Robert Trump, the president’s younger brother, dies at 71
By Annie Karni
NEW YORK – Robert Trump, the younger brother of President Donald Trump, died Saturday (15) night at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital in Manhattan. He was 71.
The White House did not provide a cause of death. “He was not just my brother, he was my best friend,” the president said in a statement. “He will be greatly missed, but we will meet again.”
Robert Trump, who took blood thinners, had experienced brain bleeds that began after a recent fall, according to a close friend of the family’s.
Donald Trump made a trip to Manhattan on Friday (14) to see him at the hospital, a visit that lasted just under an hour.
“I have a wonderful brother,” the president had said Friday during a news conference at the White House before departing to visit him. “We’ve had a great relationship for a long time, from Day 1, a long time ago.” In fact, the two were estranged for years, before Donald Trump’s run for the White House.
Robert Trump had no children, but he helped raise Christopher Hollister Trump-Retchin, the son of his first wife, Blaine Trump, even giving him his last name. Besides the president, he 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.
As the youngest of five children growing up in the strict Queens household of Fred C. Trump, Robert Trump was shielded from some of the pressure exerted by his disciplinarian father over his older brothers. He was never groomed to take over the family real estate company and was considered by those who knew him to be the inverse of the self-promotional brother who eventually did. After graduating from Boston University, he took a job on Wall Street but eventually went to work for his brother as a senior executive at the Trump Organization.
“You could consider him the quietest of Trumps,” Michael D’Antonio, a Trump biographer, said. “He was glad to stay out of the spotlight.”
Jack O’Donnell, a former Trump Organization executive, recalled the younger Trump as someone with a natural ease and good humor that his older brother lacked.
“He had zero sense of entitlement,” he said.
Simply being a family member did nothing to shield him from his brother’s rages when he needed someone to blame.
After one blow-up, Robert Trump stopped reporting directly to his brother and removed himself from the core of the business, working out of the Brooklyn office. He reconciled with his brother when Donald Trump decided to run for president, according to a person close to the family.
Robert Trump, who for 25 years was married to Blaine Trump, was more accepted in society circles than Donald Trump ever was, D’Antonio said.
But after a public and painful divorce in 2009, involving tabloid coverage documenting his decision to leave his marriage for Pallan, an employee at the Trump Organization, Robert Trump sought a quiet, retired life on Long Island.
He and Pallan married this year.
-New York Times