US President Donald Trump said his younger brother, Robert Trump, has died 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,” Trump said in a statement on Saturday night.
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.
President Trump made an emotional visit to see his ailing brother on Friday at New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Cen
ter before going to his golf club at Bedminster, New Jersey for the weekend.
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. 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 Sr, who died in 1999.
Robert Trump had served as an executive vice president of the Trump Organization. Part of his duties including overseeing the organization’s Atlantic City casinos.
Robert Trump was born in 1948 and was one of four siblings to the President, including the late Fred Trump, Jr. He was a former top executive at the Trump Organization. He married Ann Marie Pallan earlier this year and was previously married to Blaine (Beard) Trump.
Before his death, Robert Trump resided in Millbrook, New York, in the Hudson Valley.
Robert Trump said in 2016 that he supported his brother’s presidential run and according to Town & Country, he hosted events and fundraisers in Millbrook for his brother and other Republicans.
In June, Robert Trump filed a temporary restraining order in an attempt to block the publication of an unflattering tell-all book by Mary Trump, Fred Trump Jr.’s daughter.
Robert Trump said in a statement to The New York Times at the time that he was “deeply disappointed” in Mary Trump’s decision to publish the book, which included details about the President’s family, childhood and upbringing.
Mary Trump said in an interview with Greenpeace earlier this week that Robert Trump had been sick and hospitalized “a couple of times in the last three months.”
Credit: Source link