Donald Trump: the story on HearLore

Donald Trump

Donald John Trump was born on the 14th of June 1946 at Jamaica Hospital in the Jamaica Estates neighborhood of Queens, New York, the fourth child of Fred Trump and Mary Anne MacLeod Trump. He grew up in a 23-room mansion with his three older siblings and one younger brother, Robert, in a family that paid each child approximately $20,000 annually, a sum equivalent to $265,000 in 2024, making him a millionaire in inflation-adjusted dollars by the age of eight. His early education took him from the private Kew-Forest School through seventh grade to the New York Military Academy for grades eight through twelve, where the curriculum emphasized sports and the imperative of winning. Although he considered a career in show business, he enrolled at Fordham University in 1964 to stay closer to home, participating in the Reserve Officers' Training Corps during his first year before dropping out. He transferred to the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in his junior year, commuting to his father's office on weekends, and graduated in May 1968 with a Bachelor of Science in economics, though he was not the top student he later claimed to be. During the Vietnam War, he was exempted from the draft due to a claim of bone spurs in his heels, a medical condition that allowed him to avoid military service while his peers were deployed overseas.

The Art Of The Deal

Starting in 1968, Trump worked at Trump Management, his father's real estate company, managing middle-class apartment complexes in Queens, Staten Island, and Brooklyn, but he soon pushed to expand into Manhattan where property values were significantly higher. In 1971, his father made himself chairman and appointed Trump president, allowing him to use the Trump Organization as an umbrella for the corporate names of the family's businesses. A pivotal figure in his early career was Roy Cohn, who served as his fixer, lawyer, and mentor for 13 years, teaching Trump that life is transactional and providing him with Mafia connections that controlled construction unions. In 1973, Cohn helped Trump countersue the U.S. government for $100 million over charges that his properties had discriminated against Black applicants and tenants, a case settled by a consent decree agreeing to desegregate, which the Trumps were later found to have violated four years later. Trump's first major Manhattan venture was the renovation of the derelict Commodore Hotel, which reopened in 1980 as the Grand Hyatt Hotel, facilitated by a $400 million city property tax abatement arranged by his father and a $70 million bank construction loan. He subsequently obtained rights to develop Trump Tower, a mixed-use skyscraper in Midtown Manhattan that became his primary residence until 2019 and the headquarters of the Trump Corporation. By 1988, he had acquired the Plaza Hotel with a loan from a consortium of 16 banks, but 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.

When and where was Donald Trump born?

Donald John Trump was born on the 14th of June 1946 at Jamaica Hospital in the Jamaica Estates neighborhood of Queens, New York.

How many times did Donald Trump file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection?

Between 1991 and 2009, Donald Trump filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection for six of his businesses, including the Plaza Hotel and the casinos in Atlantic City.

What was the outcome of the 2016 presidential election for Donald Trump?

Donald Trump won the election with 306 pledged electoral votes versus 232 for Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, making him the fifth person to be elected president despite losing the popular vote.

When did Donald Trump serve as President of the United States?

Donald Trump served as President of the United States from 2017 to 2021 and has served since 2025.

What legal penalties did Donald Trump face regarding sexual abuse and defamation in 2024 and 2025?

Donald Trump was found liable for sexual abuse and defamation and ordered to pay $5 million in one case and $83.3 million in the other, with federal appeals courts upholding both findings and awards in December 2024 and September 2025.

Why was Donald Trump convicted of a felony in 2024?

Donald Trump was convicted on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in May 2024, stemming from evidence that he booked Michael Cohen's hush-money payments to adult film actress Stormy Daniels as business expenses.

