Donald Trump
Donald John Trump 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 fame as a billionaire. Presenting himself as a political 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 family separation policy on the border. He rolled back environmental and business regulations, signed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, and appointed three Supreme Court justices. In foreign policy, Trump withdrew the U.S. from agreements on climate, trade, and Iran's nuclear program, and initiated a trade war with China. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, he downplayed its severity, contradicted health officials, and signed the CARES Act. After losing the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden, Trump attempted to overturn the result, culminating in the January 6 Capitol attack in 2021. He was impeached in 2019 for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, and in 2021 for incitement of insurrection; the Senate acquitted him both times.
In 2023, Trump was found liable in civil cases for sexual abuse and defamation and for business fraud. He was found guilty in 34 counts of falsifying business records in 2024, making him the first U.S. president convicted of a felony. After winning the 2024 presidential election against Vice President Kamala Harris, he was sentenced to a discharge, and two federal felony indictments against him 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 its targeting of political opponents and civil society, persecution of transgender people, mass deportation of immigrants, and extensive use of executive orders—have drawn over 550 lawsuits challenging their legality.
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. He promotes 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.
Early life and education
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. Fred Trump 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 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 a show business career but instead, 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 graduating in May 1968 with a Bachelor of Science in economics. He was not the top student he sometimes claimed to be. By the time he went to Wharton he was eyeing 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.
Business career
Real estate
Starting in 1968, Trump was employed at Trump Management, his father's real estate company, which managed the middle-class apartment complexes Fred had built in Queens, Staten Island, and Brooklyn. His main tasks were collecting rent and making repairs for about five years. 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 move 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 to think that life is transactional. In 1973, Cohn helped Trump countersue the U.S. government for $100 million over its charges that Trump's properties had discriminated against Black applicants and tenants; the case was settled a consent decree agreeing to desegregate, which the Trumps ended up in court for violating four years later. Helping Trump projects, Cohn was a consigliere whose Mafia connections controlled construction unions. In 1979, Cohn introduced political consultant Roger Stone to Trump, who enlisted Stone's services to deal with the federal government.
Trump moved from his studio to a penthouse with a view, and got a real estate broker's license in the mid-1970s. Trump showed a propensity for litigation, no matter the outcome and cost; even when he lost, he described the case as a win. By 2018, Trump had been involved in more than 4,000 lawsuits, liens, and other filings, often filed for nonpayment against him by employees, contractors, real estate brokers, and his own attorneys. 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 Trump to his children and nephew and lower their tax burden.
Manhattan and Chicago developments
Trump attracted 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. The financing was facilitated by a $400 million city property tax abatement arranged for him by his father who also, jointly with Hyatt, guaranteed a $70 million bank construction loan. The hotel reopened in 1980 as the Grand Hyatt Hotel, and 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 PAC and was his primary residence until 2019. 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.