Donald John Trump (born June 14, 1946) is an American politician, media personality, and businessman who is the 47th president of the United States. A member of the Republican Party, he served as the 45th president from 2017 to 2021.
Born into a wealthy New York City family, Trump graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1968 with a bachelor's degree in economics. He became the president of his family's real estate business in 1971, renamed it the Trump Organization, and began acquiring and building skyscrapers, hotels, casinos, and golf courses. He launched side ventures, many licensing the Trump name, and filed for six business bankruptcies in the 1990s and 2000s. From 2004 to 2015, he hosted the reality television show The Apprentice, bolstering his reputation as a wealthy tycoon. Presenting himself as a political outsider, Trump won the 2016 presidential election against Democratic Party nominee Hillary Clinton.
During his first presidency, Trump imposed a travel ban on seven Muslim-majority countries, expanded the Mexico–United States border wall, and enforced a family separation policy on the border. He rolled back environmental and business regulations, signed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, and appointed three Supreme Court justices. He withdrew the U.S. from agreements on climate and trade, and started a trade war with China. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, he downplayed its severity, contradicted health officials, and signed the CARES Act. After losing the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden, Trump refused to concede defeat and attempted to overturn the result, resulting in the January 6 Capitol attack in 2021. He was impeached twice—in 2019 for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress and in 2021 for incitement of insurrection—and acquitted by the Senate both times.
In 2023, Trump was found liable in New York state civil cases for sexual abuse and defamation and for business fraud. In May 2024, he was found guilty in a New York state court on 34 counts of falsifying business records, making him the first U.S. president convicted of a felony. After winning the 2024 presidential election against Vice President Kamala Harris, he was given a no-penalty sentence, and two federal felony indictments for retention of classified documents and obstruction of the 2020 election were dismissed without prejudice.
Trump began his second presidency by initiating mass layoffs of federal workers. He imposed tariffs on nearly all countries at the highest level since the Great Depression and signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. His administration's actions—including the targeting of political opponents and civil society, restriction of transgender rights, mass deportation of undocumented immigrants, and extensive use of executive orders—have drawn over 550 lawsuits challenging their legality. In Latin America, he pursued a campaign to attack alleged drug traffickers, and ordered a military raid into Venezuela to capture the country's president and turned it into a de facto puppet state. In the Middle East, he authorized joint U.S.–Israeli strikes on Iran that began the 2026 Iran war.
Since 2015, Trump's leadership style and political agenda—often referred to as Trumpism—have reshaped the Republican Party's identity. Many of his comments and actions have been characterized as racist or misogynistic. He has made many false or misleading statements during his campaigns and presidency, to a degree unprecedented in American politics, and has promoted conspiracy theories. Trump's actions have been described by researchers as authoritarian and contributing to democratic backsliding. After his first term, scholars and historians ranked him as one of the worst presidents in American history.
Early life and education
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. 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 eyeing 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.
Business career
Real estate
Starting in 1968, Trump was employed at Trump Management, his father's real estate company, which managed the middle-class apartment complexes Fred had built in Queens, Staten Island, and Brooklyn. His main tasks were collecting rent and making repairs for about five years. 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 move 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. 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. Helping Trump projects, Cohn was a consigliere whose Mafia connections controlled construction unions. In 1979, Cohn introduced political consultant Roger Stone to Trump, who enlisted Stone's services to deal with the federal government.
Trump showed a propensity for litigation, no matter the outcome and cost; even when he lost, he described the case as a win. 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. Besides inflating rents, the schemes served to transfer assets from Fred to his children and nephew and lower their tax burden.
