“He was dignified, he was quiet, he listened, he was good to work with,” Mr. O’Donnell said. “He had zero sense of entitlement. Robert was very comfortable being Donald Trump’s brother and not being like him.”
That was not always an easy role to play, and simply being a close family member did not shield him from his brother’s rages when Donald Trump needed someone to blame. Family friends said that as Donald’s star grew, Robert struggled with working for his brother and cast himself as his brother’s polar opposite.
Donald faulted Robert, for instance, for the problems with slot machines that plagued the opening of the Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City in 1990, costing him tens of millions of dollars in lost revenue. Donald Trump had put his brother in charge of the property after a helicopter accident in 1989 killed three Trump Organization executives who had been overseeing it.
Gaming regulators did not allow the casino to open because of a lack of financial control of the slot machines. On opening night, only a small section of the casino floor was open, and it was months before the slot machines were fully activated.
In one meeting, Mr. O’Donnell recalled, Donald Trump screamed at his brother, putting the blame for the slot machine debacle entirely on him. “Robert calmly got up, walked out of the room, and that’s the last time I ever saw him,” Mr. O’Donnell said.
After the blowup, Robert Trump stopped reporting directly to his brother and removed himself from the core of the business, working out of its Brooklyn office and dealing with real estate projects in boroughs outside Manhattan. But people who knew him said that he had been devastated by the fight with Donald Trump and that the rift had taken years to heal.
Source Article from https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/15/us/politics/robert-s-trump-dead.html
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