(CNN) – While offered a press conference about the outbreak of coronavirus Last Friday, President Donald Trump said he did not know that people died from the flu. However, his grandfather died from this disease in 1918, according to Gwenda Blair, Trump’s biographer.
“When I heard the number of people who have died from the flu, I was surprised to hear it,” Trump said as he toured the headquarters of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta. “During the last and long period when people have the flu, there is an average of 36,000 people dying. I’ve never heard those numbers, I would have been shocked. I would have said, “Does anyone die from the flu?” I didn’t know that people died of the flu, “he added.
Trump is right that thousands of Americans die each season because of the flu. The CDC estimates that more than 34,000 people died from influenza in the 2018-2019 season. The previous period that figure was calculated at more than 61,000.
In 1918, a influenza pandemic It spread throughout the world and killed 675,000 people in U.S and 50 million around the world, according to the CDC. Trump’s paternal grandfather, Friedrich Trump, was one of those people who died of the flu in 1918, according to Blair’s book The Trumps: Three Generations of Builders and a President, which was first published with a different title in 2001 and was subsequently reissued after Trump arrived at the White House. The Washington Post It was the first means to point out, following the president’s comments last week, that the flu killed his grandfather.
CNN talked with Blair about Trump and his family history this Sunday. The biographer, who has not spoken to the president today in more than a decade, suggested it was unlikely that Trump would not know how his grandfather died.
Trump knows some details of his grandfather’s life. In the 2016 documentary The Kings of Kallstadt, Trump mentioned his family’s first arrival in the United States. “My grandfather Friedrich Trump came to the United States in 1885,” the president said in the documentary. “He joined the great gold rush, he did incredibly well, he loved this country,” he added.
At the time of his death in 1918, Friedrich was a 49-year-old businessman with three children living in Queens, Blair wrote in his book.
Blair recalled that when he interviewed Trump, he didn’t show much interest in his own family history and preferred to focus on his business.
The White House has not responded to the request for comment, nor has it answered CNN questions about whether the president knew his grandfather died of the flu.
The following interview with Blair has been edited and condensed for clarity:
CNN: When the president visited the CDC on Friday, he said he was surprised to hear the number of people who have died from the flu. But, as you have emphasized in your book, Trump’s grandfather, Friedrich Trump, died in the 1918 flu pandemic. What do you think about that?
Blair: He (Trump) is not a history student. He is just looking to the future. It has no rearview mirror and that means that it learns little. There is an old cliché that people who do not learn from history are obliged to repeat it, and I think that is what he is currently in the middle of recreating again.
Can you explain that a little more?
Well, certainly, specifically, regarding health crises, and then, in more general terms, their refusal to participate, to learn from experts in all kinds of fields. And this is another example of that: his refusal to really learn how epidemics begin, how to deal with them, the types of planning that are needed, the necessary preparations.
Did Trump mention his grandfather in the past? Do you know how much you knew about your grandfather?
When I interviewed him for my book, he was not very interested in history in general … in family history. He was focused on his own business career, which was 100% of his interests at the time I interviewed him. But he knew in broad strokes about his father, grandfather and grandmother, who became a widow after the death of her husband in 1918. Her grandmother, also a immigrant German, lived until the 1960s, in front of the Trump family during much of Donald Trump’s childhood and was close until he went to college and was very close to his father. Then, his grandmother was in the picture. I mean not only in the picture: actively involved in the family.
But is it possible that Trump did not know that his grandfather died of the flu?
Within the scope of the possibility, of course. Within the scope of probability, no.
And why does it say that?
Well, I wrote a book about that.
There were also articles about it, there have been articles since then in which this was mentioned. I think his own father (Fred Trump) knew it, as I described in my book. When he was 12, he was with his father walking down a street in Queens, and his father suddenly said, “I don’t feel well, we have to go home.” He died that same day. And Fred Trump told me that it was so shocking and so sudden that he didn’t really understand what had happened. It was so sudden, but she saw her mother – that is, Donald Trump’s grandmother – really distressed because her husband had just died.
In addition, an uncle, a brother-in-law of his father, also died during the 1918 pandemic.
Do you think President Trump and his grandfather share similar traits?
Certainly, business acuity, cunning. His grandfather was a guy who expanded the limits as much as he could.
There have been reports that the president has him germ phobia. How do you think you are managing the coronavirus?
To date, he seems to be driving it the same way he has managed everything else in his career: to insist that he is right. If there are accusations, throw them in the face of who made them. Redouble every time there is any new evidence, the information arrives to say even more strongly that he was right. Find ways to promote your own candidacy.
There is a pattern of how Trump behaves: I think the country has become very familiar with that. But the coronavirus is not a person … This is not a rival or competitor, although Trump is treating him that way. And all I can see suggests that it is a really bad strategy to deal with an epidemic. Maybe it works politically, but an epidemic is a disease; not a rival political.
Atika Shubert and Jennifer Hansler, both of CNN, contributed to this report.
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