalist on the series’s first season, asking the show’s producers, “I mean, would America buy a n— winning?”
In the light of his uncle’s history, Trump III’s writings seem plausible. As Trump will likely face a Black woman in Vice President Kamala Harris, we will probably see racially questionable attacks from him and his campaign in the coming days. In fact, they’ve already started.
