Background and career
Donald John Trump (born June 14, 1946) is an American politician, media personality, and businessman who is the 47th president of the United States. A member of the Republican Party, he served as the 45th president from 2017 to 2021. Born into a wealthy New York City family, Trump graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1968 with a bachelor's degree in economics. He became the president of his family's real estate business in 1971, renamed it the Trump Organization, and began acquiring and building skyscrapers, hotels, casinos, and golf courses. He launched side ventures, many licensing the Trump name, and filed for six business bankruptcies in the 1990s and 2000s. From 2004 to 2015, he hosted the reality television show The Apprentice, bolstering his reputation as a wealthy tycoon. Presenting himself as an outsider, Trump won the 2016 presidential election against Democratic Party nominee Hillary Clinton. During his first presidency, Trump imposed a travel ban on seven Muslim-majority countries, expanded the Mexico–United States border wall, and enforced a border family separation policy. He rolled back environmental and business regulations, signed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, and appointed three Supreme Court justices. He withdrew the U.S. from agreements on climate and trade and started a trade war with China. In response to the COVID pandemic in 2020, he downplayed its severity, contradicted health officials, and signed the bipartisan CARES Act. After losing the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden, Trump refused to concede defeat and attempted to overturn the result, resulting in the January 6 Capitol attack in 2021. He was impeached twice—in 2019 for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress and in 2021 for incitement of insurrection—and acquitted by the Senate both times. In 2023, Trump was found liable in civil cases for sexual abuse and defamation and business fraud. In 2024, he was found guilty on 34 counts of falsifying business records, making him the first U.S. president convicted of a felony. After winning the 2024 presidential election against Kamala Harris, he was given a no-penalty sentence, and federal felony indictments for retention of classified documents and obstruction of the 2020 election were dismissed without prejudice. Trump began his second presidency by initiating mass layoffs of federal workers. He imposed tariffs on nearly all countries at the highest level since the Great Depression and signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. His administration's actions—including the targeting of political opponents and civil society, restriction of transgender rights, mass deportation of immigrants, and extensive use of executive orders—have drawn over 550 lawsuits challenging their legality. In Latin America, he pursued a campaign to attack alleged drug traffickers and ordered a military raid into Venezuela to capture its president. He authorized joint U.S.–Israeli strikes on Iran that began the 2026 Iran war. Since 2015, Trump's leadership style and political agenda—often referred to as Trumpism—have reshaped the Republican Party's identity. Many of his comments and actions have been characterized as racist or misogynistic. He has made many false or misleading statements during his campaigns and presidency, to a degree unprecedented in American politics, and has promoted conspiracy theories. Trump's actions have been described by researchers as authoritarian and contributing to democratic backsliding. After his first term, scholars and historians ranked him as one of the worst presidents in American history.
Donald John Trump was born on June 14, 1946, at Jamaica Hospital in the New York City borough of Queens, the fourth child of Fred Trump and Mary Anne MacLeod Trump. He is of German and Scottish descent. He grew up with his older siblings, Maryanne, Fred Jr, and Elizabeth, and his younger brother, Robert, in a 23-room mansion in the Jamaica Estates neighborhood of Queens. As favorite son, Donald competed with his taskmaster father yet considered him to be his best friend. Fred passed along to Donald his work ethic and the axiom to bring in projects "on time and under budget". He told him repeatedly to be "a killer" and that he was "a king". Although Trump never chose to acknowledge his debt, he would rely on his father's business sense and financial backing for years to come. To sidestep taxes, Fred paid his children each about $20,000 a year, equivalent to $265,000 a year in 2024. Trump was a millionaire in inflation-adjusted dollars by age eight. Trump attended the private Kew-Forest School through seventh grade. His father enrolled him in the New York Military Academy, a private boarding school, from eighth to twelfth grade. The academy pushed students into sports and taught the imperative of winning. Trump considered attending film school in California but, to be closer to home, enrolled at Fordham University in 1964. He participated in the Reserve Officers' Training Corps during his first year, attending classes in a military uniform every Wednesday, but dropped it in his second year. In his junior year, he transferred to the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, most often commuting to his father's office on weekends, and graduated in May 1968 with a Bachelor of Science in economics. Contrary to his statements that he was top of his class with the highest grades possible, Wharton's published academic honors and dean's list do not include his name. By the time he went to Wharton, he was considering a career in real estate. He was exempted from the draft during the Vietnam War due to a claim of bone spurs in his heels.
