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Donald Trump
Table of Contents
Donald Trump

 * Introduction
   
 * 
   Early life and business career
   
 * 
   Presidential election of 2016
   
 * Presidency
    * Immigration
   
    * Emoluments clause
   
    * Supreme Court
   
    * Cabinet appointments
   
    * Russia investigation
   
    * Other investigations
   
    * Health care
   
    * Environmental policy
   
    * Foreign relations
   
    * Ukraine scandal
   
    * COVID-19 pandemic
   
    * Presidential election of 2020
      * Campaigns and litigation
      * Aftermath
   
    * Style and rhetoric

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Home Politics, Law & Government World Leaders Presidents & Heads of States


DONALD TRUMP

president of United States
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Alternate titles: Donald John Trump
By Brian Duignan • Last Updated: Jun 10, 2022 • Edit History

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Table of Contents
Donald Trump
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Born: June 14, 1946 (age 76) New York City New York ...(Show more) Title /
Office: presidency of the United States of America (2017-2021), United States
...(Show more) Political Affiliation: Republican Party ...(Show more) Notable
Works: “Crippled America: How to Make America Great Again” “The America We
Deserve” “Trump: The Art of the Deal” ...(Show more) Notable Family Members:
spouse Melania Trump daughter Ivanka Trump son Donald Trump, Jr. son of
Frederick Christ Trump son of Mary MacLeod husband of Melania Trump (January 22,
2005–present) husband of Marla Maples (December 20, 1993–June 8, 1999) husband
of Ivana Trump (April 9, 1977–March 22, 1992) father of Donald Trump, Jr. (b.
1977) father of Ivanka Trump (b. 1981) father of Eric Trump (b. 1984) father of
Tiffany Trump (b. 1993) father of Barron Trump (b. 2006) brother of Maryanne
Trump Barry brother of Frederick Trump, Jr. brother of Elizabeth Trump Grau
brother of Robert Trump ...(Show more)
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Summary


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Donald Trump, in full Donald John Trump, (born June 14, 1946, New York, New
York, U.S.), 45th president of the United States (2017–21). Trump was a
real-estate developer and businessman who owned, managed, or licensed his name
to several hotels, casinos, golf courses, resorts, and residential properties in
the New York City area and around the world. From the 1980s Trump also lent his
name to scores of retail ventures—including branded lines of clothing, cologne,
food, and furniture—and to Trump University, which offered seminars in
real-estate education from 2005 to 2010. In the early 21st century his private
conglomerate, the Trump Organization, comprised some 500 companies involved in a
wide range of businesses, including hotels and resorts, residential properties,
merchandise, and entertainment and television. Trump was the third president in
U.S. history (after Andrew Johnson in 1868 and Bill Clinton in 1998) to be
impeached by the U.S. House of Representatives and the only president to be
impeached twice—once (in 2019) for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress in
connection with the Ukraine scandal and once (in 2021) for “incitement of
insurrection” in connection with the storming of the United States Capitol by a
violent mob of Trump supporters as Congress met in joint session to ceremonially
count electoral college votes from the 2020 presidential election. Both of
Trump’s impeachments ended in his acquittal by the U.S. Senate. Trump lost the
2020 election to former vice president Joe Biden by 306 electoral votes to 232;
he lost the popular vote by more than seven million votes.




EARLY LIFE AND BUSINESS CAREER

Trump was the fourth of five children of Frederick (Fred) Christ Trump, a
successful real estate developer, and Mary MacLeod. Donald’s eldest sister,
Maryanne Trump Barry, eventually served as a U.S. district court judge (1983–99)
and later as a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit until
her retirement in 2011. His elder brother, Frederick, Jr. (Freddy), worked
briefly for his father’s business before becoming an airline pilot in the 1960s.
Freddy’s alcoholism led to his early death in 1981, at the age of 43.


