Donald Trump's Younger Brother, Robert Trump, Has Died at Age 71
Robert Trump, Donald Trump's youngest brother, died on Saturday August 15 in New York City. The White House had recently confirmed that Robert has been hospitalized in Manhattan, and the President visited his brother the day before he died. “He was not just my brother, he was my best friend,” the president said in a statement.
While he had not been in the media spotlight as much as his older sibling, Robert was back in the news this summer, as his niece Mary Trump published a tell-all about her family called Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man. Her publisher, Simon & Schuster, describes the text as a “revelatory, authoritative portrait of Donald J. Trump and the toxic family that made him.”
Robert requested a temporary restraining order in an attempt to stop the book from being published. In a statement to the New York Times, he said he was "deeply disappointed" in his niece's decision to publish the book. “Her attempt to sensationalize and mischaracterize our family relationship after all of these years for her own financial gain is both a travesty and injustice to the memory of my late brother, Fred, and our beloved parents,” he said. “I and the rest of my entire family are so proud of my wonderful brother, the president, and feel that Mary’s actions are truly a disgrace.”
Here, a look back at Robert's history, and how he handled Trump's 2016 campaign.
This story was originally published on November 2, 2016:
Judging by his media footprint, Robert Trump cuts a markedly lower profile than his brother Donald. In the Trump family, that may not be saying much.
Anyone who paid attention to New York society in the '80s and '90s will recognize Robert's name. He is the youngest Trump sibling, born two years after his brother Donald. (There are five member of that generation: the oldest is Maryanne Trump Barry, a federal judge; next comes Frederick Trump Jr., who died in 1981 at the age of 43; Donald is in the middle, then Elizabeth Trump Grau, a retired bank executive; and finally Robert.)
Like Donald, Robert joined the family business and was a top executive with the company. Unlike his brother, he doesn't court publicity; ostentation, by most accounts, doesn't excite him. He may have learned to hold back the hard way in the mid-aughts, when his high-profile divorce from socialite Blaine Trump, his wife of about 25 years, was tabloid fodder. There was a mistress, a house Robert bought her on Long Island, and no prenup—a perfect recipe for the gossip pages.
Since then, Robert has pretty much vanished from public view. He is "gainfully retired," as he described himself to Page Six, and lives in Millbrook, New York, in the Hudson Valley, where he leads a relatively parochial but presumably lavish life with his now-not-so-secret partner and former secretary, Ann Marie Pallan, whose family owned and operated Gurney's, the famed Montauk resort and spa, for decades. (Robert did not respond to voicemail requests asking for an interview.)
According to town residents, Robert maintains a reserved but affable presence in Millbrook and its environs, using his financial largesse to support a number of local causes and small businesses. Now in his late 60s, Robert is a trustee of Angels of Light, a holiday giving nonprofit, and he's donated quite heavily to a horse rescue operation in the area, among other things.
"He's not flamboyant," says one local who has met Robert a few times and asked to remain anonymous, describing him as a classy and dignified guy. "He couldn't be more different than his brother, quite frankly," the local adds. "I don't even know how they're in the same family."
There is little doubt, however, that Robert is rooting for his brother's presidential bid—in a rare interview earlier this year, he told Page Six, "I support Donald one thousand percent." He also favors Donald's supporters, like Republican Andrew Heaney, who hitched his congressional primary campaign to the Trump wagon and failed miserably in New York's 19th district, where Robert resides.
From his perch in Millbrook, it appears that Robert does what he can for his brother and other Republican affiliates, hosting events and fundraisers out of Monte's Local Kitchen & Tap Room, Pallan's farm-to-table restaurant in nearby Amenia helmed by Chopped star Dafna Mizrahi (and where it is apparently uncouth to mention Donald's name unbidden, according to the local). The restaurant catered a Trump rally in Poughkeepsie in April.
Robert has a meal named after him on Monte's menu, the "RST All American Burger," an eight-ouncer with cheese, lettuce, aioli, homemade pickles, and truffle fries that goes for $17.50. "The Trump boys love their burgers," Pallan told The Hudson Valley News last year.
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