What to Know About Donald
Trump’s Brother Robert
The President visited his brother in a Manhattan hospital in
mid-August.
BY
CHIP
SOMODEVILLAGETTY IMAGES
- Robert Trump is Donald Trump’s youngest brother. In mid-August
2020, the White House confirmed that Robert has been hospitalized
in Manhattan. The President then visited his brother who is said to
be very sick. - While he has not been in the media spotlight as much as his
older sibling, he is back in the news this summer, as his
niece Mary Trump is publishing 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.
Original
11/02/2016: 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.)
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Robert Trump and his then-wife Blaine Trump attend a dinner in New
York City in 1999 with Donald Trump and his girlfriend at the time,
Melania Knauss.
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.)
Robert and Blaine Trump in 2003.
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.
Robert Trump and his father Fred attend the opening of the restored
Wollman Rink in Central Park on November 5, 1987 in New York City.