Donald Trump
Donald Trump speaking in front of Trump Tower, New York City, August 2008.
© Paul Hakimata—Phakimata/Dreamstime.com
Britannica Quiz
U.S. Presidents and Their Years in Office Quiz
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Beginning in the late 1920s, Fred Trump built hundreds of single-family houses
and rowhouses in the Queens and Brooklyn boroughs of New York City, and from the
late 1940s he built thousands of apartment units, mostly in Brooklyn, using
federal loan guarantees designed to stimulate the construction of affordable
housing. During World War II he also built federally backed housing for naval
personnel and shipyard workers in Virginia and Pennsylvania. In 1954 Fred was
investigated by the Senate Banking Committee for allegedly abusing the
loan-guarantee program by deliberately overestimating the costs of his
construction projects to secure larger loans from commercial banks, enabling him
to keep the difference between the loan amounts and his actual construction
costs. In testimony before the Senate committee in 1954, Fred admitted that he
had built the Beach Haven apartment complex in Brooklyn for $3.7 million less
than the amount of his government-insured loan. Although he was not charged with
any crime, he was thereafter unable to obtain federal loan guarantees. A decade
later a New York state investigation found that Fred had used his profit on a
state-insured construction loan to build a shopping centre that was entirely his
own property. He eventually returned $1.2 million to the state but was
thereafter unable to obtain state loan guarantees for residential projects in
the Coney Island area of Brooklyn.



Donald Trump attended New York Military Academy (1959–64), a private boarding
school; Fordham University in the Bronx (1964–66); and the University of
Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Finance and Commerce (1966–68), where he
graduated with a bachelor’s degree in economics. In 1968, during the Vietnam
War, he secured a diagnosis of bone spurs, which qualified him for a medical
exemption from the military draft (he had earlier received four draft deferments
for education). Upon his graduation Trump began working full-time for his
father’s business, helping to manage its holdings of rental housing, then
estimated at between 10,000 and 22,000 units. In 1974 he became president of a
conglomeration of Trump-owned corporations and partnerships, which he later
named the Trump Organization.


key events in the life of Donald Trump
Key events in the life of U.S. Pres. Donald Trump.
Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
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During the 1960s and early 1970s, Trump-owned housing developments in New York
City, Cincinnati, Ohio, and Norfolk, Virginia, were the target of several
complaints of racial discrimination against African Americans and other minority
groups. In 1973 Fred and Donald Trump, along with their company, were sued by
the U.S. Justice Department for allegedly violating the Fair Housing Act (1968)
in the operation of 39 apartment buildings in New York City. The Trumps
initially countersued the Justice Department for $100 million, alleging harm to
their reputations. The suit was settled two years later under an agreement that
did not require the Trumps to admit guilt.



In the late 1970s and the 1980s, Donald Trump greatly expanded his father’s
business by investing in luxury hotels and residential properties and by
shifting its geographic focus to Manhattan and later to Atlantic City, New
Jersey. In doing so, he relied heavily on loans, gifts, and other financial
assistance from his father, as well as on his father’s political connections in
New York City. In 1976 he purchased the decrepit Commodore Hotel near Grand
Central Station under a complex profit-sharing agreement with the city that
included a 40-year property tax abatement, the first such tax break granted to a
commercial property in New York City. Relying on a construction loan guaranteed
by his father and the Hyatt Corporation, which became a partner in the project,
Trump refurbished the building and reopened it in 1980 as the 1,400-room Grand
Hyatt Hotel. In 1983 he opened Trump Tower, an office, retail, and residential
complex constructed in partnership with the Equitable Life Assurance Company.
The 58-story building on 56th Street and Fifth Avenue eventually contained
Trump’s Manhattan residence and the headquarters of the Trump Organization.
Other Manhattan properties developed by Trump during the 1980s included the
Trump Plaza residential cooperative (1984), the Trump Parc luxury condominium
complex (1986), and the 19-story Plaza Hotel (1988), a historic landmark for
which Trump paid more than $400 million.

