Donald Trump

Donald John Trump was born on June 14, 1946, in the Queens borough of New York City, the fourth of five children of Fred Trump and Mary Anne MacLeod Trump ^[1]. His father was a successful real estate developer who built and managed middle-income apartment housing in Brooklyn and Queens. His mother had emigrated from the Isle of Lewis in Scotland as a young woman. The family lived comfortably in the Jamaica Estates neighborhood, and the children were raised with an expectation of discipline and ambition ^[2].

As a boy Trump attended the Kew-Forest School in Queens. At age 13 his parents enrolled him at the New York Military Academy, a boarding school north of the city, where he remained through his graduation in 1964 ^[1]. He then studied for two years at Fordham University in the Bronx before transferring to the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, one of the country's leading business programs. He earned a bachelor's degree in economics in 1968 ^[2].

During the Vietnam War era, Trump received student deferments while in college and later a medical deferment, and he did not serve in the military ^[3]. After graduation he went to work in the family firm, then called Trump Management, learning the rental housing business from his father in the outer boroughs of New York.

Trump took charge of the family company in 1971 and renamed it the Trump Organization. Unlike his father, who had concentrated on outer-borough apartments, the younger Trump set his sights on Manhattan ^[2]. His first major project was the transformation of the aging Commodore Hotel next to Grand Central Terminal into the Grand Hyatt New York, completed in 1980 with the help of a substantial tax abatement negotiated with the city ^[1]. The deal established him as a rising figure in New York real estate.

In 1983 he opened Trump Tower, a 58-story skyscraper on Fifth Avenue that combined retail, offices, and luxury apartments. The building became his home, his headquarters, and the most visible emblem of his brand ^[2]. Through the 1980s he expanded aggressively into Atlantic City casinos, acquiring or building properties including the Trump Plaza, Trump's Castle, and the vast Trump Taj Mahal, which opened in 1990 ^[1]. He also bought the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan, an airline shuttle, and a yacht, and he published the bestselling 1987 book The Art of the Deal, written with Tony Schwartz, which fixed his image as a brash dealmaker ^[4].

The expansion carried enormous debt. In the early 1990s, amid a recession and heavy casino losses, several Trump businesses entered bankruptcy proceedings and he was forced to give up assets and restructure loans ^[3]. He gradually rebuilt his fortunes, relying less on new construction and more on licensing the Trump name to hotels, residential towers, golf courses, and consumer products around the world. In 2004 he began hosting the NBC reality television program The Apprentice, in which contestants competed for a job in his organization. The show ran for years, made his catchphrase famous, and introduced him to a national audience far beyond real estate ^[1].

Trump had flirted with politics for decades, briefly exploring a Reform Party presidential bid in 2000, and he became widely known in Republican circles in the early 2010s for questioning President Barack Obama's birthplace, a claim that was false and that he later acknowledged as such ^[3]. In June 2015 he announced a campaign for the Republican presidential nomination from the lobby of Trump Tower. Running on promises to restrict immigration, renegotiate trade agreements, and, in his slogan, make America great again, he defeated a large field of experienced rivals to win the nomination in 2016 ^[1].

In the general election he faced Democrat Hillary Clinton. On November 8, 2016, Trump won the Electoral College with 304 electoral votes while losing the national popular vote, and he was inaugurated as the 45th president on January 20, 2017 ^[5]. He was the first president elected without any previous public office or military rank. Who was Donald Trump before that day mattered less to supporters than what he promised to disrupt in Washington.

His first term produced a major tax overhaul, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, the appointment of three Supreme Court justices (Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett), a renegotiated North American trade pact known as the USMCA, and the brokering of the Abraham Accords normalizing relations between Israel and several Arab states ^[5]. His administration also imposed tariffs on Chinese goods, withdrew the United States from the Paris climate agreement and the Iran nuclear deal, and tightened immigration enforcement. The final year of the term was dominated by the COVID-19 pandemic, which killed hundreds of thousands of Americans and drove the economy into a sharp contraction; his administration launched Operation Warp Speed, a program that accelerated vaccine development ^[6].

Trump was impeached twice by the House of Representatives, first in December 2019 over his dealings with Ukraine and again in January 2021 on a charge of incitement of insurrection after a crowd of his supporters attacked the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021, while Congress was certifying his election loss. The Senate acquitted him both times ^[5]. He disputed the 2020 election result, which he lost to Joe Biden, though courts rejected dozens of challenges brought by his campaign and allies ^[6].

After leaving office in January 2021, Trump remained the dominant figure in the Republican Party from his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida. He announced another presidential campaign in November 2022 ^[5]. The years between his terms brought unprecedented legal battles: in 2024 a New York jury convicted him on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records related to a payment made before the 2016 election, making him the first former American president convicted of a crime, and he faced additional indictments in other jurisdictions ^[6]. He was later sentenced without penalty in the New York case, and federal cases against him were dropped after his election victory.

During the 2024 campaign he survived an assassination attempt at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, in July 2024, in which a bullet grazed his ear and a spectator was killed ^[6]. In November 2024 he defeated Vice President Kamala Harris, winning both the Electoral College and the popular vote, and on January 20, 2025, he was inaugurated as the 47th president. He became the second president, after Grover Cleveland, to serve nonconsecutive terms, and at 78 the oldest person sworn in to the office ^[5].

His second term opened with a rapid series of executive actions on immigration, tariffs, and the structure of the federal workforce, moves that supporters praised as decisive and critics challenged in court ^[6]. The full shape of the term belongs to ongoing history rather than to settled record.

Trump has been married three times. He wed the Czech-born model Ivana Zelnickova in 1977; the couple had three children, Donald Jr., Ivanka, and Eric, before divorcing in 1992 ^[1]. His second marriage, to Marla Maples, produced a daughter, Tiffany, and ended in divorce in 1999. In 2005 he married the Slovenian-born model Melania Knauss, and their son Barron was born in 2006 ^[2]. Several of his children have held senior roles in the Trump Organization, and Ivanka Trump and her husband Jared Kushner served as White House advisers during his first term.

He is known for his abstention from alcohol and tobacco, a habit he has attributed to the early death of his older brother Fred Jr., who struggled with alcoholism ^[3]. Golf is his principal recreation, and his company owns courses in the United States, Scotland, Ireland, and elsewhere. Raised attending a Presbyterian church, he later identified as a nondenominational Christian ^[1]. Since 2019 his primary residence has been Mar-a-Lago, the Palm Beach club he purchased in 1985.

Assessments of Donald Trump divide sharply, and any honest account of Donald Trump achievements and controversies must hold both in view. Supporters credit him with pre-pandemic economic growth, a reshaped federal judiciary, new Middle East diplomatic agreements, and a willingness to confront trade partners and international institutions on behalf of American workers ^[5]. Critics point to his rhetoric, his refusal to accept the 2020 election result, the January 6 attack on the Capitol, and his criminal conviction as lasting stains on the office ^[6]. Historians surveyed during and after his first term generally ranked him low among presidents, though such rankings of recent leaders often shift with time ^[5].

What is beyond dispute is his influence. Trump remade the Republican Party around his own populist and nationalist priorities, changed the way campaigns use media and social platforms, and demonstrated that a celebrity outsider could capture the presidency twice. Among the basic Donald Trump facts that will anchor future accounts: he is the only president impeached twice, the first convicted of a felony, and the second to win nonconsecutive terms ^[6]. Whatever verdict later generations reach, his career marks one of the most disruptive chapters in the modern American presidency.