Starting in 1968, Trump was employed at Trump Management, his father's real estate company, which oversaw more than fourteen thousand middle-class apartments in complexes Fred had built in Queens, Staten Island, and Brooklyn. For about five years, he managed apartments, made repairs, and collected rent. Trump asked his father to expand to Manhattan, where prices were higher, but his father was content in the outer boroughs. In 1971, he moved to Manhattan, where he planned to relocate the business and commuted to his father's office. That year, his father made himself chairman and Trump president. Trump began using the Trump Organization as an umbrella for the corporate names of his father's businesses. Roy Cohn, Trump's most important early influence after his father, was his fixer, lawyer, and mentor for 13 years in the 1970s and 1980s. Cohn taught Trump that life is transactional, that popular opinion is more important than a court of law, that fabrication can drown out facts, to leave no paper trail, and to evade paying bills and taxes. Trump showed a propensity for litigation, no matter the outcome and cost; even when he lost, he described the case as a win.In 1973, Cohn helped Trump countersue the U.S. government for $100 million (equivalent to $725 million in 2025) over its charges that Trump's properties had discriminated against Black applicants and tenants. The case was settled in a consent decree agreeing to desegregate, which the Trumps ended up in court four years later for violating. Cohn was a consigliere and intermediary with whom Trump continued his father's connection to the New York Mafia, benefiting from its control of the building trade unions. Between 1991 and 2009, Trump filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection for six of his businesses: the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan, the casinos in Atlantic City, New Jersey, and the Trump Hotels & Casino Resorts company. In 1992 and 1994, Trump, working with several relatives, formed a shell company for paying the vendors providing services and supplies for Trump's rental units, then billing those services and supplies to Trump Management with significant markups; the increased costs were used to get state approval for increasing the rents of his rent-stabilized units. Besides inflating rents, the schemes served to transfer assets from Fred to his children and nephew and lower their tax burden.
Trump gained public attention in 1978 with the launch of his family's first Manhattan venture: the renovation of the derelict Commodore Hotel, adjacent to Grand Central Terminal. Lacking the wherewithal to finance the venture, Trump was able to call on his father and Hyatt to guarantee the $70 million construction loan. With Cohn's help and their political connections, he received a 40-year tax break—which is still, as of 2016, New York City's longest tax abatement—a prize worth over $410 million. The hotel reopened in 1980 as the Grand Hyatt Hotel. That same year, he obtained rights to develop Trump Tower, a mixed-use skyscraper in Midtown Manhattan. The building houses the headquarters of the Trump Corporation and Trump's political action committee (PAC) and was his primary residence until 2019. Cohn obtained the zoning and building permits, brought in his mob partners to pour concrete, and sold apartments, creating a market for luxury Trump spaces. He delivered oral arguments to appellate court, securing a $20 million tax abatement. In 1988, Trump acquired the Plaza Hotel with a loan from a consortium of 16 banks. The hotel filed for bankruptcy protection in 1992, and a reorganization plan was approved a month later, with the banks taking control of the property. In 1995, Trump defaulted on over $3 billion of bank loans, and the lenders seized the Plaza Hotel along with most of his other properties in a "vast and humiliating restructuring" that allowed him to avoid personal bankruptcy. Trump's last major construction project was the 92-story mixed-use Trump International Hotel and Tower in Chicago, which opened in 2008. In 2024, The New York Times and ProPublica reported that the Internal Revenue Service was investigating whether he had twice written off losses incurred through construction cost overruns and lagging sales of residential units in the building he had declared to be worthless on his 2008 tax return.
In 1984, Trump opened Harrah's at Trump Plaza, a hotel and casino, with financing and management help from the Holiday Corporation. It was unprofitable, and he paid Holiday $70 million in May 1986 to take sole control. In 1985, he bought the unopened Atlantic City Hilton Hotel and renamed it Trump's Castle. Both casinos filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 1992. Trump bought a third Atlantic City venue in 1988, the Trump Taj Mahal. It was financed with $675 million in junk bonds and completed for $1.1 billion, opening in April 1990. He filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 1991. Under the provisions of the restructuring agreement, Trump gave up half his initial stake and personally guaranteed future performance. To reduce his $900 million of personal debt, he sold the Trump Shuttle airline; his megayacht, the Trump Princess, which had been leased to his casinos and kept docked; and other businesses. In 1995, Trump founded Trump Hotels & Casino Resorts (THCR), which assumed ownership of the Trump Plaza. THCR purchased the Taj Mahal and the Trump Castle in 1996 and went bankrupt in 2004 and 2009, leaving him with 10 percent ownership. He remained chairman until 2009.
In 1985, Trump acquired the Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida. In 1995, he converted the estate into a private club with an initiation fee and annual dues. Trump continued to use a wing of the house as a private residence. He declared the club his primary residence in 2019. Trump began building and buying golf courses in 1999, owning 17 golf courses globally by 2016.
