Tell-all on ‘toxic’ Trumps reveals cash for disabled family member was cut
President and siblings allegedly branded care ‘expensive babysitting’
US PRESIDENT Donald Trump has warned his niece against releasing a tell-all book on their “toxic” family as details of a damaging lawsuit at the centre of the Trump family feud emerged.
The lawsuit dates back to the early 2000s, when Trump and his siblings were accused of cutting off financial support for their disabled great-nephew after calling it “expensive babysitting”.
The family feud has come back into the spotlight as the US president is facing the fallout from another tell-all book by his former national security adviser, John Bolton, as well as political pressure over poor turnout at a recent rally.
Mr Trump’s niece Mary, daughter of the president’s late brother Fred, is releasing her own tell-all book, ‘Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man’, at the end of July.
Speaking to the website Axios, the US president said Ms Trump was violating a non-disclosure agreement she signed as part of a legal settlement with him, saying: “She’s not allowed to write a book”.
The bombshell book, due for release on July 28, is described by its publisher Simon & Schuster as a “revelatory, authoritative portrait” of Mr Trump “and the toxic family that made him”.
The agreement was signed in 2001 as part of a legal settlement after Mary and her brother Fred Trump III filed a lawsuit against Mr Trump and his two siblings disputing their inheritance from their grandfather’s estate.
The pair filed another lawsuit after their health insurance, which had been provided by the Trump company for decades, was cancelled in apparent retaliation.
Details of that lawsuit have now come to light, revealing the full extent of the bitter relationship between the president and his eldest brother’s offspring.
In the lawsuit Mary and Fred III accused the president and his siblings of refusing to pay for the healthcare of Fred III’s disabled son William, despite the fact that he was born with a disorder known as Infantile Spasms, which can cause violent seizures and slow down a baby’s development.
According to copies of the lawsuit seen by Mail Online, Donald Trump and his siblings claimed William did not need round-the-clock care, which they labelled “expensive babysitting”.
Instead, the Trump family argued that Fred III should take a CPR course from the American Red Cross in case baby William suffered another cardiac arrest.
They also claimed that Mary and Fred III had already received millions of dollars from them saying that rather than suing them, a “thank you would be extremely appreciated”.
Fred III and Mary claimed the Trumps acted in “retaliation” for them challenging the will of Donald Trump’s father, Fred Trump Senior.
Donald Trump appeared to confirm the decision to cut his niece and nephew’s health insurance was a response to their dispute over his father’s will in an interview with the ‘New York Daily News’ at the time.
“When [Fred III] sued us, we said, ‘Why should we give him medical coverage?” he told the newspaper in 2000.
But in his interview with Axios website on Sunday, Mr Trump claimed that he was on very good terms with Fred III, even claiming he had recently visited the White House.
Meanwhile, President Trump opened a new front in his fight against mail-in voting last night, making unsubstantiated assertions that foreign countries will print up millions of bogus ballots to rig the results and create what he called the “scandal of our times.”
The claims not only ignore safeguards that states have implemented to prevent against widespread fraud but they also risk undermining Americans’ faith in the election, spreading the very kind of disinformation US authorities have warned foreign adversaries could exploit to foment doubt in the voting process.
The rhetoric, coming as states scramble to adjust voting processes because of the coronavirus pandemic, represents a two-track approach of trying to both block mail-in balloting in advance and setting the stage for challenging the results once it’s over.
“It’s a way of trying to turn the foreign interference claims that have been made on their head,” said Richard Hasen, an election law expert at the University of California, Irvine.
“This potentially lays the groundwork for him contesting election results,” he added.