Manhattan and Chicago developments
Trump gained public attention in 1978 with the launch of his family's first Manhattan venture: the renovation of the derelict Commodore Hotel, adjacent to Grand Central Terminal. The financing was facilitated by a $400 million city property tax abatement arranged for him by his father who also, jointly with Hyatt, guaranteed a $70 million bank construction loan. The hotel reopened in 1980 as the Grand Hyatt Hotel, and that same year, he obtained rights to develop Trump Tower, a mixed-use skyscraper in Midtown Manhattan. The building houses the headquarters of the Trump Corporation and Trump's political action committee (PAC) and was his primary residence until 2019. In 1988, Trump acquired the Plaza Hotel with a loan from a consortium of 16 banks. 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. Trump's last major construction project was the 92-story mixed-use Trump International Hotel and Tower in Chicago, which opened in 2008. In 2024, The New York Times and ProPublica reported that the Internal Revenue Service was investigating whether he had twice written off losses incurred through construction cost overruns and lagging sales of residential units in the building he had declared to be worthless on his 2008 tax return.
Atlantic City casinos
In 1984, Trump opened Harrah's at Trump Plaza, a hotel and casino, with financing and management help from the Holiday Corporation. It was unprofitable, and he paid Holiday $70 million in May 1986 to take sole control. In 1985, he bought the unopened Atlantic City Hilton Hotel and renamed it Trump's Castle. Both casinos filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 1992. Trump bought a third Atlantic City venue in 1988, the Trump Taj Mahal. It was financed with $675 million in junk bonds and completed for $1.1 billion, opening in April 1990. He filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 1991. Under the provisions of the restructuring agreement, Trump gave up half his initial stake and personally guaranteed future performance. To reduce his $900 million of personal debt, he sold the Trump Shuttle airline; his megayacht, the Trump Princess, which had been leased to his casinos and kept docked; and other businesses. In 1995, Trump founded Trump Hotels & Casino Resorts (THCR), which assumed ownership of the Trump Plaza. THCR purchased the Taj Mahal and the Trump Castle in 1996 and went bankrupt in 2004 and 2009, leaving him with 10 percent ownership. He remained chairman until 2009.
Golf clubs
In 1985, Trump acquired the Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida. In 1995, he converted the estate into a private club with an initiation fee and annual dues. Trump continued to use a wing of the house as a private residence. He declared the club his primary residence in 2019. Trump began building and buying golf courses in 1999, owning 17 golf courses globally by 2016.
Licensing the Trump name
The Trump Organization often licensed the Trump name for consumer products and services, including foodstuffs, apparel, learning courses, and home furnishings. Over 50 licensing or management deals involved his name, generating at least $59 million for his companies. By 2018, only two consumer goods companies continued to license Trump's name. During the 2000s, he licensed his name to real estate developments. Forty of the projects he announced were not completed.
Side ventures
In 1970, Trump invested $70,000 of his father's wealth to receive billing as coproducer of a Broadway comedy—and lost the money. After making low-ball bids for the New York Mets and the Cleveland Indians baseball teams, in 1983 for about $6 million, he purchased the New Jersey Generals, a team in the United States Football League. The league folded after the 1985 season, largely due to his attempt to move to a fall schedule (when it would have competed with the National Football League for audience) and his attempt to force a merger with the NFL by bringing an antitrust suit. In 1989 and 1990, he lent his name to the Tour de Trump cycling stage race, an attempt to create an American equivalent of European races such as the Tour de France or the Giro d'Italia.
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 1988, Trump purchased the Eastern Air Lines Shuttle, financing the purchase with $380 million (equivalent to $1.03 billion in 2025) in loans from a syndicate of 22 banks. He renamed the airline Trump Shuttle and operated it until 1992. He defaulted on his loans in 1991, and ownership passed to the banks. In 1996, he purchased the Miss Universe pageants, including Miss USA and Miss Teen USA. Due to disagreements with CBS about scheduling, he took both pageants to NBC in 2002. In 2007, he received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for his work as producer of Miss Universe. NBC and Univision dropped the pageants in June 2015 in reaction to his comments about Mexican immigrants.
