The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
President’s brother dies at 71, cause not released
Robert Trump, the younger brother of President Donald Trump, died Saturday in Manhattan. He was 71.
What the president said
The White House, which announced his death at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, did not give a cause.
“It is with heavy heart I share that my wonderful brother, Robert, peacefully passed away tonight,” President Trump said in a statement. “He was not just my brother, he was my best friend. He will be greatly missed, but we will meet again. His memory will live on in my heart forever. Robert, I love you. Rest in peace.”
About Robert Trump’s health
Robert Trump, who took blood thinners, had experienced brain bleeds that began after a recent fall, according to a family friend. On Friday, the president went to Manhattan to see his brother at the hospital.
On Saturday, when Robert Trump was not expected to live much longer, the president called into the hospital from his Bedminster, New Jersey, golf club. He held a short news conference but did not mention his brother’s health. Friends who spoke to him said he was downcast.
“I have a wonderful brother,” the president said Friday at a White House news conference before departing to visit him. “We’ve had a great relationship for a long time, from Day One.”
About Robert Trump’s life
Robert Trump had no children, but he helped raise
Christopher Hollister TrumpRetchin, the son of his first wife, Blaine Trump, even giving him his last name. Besides the president, Robert is survived by his second wife, Ann Marie Pallan, and his sisters, Maryanne Trump Barry and Elizabeth Trump Grau. His brother Fred Trump Jr. died in 1981.
Robert Stewart Trump was born Aug. 26, 1948, in New York, the youngest of five children of Fred Trump Sr. and his wife, the former Mary Anne MacLeod.
It was Fred Jr.’s daughter, Mary Trump, who this year published a scathing memoir of her time in the family, and her book provides the most vivid account of Robert Trump’s upbringing.
As the youngest of five children growing up in the strict Queens household, Robert Trump was shielded from some of the pressure exerted by his disciplinarian father over his older brothers. After graduating from Boston University,
he first went to work on Wall Street instead of joining the family business. But he eventually went to work for his brother as a senior executive at the Trump Organization.
In 1991, Robert Trump joined his father’s business, Trump Management, where he was reportedly paid $500,000 a year, according to a 2018 New York Times story.
Robert Trump, just as he had in the inheritance lawsuit, acted on behalf of Donald and other siblings in filing an action seeking to prevent publication of his niece’s book this summer. Robert issued a statement in which he said he was “deeply disappointed” by Mary’s decision to write the book.
Jack O’Donnell, a former Trump Organization executive, recalled Robert Trump as someone with a natural ease and good humor. “He had zero sense of entitlement,” he said.