In the 1980s Trump invested heavily in the casino business in Atlantic City,
where his properties eventually included Harrah’s at Trump Plaza (1984, later
renamed Trump Plaza), Trump’s Castle Casino Resort (1985), and the Trump Taj
Mahal (1990), then the largest casino in the world. During that period Trump
also purchased the New Jersey Generals, a team in the short-lived U.S. Football
League; Mar-a-Lago, a 118-room mansion in Palm Beach, Florida, built in the
1920s by the cereal heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post; a 282-foot yacht, then
the world’s second largest, which he named the Trump Princess; and an East Coast
air-shuttle service, which he called Trump Shuttle.

In 1977 Trump married Ivana Zelníčková Winklmayr, a Czech model, with whom he
had three children—Donald, Jr., Ivanka, and Eric—before the couple divorced in
1992. Their married life, as well as Trump’s business affairs, were a staple of
the tabloid press in New York City during the 1980s. Trump married the American
actress Marla Maples after she gave birth to Trump’s fourth child, Tiffany, in
1993. Their marriage ended in divorce in 1999. In 2005 Trump married the Slovene
model Melania Knauss, and their son, Barron, was born the following year.
Melania Trump became only the second foreign-born first lady of the United
States upon Trump’s inauguration as president in 2017.



When the U.S. economy fell into recession in 1990, many of Trump’s businesses
suffered, and he soon had trouble making payments on his approximately $5
billion debt, some $900 million of which he had personally guaranteed. Under a
restructuring agreement with several banks, Trump was forced to surrender his
airline, which was taken over by US Airways in 1992; to sell the Trump Princess;
to take out second or third mortgages on nearly all of his properties and to
reduce his ownership stakes in them; and to commit himself to living on a
personal budget of $450,000 a year. Despite those measures, the Trump Taj Mahal
declared bankruptcy in 1991, and two other casinos owned by Trump, as well as
his Plaza Hotel in New York City, went bankrupt in 1992. Following those
setbacks, most major banks refused to do any further business with him.
Estimates of Trump’s net worth during this period ranged from $1.7 billion to
minus $900 million.

Trump’s fortunes rebounded with the stronger economy of the later 1990s and with
the decision of the Frankfurt-based Deutsche Bank AG to establish a presence in
the U.S. commercial real estate market. Deutsche Bank extended hundreds of
millions of dollars in credit to Trump in the late 1990s and the 2000s for
projects including Trump World Tower (2001) in New York and Trump International
Hotel and Tower (2009) in Chicago. In the early 1990s Trump had floated a plan
to his creditors to convert his Mar-a-Lago estate into a luxury housing
development consisting of several smaller mansions, but local opposition led him
instead to turn it into a private club, which was opened in 1995. In 1996 Trump
partnered with the NBC television network to purchase the Miss Universe
Organization, which produced the Miss Universe, Miss USA, and Miss Teen USA
beauty pageants. Trump’s casino businesses continued to struggle, however: in
2004 his company Trump Hotels & Casino Resorts filed for bankruptcy after
several of its properties accumulated unmanageable debt, and the same company,
renamed Trump Entertainment Resorts, went bankrupt again in 2009.

Beginning in the mid-2000s Trump enjoyed an enormous financial windfall from the
success of The Apprentice, a reality television series in which he starred that
directly earned him nearly $200 million over a 16-year period. The
Emmy-nominated show, in each episode of which Trump “fired” one or more
contestants competing for a lucrative one-year contract as a Trump employee,
further enhanced his reputation as a shrewd businessman and self-made
billionaire. In 2008 the show was revamped as The Celebrity Apprentice, which
featured news makers and entertainers as contestants.



