Donald Trump

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. …

Trump was inaugurated on January 20, 2017. 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 two weeks in office, Trump signed eighteen executive orders, including authorizing procedures for repealing the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act ("Obamacare"), withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations, advancement of the Keystone XL and Dakota Access Pipeline projects, and planning for a wall along the U.S. border with Mexico.

Trump continued to profit from his businesses during his first presidency and knew how his administration's policies affected them. He claimed he would eschew "new foreign deals", but the Trump Organization pursued operational expansions in Scotland, Dubai, and the Dominican Republic. Lobbyists, foreign government officials, and Trump donors and allies generated hundreds of millions of dollars for his resorts and hotels.

Trump took office at the height of the longest economic expansion in American history, which began in 2009 and continued until February 2020, when the COVID-19 recession began. 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. Under Trump, the federal budget deficit increased by almost 50 percent, to nearly $1 trillion in 2019. By the end of his term, the U.S. national debt increased by 39 percent, reaching $27.75 trillion, and the U.S. debt-to-GDP ratio hit a post-World War II high.

Trump rejects the scientific consensus on climate change. He reduced the budget for renewable energy research by 40 percent and reversed Obama-era policies directed at curbing climate change. He withdrew from the Paris Agreement, making the U.S. the only nation to not ratify it.

Trump aimed and aims to boost the production and exports of fossil fuels. Natural gas production expanded under Trump, but that of coal continued to decline. He 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. …

Trump began his second term upon his inauguration on January 20, 2025. He became the oldest to assume the presidency, the first president with a felony conviction, and the second to serve two nonconsecutive terms.

Trump chose several Project 2025 authors for his second administration; after the first year of his second term about half of the project's agenda had been implemented. Emphasizing his conflicts with judicial authority, The New York Times said his attempts to expand presidential power are a defining characteristic of his second term. Trump's second term saw frequent policy announcements, delays, and reversals leading to the emergence of the term "TACO" (Trump Always Chickens Out) to describe it.

More than a month before the 100-day mark of Trump's second term, he had issued more executive orders than any other U.S. president's first 100 days. As of mid-January 2026, his orders and actions had been challenged in over 550 lawsuits nationwide. Of these, plaintiffs had prevailed in 195 cases, the government had prevailed in 109 cases, there were split rulings in 16 cases, 228 cases were pending, and 25 cases were closed. Both Republican and Democratic judicial appointees have found numerous constitutional and statutory flaws with Trump administration policies.

Following legal setbacks, Trump increased his criticism of the judiciary and called for impeachment of federal judges who ruled against him. By mid-July 2025, a Washington Post analysis found he defied judges and the courts in roughly one third of all cases against him, actions that were described by legal experts as unprecedented for any presidential administration.

His administration asserted a constitutional right to ignore federal law in its justification of several actions. It refused to enforce a federal ban on TikTok, and legal experts said Trump was "claiming a constitutional power to immunize private parties to commit otherwise illegal acts with impunity".

Trump's second presidency faced unprecedented conflicts of interest, self-enrichment, and allegations of insider trading and corruption unrivaled in American history from historians, legal experts, and federal judges.

Trump's second presidency has been described as having fewer guardrails against conflicts of interest than his first, breaking with decades of ethical norms, and raising substantial corruption concerns. …

In 1977, Trump married Ivana Zelníčková. They had three children: Donald Jr. (b. 1977), Ivanka (b. 1981), and Eric (b. 1984). Ivana played a crucial role in generating the "fawning press coverage" that shaped Trump's public image as a real estate mogul. The couple divorced in 1990, following his affair with model and actress Marla Maples. He and Maples married in 1993 and had one daughter, Tiffany (b. 1993), whom Maples raised in California. They divorced in 1999. In 2005, he married Slovenian model Melania Knauss. Their son Barron was born in 2006.

Trump had a 15-year friendship with Jeffrey Epstein. Persons who knew them at the time said they frequently "hit on" and competed for women. Media attention and public pressure mounted in 2025, when his administration did not release files relating to Epstein, despite Trump's promise to do so during the 2024 campaign. Some of the files were released in December 2025, mostly heavily redacted. Roughly three million additional pages released in 2026 included approximately 38,000 references to Trump, his wife, Mar-a-Lago, and other Trump-related terms. References to Trump included "salacious information" and uncorroborated statements about him from witnesses in transcripts made since the early 2000s.

Trump has said he began his career with "a small loan of a million dollars" from his father and that he had to pay it back with interest. He borrowed at least $60 million from his father, did not repay many of the loans, and received $413 million (2018 equivalent, adjusted for inflation) from his father's real estate company. Posing as a Trump Organization official named "John Barron", Trump called journalist Jonathan Greenberg in 1984, trying to get a higher ranking on the Forbes 400 list of wealthiest Americans.

Trump self-reported his net worth over a wide range, from minus $900 million in 1990, to $10 billion in 2015. After his business bankruptcies in the 1990s, his lenders forgave more than 80% of his personal debt and allowed him to keep some of his real estate. In 2015, Forbes estimated his net worth at $4.5 billion, based on interviews with more than 80 sources. …