Robert Trump, the younger brother of Donald Trump, died on Saturday night aged 71 after being hospitalised, the US president has said.
“It is with heavy heart I share that my wonderful brother, Robert, peacefully passed away tonight,” Mr 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.”
Robert Trump, who was three years younger than the 74-year-old president, was a business executive and real estate developer. Unlike his reality TV star brother, he shunned the limelight.
President Trump made an emotional visit to see his brother on Friday at New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center before going to his golf club at Bedminster, New Jersey, for the weekend.
He is expected to attend the funeral, an aide said. He has a busy travel schedule in coming days with plans to visit four battleground states as part of his re-election campaign.
The cause of Robert’s death was not revealed. Donald Trump told reporters on Friday that his brother was “having a hard time” with an undisclosed illness.
It was reported in June that Robert had been placed into intensive care at Mount Sinai hospital in New York for more than a week.
That same month, he won a temporary restraining order against his and the president’s niece, Mary Trump, to stop her from publishing a tell-all book that offered an unflattering look of the US president and his family.
The supreme court in Poughkeepsie, New York, later denied a request to stop publication and cancelled the temporary restraining order.
A Boston University graduate, Robert Trump began his career on Wall Street working in corporate finance but later joined the family business, managing real estate holdings as a top executive in the Trump Organisation.
Once a regular name in Manhattan’s social pages, he had kept a lower profile in recent years.
He avoided the limelight during his elder brother’s presidency, having retired to the Hudson Valley. But he described himself as a big supporter of the White House run in a 2016 interview with the New York Post.
“I support Donald one thousand percent,” Robert Trump said.
In early March of 2020, he married his longtime girlfriend, Ann Marie Pallan.
The president’s surviving siblings include Elizabeth Trump Grau and Maryanne Trump Barry, a retired federal appeals judge.
Authors Michael Kranish and Marc Fisher described Robert Trump as soft spoken but cerebral in Trump Revealed: The Definitive Biography of the 45th President.
They wrote: “He lacked Donald’s charismatic showmanship, and he was happy to leave the bravado to his brother, but he could show flashes of Trump temper.”