The Reality Star

In 1988, Trump purchased the Eastern Air Lines Shuttle, financing the purchase with $380 million in loans from a syndicate of 22 banks, but he defaulted on his loans in 1991, and ownership passed to the banks. He purchased the Miss Universe pageants in 1996, including Miss USA and Miss Teen USA, and took both pageants to NBC in 2002 after disagreements with CBS about scheduling, receiving a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2007 for his work as producer. In 1983, for about $6 million, he purchased the New Jersey Generals, a team in the United States Football League, but the league folded after the 1985 season, largely due to his attempt to move to a fall schedule and his attempt to force a merger with the NFL by bringing an antitrust suit. From 1986 to 1988, he purchased significant blocks of shares in various public companies while suggesting that he intended to take over the company and then sold his shares for a profit, leading some observers to think he was engaged in greenmail. The New York Times found that he initially made millions of dollars in such stock transactions, but lost most, if not all, of those gains after investors stopped taking his takeover talk seriously. In 2005, Trump cofounded Trump University, a company that sold real estate seminars for up to $35,000, which was renamed the Trump Entrepreneur Initiative in 2010 after New York State authorities notified the company that its use of university violated state law. In 2013, the State of New York filed a $40 million civil suit against Trump University, alleging that the company made false statements and defrauded consumers, and shortly after he won the 2016 presidential election, he agreed to pay a total of $25 million to settle the three cases. Producer Mark Burnett made Trump a television star when he created the reality show The Apprentice, which Trump hosted from 2004 to 2015, including the variant The Celebrity Apprentice, where he was a superrich chief executive who eliminated contestants with the catchphrase you're fired. The shows remade Trump's image for millions of viewers nationwide, and with the related licensing agreements, they earned him more than $400 million.

The Outsider Campaign

Trump announced his candidacy for the 2016 election in June 2015, campaigning as a rich, successful businessman and an outsider without political experience, and claiming media bias against him. His campaign statements were often opaque and suggestive, and a record number were false, with his campaign launch speech drawing criticism for claiming Mexican immigrants were bringing drugs, they're bringing crime, they're rapists, in response to which NBC fired him from Celebrity Apprentice. He became the Republican front-runner in March 2016 and was declared the presumptive Republican nominee in May, describing NATO as obsolete and espousing views described by The Washington Post as noninterventionist and protectionist. His campaign platform emphasized renegotiating U.S., China relations and free trade agreements such as NAFTA, strongly enforcing immigration laws, pursuing energy independence while opposing climate change regulations, and imposing tariffs on imports by companies that offshore jobs. He advocated increasing military spending and extreme vetting or banning of immigrants from Muslim-majority countries, and promised to build a wall on the Mexico, U.S. border, vowing that Mexico would pay for it. He pledged to deport millions of illegal immigrants residing in the U.S., and criticized birthright citizenship for incentivizing anchor babies. According to an analysis in Political Science Quarterly, Trump made explicitly racist and sexist appeals to win over white voters during his 2016 presidential campaign. He did not release his tax returns, contrary to the practice of every major candidate since 1976, and after a lengthy court battle, the U.S. Supreme Court allowed records to be released to the prosecutor for review by a grand jury in February 2021. Trump won the election with 306 pledged electoral votes versus 232 for Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, though the official count was 304 to 227 after elector defections on both sides, making him the fifth person to be elected president despite losing the popular vote, receiving nearly 2.9 million fewer votes than Clinton. He was the only president who neither served in the military nor held any government office prior to becoming president, and his election marked the return of a Republican undivided government.

The First Term

Trump was inaugurated on the 20th of January 2017, and the day after his inauguration, an estimated 2.6 million people worldwide, including 500,000 in Washington, D.C., protested against him in the Women's Marches. During his first week in office, he signed six executive orders, including authorizing procedures for repealing the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations, and planning for a wall along the U.S. border with Mexico. In December 2017, he signed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, which reduced tax rates for businesses and individuals and eliminated the penalty associated with the Affordable Care Act's individual mandate, but under Trump, the federal budget deficit increased by almost 50 percent, to nearly $1 trillion in 2019. He withdrew from the Paris Agreement, making the U.S. the only nation to not ratify it, and rolled back more than 100 federal environmental regulations, including those that curbed greenhouse gas emissions, air and water pollution, and the use of toxic substances. From 2017 to 2018, the Trump administration had a policy of family separation that separated over 4,400 children, some as young as four months old, from migrant parents at the U.S., Mexico border, an unprecedented policy that sparked public outrage. In 2018, Trump's refusal to sign any spending bill unless it allocated funding for the border wall resulted in the longest-ever federal government shutdown, for 35 days from December 2018 to January 2019. He signed an executive order in January 2017 that denied entry to citizens from six Muslim-majority countries for four months and from Syria indefinitely, and the Supreme Court allowed a revised version to go into effect in December 2017. Trump appointed 234 federal judges, including three to the Supreme Court: Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett, which politically shifted the Court to the right, and he later took credit when Roe v. Wade was overturned by Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization in 2022. During the COVID-19 pandemic, he initially ignored public health warnings, established the White House Coronavirus Task Force on January 29, and signed the CARES Act, a $2.2 trillion bipartisan economic stimulus bill, but he also halted funding of the World Health Organization in April and encouraged right-wing protests against social-distancing policies.