Trump marketed his name as a brand in numerous other business ventures including
Trump Financial, a mortgage company, and the Trump Entrepreneur Initiative
(formerly Trump University), an online education company focusing on real-estate
investment and entrepreneurialism. The latter firm, which ceased operating in
2011, was the target of class-action lawsuits by former students and a separate
action by the attorney general of New York state, alleging fraud. After
initially denying the allegations, Trump settled the lawsuits for $25 million in
November 2016. In 2019, more than two years into his presidency, Trump agreed to
pay $2 million in damages and to admit guilt to settle another lawsuit by the
attorney general of New York that had accused him of illegally using assets from
his charity, the Trump Foundation, to fund his 2016 presidential campaign. As
part of the settlement, the Trump Foundation was dissolved.

In 2018 The New York Times published a lengthy investigative report that
documented how Fred Trump had regularly transferred vast sums of money,
ultimately amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars, to his children by
means of strategies that involved tax, securities, and real-estate fraud, as
well as by legal means. According to the report, Donald was the main beneficiary
of the transfers, having received the equivalent (in 2018 dollars) of $413
million by the early 2000s. According to a later report by the Times, based on
data from tax returns filed by Trump during an 18-year period starting in 2000,
Trump paid no federal taxes in 11 years and only $750 in each of two years, 2016
and 2017. Trump was able to reduce his tax obligations to levels significantly
below the average for the wealthiest Americans by claiming massive losses on
many of his businesses; by deducting as business expenses costs associated with
his residences and his personal aircraft; and by receiving, on the basis of
business losses, a tentative refund from the IRS (Internal Revenue Service) of
nearly $73 million, which more than covered the federal taxes Trump had paid on
income he received from The Apprentice in 2005–08. The refund became the subject
of an IRS audit and a legally mandated review by the congressional Joint
Committee on Taxation.

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Trump was credited as coauthor of a number of books on entrepreneurship and his
business career, including Trump: The Art of the Deal (1987), Trump: The Art of
the Comeback (1997), Why We Want You to Be Rich (2006), Trump 101: The Way to
Success (2006), and Trump Never Give Up: How I Turned My Biggest Challenges into
Success (2008).




PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION OF 2016 OF DONALD TRUMP

From the 1980s Trump periodically mused in public about running for president,
but those moments were widely dismissed in the press as publicity stunts. In
1999 he switched his voter registration from Republican to the Reform Party and
established a presidential exploratory committee. Though he ultimately declined
to run in 2000, he published a book that year, The America We Deserve, in which
he set forth his socially liberal and economically conservative political views.
Trump later rejoined the Republican Party, and he maintained a high public
profile during the 2012 presidential election. Although he did not run for
office at that time, he gained much attention for repeatedly and falsely
claiming that Democratic Pres. Barack Obama was not a natural-born U.S. citizen.

In June 2015 Trump announced that he would be a candidate in the U.S.
presidential election of 2016. Pledging to “make America great again,” he
promised to create millions of new jobs; to punish American companies that
exported jobs overseas; to repeal Obama’s signature legislative achievement, the
Affordable Care Act (ACA); to revive the U.S. coal industry; to drastically
reduce the influence of lobbyists in Washington, D.C. (“drain the swamp”); to
withdraw the United States from the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change; to
impose tariffs on countries that allegedly engaged in trade practices that were
unfair to the United States; to construct a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border to
prevent illegal immigration from Latin America; and to ban immigration by
Muslims. Trump mused about those and other issues in Crippled America: How to
Make America Great Again (2015).



On the campaign trail, Trump quickly established himself as a political
outsider, a common strategy among nonincumbent candidates at all levels. In
Trump’s case the stance proved popular with conservative voters—especially those
in the Tea Party movement—and he frequently topped opinion polls, besting
established Republican politicians. However, his campaign was often mired in
controversy, much of it of his own making. In speeches and especially via
Twitter, a social medium he had used frequently since 2009, Trump regularly made
inflammatory remarks, including racist and sexist slurs and insults. Other
public comments by Trump, especially those directed at his rivals or detractors
in the Republican establishment, were widely criticized for their belligerence,
their bullying tone, and their indulgence in juvenile name-calling. Trump’s
initial refusal to condemn the Ku Klux Klan after a former Klansman endorsed him
also drew sharp criticism, as did his failure to repudiate racist elements among
his supporters, including white supremacists and neo-Nazis. While Trump’s
comments worried the Republican establishment, his supporters were pleased by
his combativeness and his apparent willingness to say whatever came into his
mind, a sign of honesty and courage in their estimation.


