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US president Donald Trump said that his younger brother, Robert Trump, died on Saturday night, a day after the president visited him in a New York hospital.
“It is with heavy heart I share that my wonderful brother, Robert, peacefully passed away tonight. 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,” Mr Trump said in a statement.
Robert Trump, who at 71 was younger than the 74-year-old president, was a business executive and real estate developer. Unlike his reality TV star brother, Robert Trump shunned the limelight.
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President Trump made an emotional visit to see his ailing brother on Friday at New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center before going to his golf club at Bedminster, New Jersey, for the weekend.
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Both longtime businessmen, Robert and Donald had strikingly different personalities.
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.
Family biographer Gwenda Blair said: “When he worked in the Trump Organisation, he was known as the nice Trump.
“Robert was the one people would try to get to intervene if there was a problem.”
Robert Stewart Trump was born in 1948, the youngest of New York City real estate developer Fred Trump's five children.
The president, more than two years older than Robert, admittedly bullied his brother in their younger years, even as he praised his loyalty and laid-back demeanour.
“I think it must be hard to have me for a brother but he’s never said anything about it and we’re very close,” Donald Trump wrote in his 1987 bestseller The Art of the Deal.
“Robert gets along with almost everyone,” he added, “which is great for me since I sometimes have to be the bad guy.”
A Boston University graduate, Robert Trump later managed the Brooklyn portion of father Fred Trump’s real estate empire, which was eventually sold.
Once a regular boldface name in Manhattan’s social pages, Robert Trump 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.
The president was 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 death was not revealed. Mr Trump told reporters on Friday that his brother was “having a hard time” with an undisclosed illness. A source familiar with the situation said the brother had been on blood thinners.
ABC News had reported that Robert Trump was hospitalised in the intensive care unit at Mount Sinai hospital in New York for more than a week in June.
That same month, Robert Trump 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.
A state supreme court judge in Poughkeepsie, New York, later denied a request to stop publication and cancelled the temporary restraining order.
Robert Trump had said the book, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man, would violate a confidentiality agreement tied to the estate of his father Fred Trump snr, who died in 1999.– Reuters and AP