Donald Trump

• 1. Introduction

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  Donald Trump was born on the 14th of June 1946 at Jamaica Hospital in Queens, New York, the fourth child of a family that was already wealthy. He would grow up in a 23-room mansion, become a millionaire in inflation-adjusted terms before his eighth birthday, and eventually hold the highest office in the United States not once but twice. Along the way he filed for bankruptcy protection six times, hosted a reality television show for more than a decade, became the first former president convicted of a felony, and was impeached by the House of Representatives twice. What made this particular New Yorker the most disruptive figure in recent American political history? Why did voters choose him despite, or because of, a legal record unlike any previous president? And what does the movement he built reveal about the country that built him?

• 2. Wealth, Academy, Wharton

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  Fred Trump paid his children each about $20,000 a year, a sum worth the equivalent of $265,000 a year in 2024. That arrangement meant his son Donald was a millionaire in inflation-adjusted terms by age eight. The elder Trump ran middle-class apartment complexes across Queens, Staten Island, and Brooklyn, and he enrolled his son in the New York Military Academy from eighth through twelfth grade. The academy emphasized sports and the imperative of winning. Donald had considered a career in show business before enrolling at Fordham University in 1964, and he participated in the Reserve Officers' Training Corps his first year. He transferred in his junior year to the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. He graduated in May 1968 with a Bachelor of Science in economics, though Wharton's published academic honors and dean's list do not include his name, contrary to his own claims of graduating at the top of his class. He was also exempted from the Vietnam War draft through a claim of bone spurs in his heels. Roy Cohn, who would serve as Trump's fixer, lawyer, and mentor for thirteen years through the 1970s and 1980s, taught him a lesson that shaped his entire subsequent career: life is transactional.

• 3. Building and Bankruptcy

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  In 1968, Trump began working at his father's company managing apartment complexes, collecting rent and making repairs for roughly five years. He pushed his father to expand into Manhattan, and in 1971 he moved there himself, becoming president of what he renamed the Trump Organization. His first major public splash came in 1978 with the renovation of the derelict Commodore Hotel, adjacent to Grand Central Terminal, financed in part by a $400 million city property tax abatement his father arranged. It reopened in 1980 as the Grand Hyatt Hotel. That same year he secured rights to build Trump Tower, the Midtown Manhattan skyscraper that would serve as his primary residence until 2019. Atlantic City became a recurring source of disaster. He opened his first hotel-casino there in 1984, bought a second in 1985, and then in 1988 purchased the Trump Taj Mahal for a total cost of $1.1 billion, financed largely with $675 million in junk bonds. The Taj Mahal filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 1991; the two earlier Atlantic City properties followed in 1992. To reduce $900 million in personal debt, he sold assets including the Trump Shuttle airline and his megayacht, the Trump Princess. Between 1991 and 2009, six of his businesses filed for bankruptcy protection in all. In 1995, lenders seized the Plaza Hotel and most of his other properties in what one account called a "vast and humiliating restructuring" that nonetheless allowed him to avoid personal bankruptcy. After those corporate failures, most major banks stopped lending to him; Deutsche Bank was the exception, and even it cut ties after the January 6 Capitol attack in 2021.

• 4. Television and the Trump Brand

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  In 1987, a book ghostwritten by Tony Schwartz and published under Trump's name, The Art of the Deal, became a New York Times bestseller and made him famous as a rich and successful entrepreneur well beyond New York. His first book planted a celebrity image that television later multiplied. Producer Mark Burnett created The Apprentice in 2004, a reality show on which Trump played a super-rich chief executive who eliminated contestants with the catchphrase "you're fired." The New York Times would later describe his portrayal as "a highly flattering, highly fictionalized version" of himself. He hosted the show, along with its variant The Celebrity Apprentice, until 2015. Together with related licensing agreements, the shows earned him more than $400 million. He also appeared as a cameo in many films and television shows between 1985 and 2001, and starting in the 1990s he appeared twenty-four times on the nationally syndicated Howard Stern Show. His media career reinforced a separate licensing machine: the Trump Organization signed over fifty licensing or management deals using his name on consumer products, generating at least $59 million for his companies. The name also went on real estate developments, though forty of the projects he announced in that category were never completed. The Apprentice ran at the same time Trump cofounded Trump University in 2005, a company that sold real estate seminars for up to $35,000. New York State authorities forced a name change to the Trump Entrepreneur Initiative in 2010. A $40 million civil suit filed by the state in 2013 alleged the company had defrauded consumers; shortly after winning the 2016 presidential election, Trump agreed to pay a total of $25 million to settle that case and two related federal class actions.