Donald Trump
Donald Trump at a campaign rally in Fountain Hills, Arizona, March 2016.
Gage Skidmore

Donald Trump
Donald Trump, 2016.
© Gino Santa Maria/Shutterstock.com

After a loss in the Iowa caucuses to open up the primary season in February
2016, Trump rebounded by winning the next three contests, and he extended his
lead with a strong showing on Super Tuesday—when primaries and caucuses were
held in 11 states—in early March. After a landslide victory in the Indiana
primary in May, Trump became the presumptive Republican nominee as his last two
opponents, Ted Cruz and John Kasich, dropped out of the race.



In July 2016 Trump announced that Indiana Gov. Mike Pence would be his vice
presidential running mate. At the Republican National Convention the following
week, Trump was officially named the party’s nominee. There he and other
speakers harshly criticized the presumptive Democratic nominee, former secretary
of state Hillary Clinton, blaming her for the 2012 attack on the U.S. consulate
in Benghazi, Libya, and for allegedly having mishandled classified State
Department e-mails by using a private e-mail server. Earlier in July the FBI
(Federal Bureau of Investigation) announced that an investigation of Clinton’s
use of e-mail as secretary of state had determined that her actions had been
“extremely careless” but not criminal. (A 2019 report by the U.S. State
Department, concluding a yearslong investigation, found “no persuasive evidence
of systemic, deliberate mishandling of classified information” by Clinton.)
Trump continued his criticisms of Clinton in the ensuing weeks, routinely
referring to her as “Crooked Hillary” and repeatedly vowing to put her in jail
if he were elected. Trump’s threat to jail his political opponent was
unprecedented in modern U.S. political history and was not founded in any
constitutional power that a U.S. president would have.


Donald Trump campaigning in 2016
Donald Trump at a rally in Akron, Ohio, August 2016.
Amy Harris—Rex Features/Shutterstock/AP Images

Despite having pledged in 2015 that he would release his tax returns, as every
presidential nominee of a major party had done since the 1970s, Trump later
refused to do so, explaining that he was under routine audit by the IRS—though
there was no legal bar to releasing his returns under audit, as Pres. Richard
Nixon had done in 1973. In January 2017, soon after Trump’s inauguration as
president, a senior White House official announced that Trump had no intention
of releasing his returns. Trump’s tax returns and other financial information
later became a focus of investigations by the House of Representatives, the
district attorney for Manhattan, and the attorney general of New York into
alleged criminal activity by Trump and his associates (see below Russia
investigation).



In late July, on the eve of the Democratic National Convention, thousands of
internal e-mails of the Democratic National Committee were publicly released by
the Web site WikiLeaks in an apparent effort to damage the Clinton campaign.
Reacting to widespread suspicion that the e-mails had been stolen by Russian
hackers, Trump publicly encouraged the Russians to hack Clinton’s private e-mail
server to find thousands of e-mails that he claimed had been illegally deleted.
A later investigation by the office of Robert Mueller, the special counsel
appointed in 2017 to investigate Russian interference in the 2016 presidential
election (see below Russia investigation), determined that Russian hackers first
attempted to break into the personal e-mail servers of Clinton campaign
officials on the same day, only hours after Trump issued his invitation.

