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“Over the last long period of time, you have an average of 36,000 people dying” a year, the president said, gesturing toward National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony S. Fauci, who nodded confirmation.

Trump continued: “I never heard those numbers. I would’ve been shocked. I would’ve said, ‘Does anybody die from the flu? I didn’t know people died from the flu.’ … And again, you had a couple of years where it was over a 100,000 people died from the flu.”

The president is correct. Seasonal influenza has killed 12,000 to 61,000 people in the United States every year since 2010, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. There have been several years where more than 100,000 Americans were killed by particularly nasty influenza strains.

One of those episodes was the 1958 pandemic, which killed 116,000 in the United States.

Another was 1918.

That is the year Trump’s paternal grandfather died.

He died of the flu.

In 1918, Friedrich Trump was a successful, 49-year-old businessman, husband and father of three living in Queens, according to Gwenda Blair in her 2001 book “The Trumps: Three Generations That Built an Empire.” One day in May, he came home from a stroll feeling sick. He died almost immediately.

He was a victim of the first wave of the Spanish flu pandemic. A second, deadlier wave hit in the fall. All told, the pandemic killed at least 50 million people worldwide and 675,000 in the United States, according to the CDC.

Friedrich’s eldest son, Frederick, was only 12 when his father died, but he and his mother would pick up the family business. It would be another 28 years before Fred and his wife would have their fourth child, a boy they named Donald.

This same grandfather’s biography has come up as a sticking point before. Friedrich came to the United States at 16 from Germany and today would be classed as an “unaccompanied alien child,” experts told The Washington Post in 2018. Trump has come under fire for his administration’s treatment of unaccompanied minors and other children from Central America trying to enter the country via the southern border.

In his 20s, Friedrich Trump made his way to the Pacific Northwest, where he made his fortune opening taverns, restaurants and hotels, usually in red-light districts, in Gold Rush-era mining towns.

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