Trump University
In 2005, Trump cofounded Trump University, a company that sold real estate seminars for up to $35,000. After New York State authorities notified the company that its use of "university" violated state law because it was not an academic institution, its name was changed to the Trump Entrepreneur Initiative in 2010. 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. Additionally, two class actions were filed in federal court against him and his companies. Internal documents revealed that employees were instructed to use a hard-sell approach, and former employees testified that Trump University had defrauded or lied to its students. Shortly after winning the 2016 presidential election, he agreed to pay a total of $25 million to settle the three cases.
Foundation
The Donald J. Trump Foundation was a private foundation established in 1988. From 1987 to 2006, Trump gave his foundation $5.4 million, which had been spent by the end of 2006. After donating a total of $65,000 in 2007–2008, he stopped donating any personal funds to the charity, which received millions from other donors, including $5 million from Vince McMahon. The foundation gave to health and sports-related charities, conservative groups, and charities that held events at Trump properties. In 2016, The Washington Post reported that the charity had committed several potential legal and ethical violations, including self-dealing and tax evasion. Also in 2016, the New York attorney general stated the foundation had violated state law by soliciting donations without submitting to required annual external audits and ordered it to cease its fundraising activities in New York immediately. Trump said in December 2016 that the foundation would be dissolved but was prevented from doing so "amid concerns about the handling of the foundation's documents and assets".
In June 2018, the New York attorney general's office filed a civil suit against the foundation, Trump, and his adult children, seeking $2.8 million in restitution and additional penalties. In December 2018, the foundation ceased operation and disbursed its assets to other charities. In November 2019, a New York state judge ordered Trump to pay $2 million to a group of charities for misusing the foundation's funds, in part to finance his presidential campaign.
Legal affairs and bankruptcies
According to a review of state and federal court files conducted by USA Today in 2018, Trump and his businesses had been involved in more than 4,000 lawsuits, liens, and other filings, often filed for nonpayment against him by employees, contractors, real estate brokers, and his own attorneys. While Trump has not filed for personal bankruptcy, his over-leveraged hotel and casino businesses in Atlantic City and New York filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection six times between 1991 and 2009. They continued to operate while the banks restructured debt and reduced his shares in the properties. During the 1980s, more than 70 banks had lent Trump $4 billion. After his corporate bankruptcies of the early 1990s, most major banks, with the exception of Deutsche Bank, declined to lend to him. After the January 6 Capitol attack, Deutsche Bank also decided not to do business with him or his affiliated company in the future.
Media career
Trump has published 19 books under his name, most written or cowritten by ghostwriters. His first book, the 1987 Art of the Deal, was ghostwritten by Tony Schwartz, who is credited as coauthor. It was a New York Times Best Seller and made Trump a celebrity beyond New York as a rich and successful entrepreneur. Trump had cameos in many films and television shows from 1985 to 2001. Trump acquired his style of politics from professional wrestling. From the late 1980s, he sporadically played himself as a super-rich boss at events staged by professional wrestling promotion WWE, including WrestleMania 23 in 2007. Starting in the 1990s, Trump appeared 24 times as a guest on the nationally syndicated Howard Stern Show. He had his own short-form talk radio program, Trumped!, from 2004 to 2008. From 2011 until 2015, he was a guest commentator on Fox & Friends. In 2021, Trump, who had been a member since 1989, resigned from SAG-AFTRA to avoid a disciplinary hearing regarding the January 6 attack; two days later, the union permanently barred him.
Producer Mark Burnett made Trump a television star when he created the reality show The Apprentice, which Trump hosted from 2004 to 2015 (including variant The Celebrity Apprentice). On the shows, he was a superrich chief executive who eliminated contestants with the catchphrase "you're fired". The New York Times called his portrayal "a highly flattering, highly fictionalized version" of himself. The shows remade Trump's image for millions of viewers nationwide. With the related licensing agreements, they earned him more than $400 million.
Early political aspirations
Trump registered as a Republican in Queens in 1969 and in Manhattan in 1987; a member of the Independence Party, the New York state affiliate of the Reform Party, in 1999; a Democrat in 2001; a Republican in 2009; unaffiliated in 2011; and a Republican in 2012.
