By
A new book by Donald Trump’s nephew Fred Trump III, a real estate executive, recounts an incident in which the presidential candidate allegedly used a racial slur after his car was damaged.
The allegation appears in Fred Trump’s book, "All in the Family: The Trumps and How We Got This Way," and is cited to offer insight into the ways in which Donald Trump has allegedly engaged in overt racism.
As The Guardian reported, based on an advance copy of the book the outlet obtained ahead of its release next week:
It was “just a normal afternoon for preteen me”, Trump III writes, but then his uncle arrived. “Donald was pissed,” Trump III writes. “Boy, was he pissed.” Trump III says his uncle showed him his “cotillon white Cadillac Eldorado convertible”. In its retractable canvas top, “there was a giant gash, at least two feet long [and] another, shorter gash next to it”. “‘N-----s,’ I recall him saying disgustedly. ‘Look at what the n-----s did.’ “‘I knew that was a bad word,’” [Fred Trump wrote]. His uncle, Trump III writes, had not seen whoever damaged his car. Instead, he “saw the damage, then went straight to the place where people’s minds sometimes go when they face a fresh affront. Across the racial divide.”
In response to the report, Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung told NBC News, “This is completely fabricated and total fake news of the highest order.”
Trump has faced previous allegations by his family that he’s used racial slurs. Mary Trump, Fred Trump III’s sister, published a book in 2020 that alleged Trump was known to use racist and antisemitic slurs. She told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow at the time that the N-word was among the slurs her uncle used. A spokesperson for Trump’s White House called Mary Trump's book at the time "a book of falsehoods, plain and simple” and said Trump “doesn’t use those words.”
Trump’s team has also had to bat away similar claims made by nonfamily members. Omarosa Manigault Newman, a former Trump business associate and White House aide, claimed in 2018 that she’d personally heard a tape of Trump using the N-word during filming of NBC’s “The Apprentice”; Manigault Newman repeated the claim in her book published that year. As with the allegations made by Trump’s niece and nephew, this allegation of racism was disputed — at the time by White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who dismissed the former aide as “a disgruntled former White House employee" who was “trying to profit off these false attacks.” And a former "Apprentice" producer, Bill Pruitt, published an essay in Slate this year in which he said he was present to hear the former president use the N-word during the show's first season (Cheung disputed Pruitt's account in a statement to Slate, saying, “This is a completely fabricated and bull---- story that was already peddled in 2016”).
Much of Trump's racist behavior and racist rhetoric has been public and well documented over the years. This latest allegation from his nephew — taken together with previous allegations — suggests his private persona might be a bit more bigoted than his public one.