Fred C. Trump III, the nephew of former President Donald J. Trump and the older brother of Mary Trump, will publish a memoir about the Trump family, according to his publisher, Simon & Schuster.
The memoir, entitled “All in the Family: The Trumps and How We Got This Way,” is set to come out on July 30 from Gallery Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster — just a few months before the 2024 presidential election, in which former President Trump is running as the presumptive Republican nominee against President Joe Biden.
Gallery described the memoir as a “candid and revealing” account of what it was like to grow up in the Trump family, and noted that the book will include “never-before-told stories” that shed “a light into the darker corner of the Trump empire.”
The publisher also stated that Mr. Trump was motivated to tell his family’s story because of the upcoming election, and suggested that his book could “shape the decision of a nation.”
It was not clear to what extent “All in the Family” would focus on former President Trump, or in what light. Gallery declined to share more information about the book beyond a brief description.
Fred Trump III, who has largely remained out of the public eye and has not been a vocal critic of the former president, declined to be interviewed, according to his publisher.
The memoir will add another layer to the complex and often combative Trump family saga. Fred and Mary Trump are the children of the former president’s older brother, Fred Trump Jr., who suffered from alcoholism and died of a heart attack in 1981. After their grandfather Fred Trump Sr.’s death in 1999, Mary and Fred Trump filed a lawsuit contesting his will, arguing that they had been cheated out of their inheritance by their father’s siblings.
As the legal fight heated up, Donald Trump and his siblings cut off financial help that was going toward medical bills for Fred Trump III’s son William, who was born with an acute medical condition and diagnosed with developmental and intellectual disabilities. (The dispute was settled in 2001.) In “All in the Family,” Fred Trump III will write about how that rivalry threatened the health and safety of his disabled son, according to Gallery.
Fred Trump III, who went into the family business of commercial real estate, distanced himself from his sister’s blockbuster 2020 memoir, “Too Much and Never Enough,” which told the damaging inside story of Donald Trump’s family history and deepened rifts in the family. The book alleged, among other things, that the former president paid someone to take his SAT test for college admissions, and viewed “cheating as a way of life.”
In a statement about the book released by the Trump family in 2020, Fred Trump III said that “my wife, children and I have a strong relationship with our extended family and have had no involvement or interest in the preparation of this book.” Mary Trump’s memoir was also published by Simon & Schuster, and sold more than 1.3 million copies in its first week on sale. Her follow-up, “Who Could Ever Love You: A Family Memoir,” will publish in September and will focus largely on her relationship with her father.
Until now, Fred Trump III has largely stayed out of the fray, which makes the arrival of his memoir, just months before the November election, something of a surprise.
With this publication, Simon & Schuster aims to continue an often profitable streak of Trump memoirs, including books from the president’s supporters. In addition to Mary Trump’s memoir, the company has published a bombshell book by John R. Bolton, the former national security adviser under Mr. Trump, a memoir by Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, a former friend and adviser to Mr. Trump’s wife, Melania, and a memoir by former Vice President Mike Pence. Through its conservative imprint, Threshold Editions, it has published books by Kellyanne Conway, who served as senior counselor in Mr. Trump’s White House, and before the 2016 presidential election, it published Mr. Trump’s campaign book, “Crippled America: How to Make America Great Again.”
While the last presidential election was packed with books that detailed Mr. Trump’s inner circle, there have been fewer in this cycle.
Gallery said that Fred Trump III has worked to keep his immediate family out of the political spotlight, until he felt he couldn’t. “Silence is golden only when there is nothing that needs to be said,” he writes in the book.
[New York Times except tweaked headline]
Credit: The Conclave NG