• 5. The 2016 Campaign and First Term

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  Trump announced his candidacy in June 2015, using the slogan "Make America Great Again," which he had trademarked in 2012. He described Mexican immigrants in his campaign launch speech as "bringing drugs, they're bringing crime, they're rapists," remarks that prompted NBC to fire him from Celebrity Apprentice. His campaign pledged to build a border wall that Mexico would pay for, to renegotiate trade agreements, and to ban or strictly vet immigrants from Muslim-majority countries. He won the 2016 election with 304 electoral votes against Hillary Clinton's 227, though he received about 2.87 million fewer popular votes, 46.1 percent to her 48.2 percent. He became the only president in American history who had neither served in the military nor held any government office before taking office. His inauguration on the 20th of January 2017 was followed the next day by an estimated 2.6 million people protesting worldwide in the Women's Marches, including 500,000 in Washington, D.C. In domestic policy, he signed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, which reduced tax rates for businesses and individuals. He appointed three Supreme Court justices: Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett. All three voted with the majority when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization in 2022. He rolled back more than one hundred federal environmental regulations and withdrew the United States from the Paris Agreement on climate change. His administration separated over 4,400 children from migrant parents at the border between 2017 and 2018; some of those children were as young as four months old. By April 2024, 1,360 of them had still not been confirmed as reunified with their families. The federal budget deficit increased by nearly 50 percent under his first term, reaching close to $1 trillion in 2019, and the national debt rose 39 percent to $27.75 trillion by the end of his term.

• 6. Impeachments and January 6

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  A whistleblower complaint filed in 2019 alleged that Trump had pressured Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy to investigate Joe and Hunter Biden. The House voted in December 2019 to impeach Trump for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress; the Senate acquitted him in February 2020. After losing the November 2020 election to Joe Biden, who received 81.3 million votes to Trump's 74.2 million, Trump declared victory before results were known and then alleged widespread fraud without evidence. At least 86 judges in state and federal courts rejected the lawsuits his team filed to challenge the outcome. On the 6th of January 2021, while Congress was certifying the election, Trump held a rally and told supporters to "fight like hell" and "take back our country" by marching to the Capitol. A mob broke into the building, more than 140 police officers were injured, and five people died during or after the attack. The House impeached Trump a second time on the 13th of January 2021, charging him with incitement of insurrection. He left office on the 20th of January and the Senate acquitted him on the 13th of February; seven Republican senators voted for conviction. In May 2024, a New York state court convicted him on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records, related to hush-money payments to adult film actress Stormy Daniels made by his attorney Michael Cohen during the 2016 campaign. He became the first United States president convicted of a felony. On the 10th of January 2025, the judge gave him an unconditional discharge, saying punitive requirements would have interfered with presidential immunity.

• 7. Second Term and Trumpism

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  Trump won the 2024 presidential election with 312 electoral votes to Vice President Kamala Harris's 226, also winning the popular vote with 49.8 percent to her 48.3 percent. He was inaugurated on the 20th of January 2025, becoming the oldest person ever to assume the presidency and the second person in American history to serve two nonconsecutive terms. Within his first hundred days he had issued more executive orders than any other president in history. Those orders and related actions had been challenged in over 550 lawsuits by mid-January 2026; plaintiffs had prevailed in 195 cases, the government in 109. He implemented mass layoffs of federal workers, with more than 30,000 fired by late February 2025. He and Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency largely dismantled several federal agencies, including USAID and the Department of Education. He imposed tariffs on nearly all countries at the highest rates since the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930. In July 2025, he signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which the Congressional Budget Office projected would increase the budget deficit by $3.4 trillion by 2034, cause 11.8 million people to lose Medicaid coverage, and eliminate SNAP benefits for three million people. In February 2026, the Supreme Court ruled that tariffs he had imposed under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act were illegal. That same month he authorized joint U.S., Israeli air strikes on Iran, sparking the 2026 Iran war and killing Iranian supreme leader Ali Khamenei; a temporary ceasefire went into effect on the 8th of April. Since 2015, the political movement known as Trumpism has reshaped the Republican Party's identity, and scholars and historians have consistently described his actions as authoritarian and contributing to democratic backsliding.