Donald Trump’s nephew offered a decades-old family anecdote to explain why he believes some of the media’s decision to dial back its coverage of the president, amid his escalating war on the press, may hit him where it hurts.
On Tuesday, Fred Trump III suggested on X that his uncle “may have found the one thing the media can take away from him: attention,” and pondered what would happen “if the media simply stopped giving him the attention he craves.”
To make his point, Fred Trump recalled a Father’s Day family gathering in 1990 “after Donald had been on the front page of The New York Post for eight straight days with some very personally negative headlines.”
Fred Trump said his uncle “looked gloomy,” prompting him to ask his uncle Robert Trump why. Robert Trump reportedly replied that Donald Trump was glum because “he wasn’t on the cover of the Post today.”
“I have never forgotten that,” wrote Fred Trump III, the son of the president’s late brother, Fred Trump Jr.
“Cover consequential news, of course,” he concluded the post. “But not every Trump provocation deserves amplification. Sometimes, the most powerful response to a demand for attention is simply no attention.”
Fred Trump III has become an outspoken critic of his uncle.
Earlier this month, he challenged the president’s unsupported claims about his actions in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
In his memoir, “All in the Family: The Trumps and How We Got This Way,” Fred Trump III also alleged that his uncle had used racist slurs and once said “maybe” people with severe disabilities “should just die.” The president has previously denied allegations made by his nephew.