Following the Democratic convention, Trump continued to make controversial and
apparently impromptu comments via Twitter and in other forums that embarrassed
the Republican establishment and seriously disrupted his campaign. In October
2016 a hot-mic video from 2005 surfaced in which he told an entertainment
reporter in vulgar language that he had tried to seduce a married woman and that
“when you’re a star…you can do anything,” including grabbing women by the
genitals. Although Trump dismissed the conversation as “locker room talk,”
eventually more than two dozen women claimed that they had been sexually
harassed or assaulted by Trump in the past (some of the allegations were made
after Trump became president). During the campaign Trump and his legal
representatives generally denied the allegations and asserted that all the women
were lying; they also noted that Bill Clinton had previously been accused of
sexual harassment and assault. In part because of the video, Trump’s support
among women voters—already low—continued to wane, and some Republicans began to
withdraw their endorsements.

Approximately one hour after the release of the Trump video, WikiLeaks published
a trove of e-mails that later investigations determined had been stolen by
Russian hackers from the account of John Podesta, Clinton’s campaign manager. On
the same day, the U.S. intelligence community publicly announced its assessment
that the Russian government had directed efforts by hackers to steal and release
sensitive Democratic Party e-mails and other information in order to bolster the
Trump campaign and to weaken public confidence in U.S. democratic institutions,
including the news media. In response, Trump attacked the competence and motives
of U.S. intelligence agencies and insisted that no one really knew who might
have been behind the hacking. A secret CIA report to Congress in December and a
separate report ordered by Obama and released in January 2017 also concluded
that the Russians had interfered in the election, including through the theft
and publication of Democratic Party e-mails and through a vast public influence
campaign that had used fake social media accounts to spread disinformation and
create discord among Americans.



United States presidential election of 2016
Results of the U.S. presidential election, 2016.
Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

Despite his ongoing efforts to portray Clinton as “crooked” and an “insider,”
Trump trailed her in almost all polls. As election day neared, he repeatedly
claimed that the election was “rigged” and that the press was treating him
unfairly by reporting “fake news,” a term he used frequently to disparage news
reports containing negative information about him. He received no endorsements
from major newspapers. During the third and final presidential debate, in
October, he made headlines when he refused to say that he would accept the
election results.

Eight days after that debate, the Trump campaign received a boost when FBI
director James Comey notified Congress that the bureau was reviewing a trove of
e-mails from an unrelated case that appeared to be relevant to its earlier
investigation of Clinton. Trump seized on the announcement as vindication of his
charge that Clinton was crooked. Six days later Comey announced that the new
e-mails contained no evidence of criminal activity. Notwithstanding the damage
that Comey’s revelation had done to her campaign, Clinton retained a slim lead
over Trump in polls of swing states (those considered to be winnable by either
candidate) on the eve of election day, and most pundits and political analysts
remained confident that she would win. When voting proceeded on November 8,
2016, however, Trump bested Clinton in a chain of critical Rust Belt states, and
he was elected president. Although Trump won the electoral college vote by 304
to 227, and thereby the presidency, he lost the nationwide popular vote by more
than 2.8 million. After the election, Trump repeatedly claimed, without
evidence, that three to five million people had voted for Clinton illegally.
Trump took the oath of office on January 20, 2017.



Trump’s unexpected victory prompted much discussion in the press regarding the
reliability of polls and the strategic mistakes of the Clinton campaign. Most
analysts agreed that Clinton had taken for granted some of her core
constituencies (such as women and minorities) and that Trump had effectively
capitalized upon the economic anxieties and racial prejudices of some
working-class whites, particularly men.



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 * Presidential election of 2016
 * Presidency

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Duignan, Brian. "Donald Trump". Encyclopedia Britannica, 10 Jun. 2022,
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Donald-Trump. Accessed 18 July 2022.
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External Websites
 * National Geographic Kids - U.S. Presidents - Donald Trump
 * Southern Poverty Law Center - Family Separation Under the Trump
   Administration - A Timeline

Britannica Websites
Articles from Britannica Encyclopedias for elementary and high school students.
 * Donald Trump - Children's Encyclopedia (Ages 8-11)
 * Donald Trump - Student Encyclopedia (Ages 11 and up)


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