In 1987, Trump placed full-page advertisements in major newspapers, expressing his views on foreign policy and how to eliminate the federal budget deficit. In 1988, he approached Lee Atwater, asking to be put into consideration to be Republican nominee George H. W. Bush's running mate. Bush found the request "strange and unbelievable". Trump was a candidate in the 2000 Reform Party presidential primaries for three months before he withdrew in February 2000. In 2011, Trump considered challenging President Barack Obama in the 2012 election. He spoke at the Conservative Political Action Conference in February and gave speeches in states with early primaries. In May 2011, he announced that he would not run.
2016 presidential election
Trump announced his candidacy for the 2016 election in June 2015. Using the slogan "Make America Great Again" he had trademarked in 2012, he campaigned as a rich, successful businessman and an outsider without political experience, and claimed media bias against him. Trump's campaign statements were often opaque and suggestive; a record number were false. He became the Republican front-runner in March 2016 and was declared the presumptive Republican nominee in May.
Trump described NATO as "obsolete" and espoused 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 and strongly enforcing immigration laws. Other campaign positions included pursuing energy independence while opposing climate change regulations, modernizing services for veterans, repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act, abolishing Common Core education standards, investing in infrastructure, simplifying the tax code while reducing taxes, 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. He promised to build a wall on the Mexico–U.S. border and vowed 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. In particular, his campaign launch speech drew criticism for claiming Mexican immigrants were "bringing drugs, they're bringing crime, they're rapists"; in response, NBC fired him from Celebrity Apprentice.
Trump's FEC-required reports listed assets above $1.4 billion and outstanding debts of at least $265 million. He did not release his tax returns, contrary to the practice of every major candidate since 1976 and to promises he made in 2014 and 2015 to release them if he ran for office. He said his tax returns were being audited, and that his lawyers had advised him against releasing them. After a lengthy court battle to block release of his tax returns and other records to the Manhattan district attorney for a criminal investigation, including two appeals by Trump to the U.S. Supreme Court, in February 2021 the high court allowed the records to be released to the prosecutor for review by a grand jury. In October 2016, portions of Trump's state filings for 1995 were leaked to a reporter from The New York Times. They show that he had declared a loss of $916 million that year, which could have let him avoid taxes for up to 18 years.
Trump won the election with 304 electoral votes versus 227 for Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton. The fifth person to be elected president despite losing the popular vote, he received about 2.87 million fewer votes than Clinton, 46.1% to her 48.2%. He was the only president who had neither served in the military nor held any government office prior to becoming president. His election marked the return of a Republican undivided government. Trump's victory sparked protests in major U.S. cities.
First presidency (2017–2021)
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.
Conflicts of interest
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", and 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.
Domestic policy
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. He weakened protections for animals and environmental standards for federal infrastructure projects, and expanded permitted areas for drilling and resource extraction, such as allowing drilling in the Arctic Refuge.
Trump dismantled federal regulations on health, labor, the environment, and other areas, including a bill that revoked the Obama-era regulation restricting the sale of firearms to severely mentally ill people. During his first six weeks in office, he delayed, suspended, or reversed ninety federal regulations, often "after requests by the regulated industries".
Trump vowed to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act. He scaled back the act's implementation through executive orders. He expressed a desire to "let Obamacare fail"; his administration halved the enrollment period and drastically reduced funding for enrollment promotion.
In response to the opioid epidemic, Trump signed legislation in 2018 to increase funding for drug treatments, but was widely criticized for failing to make a concrete strategy. He barred organizations that provide abortions or abortion referrals from receiving federal funds. His administration rolled back key components of the Obama administration's workplace protections against discrimination of LGBTQ people. His attempted rollback of anti-discrimination protections for transgender patients in August 2020 was halted by a federal judge after a Supreme Court ruling extended employees' civil rights protections to gender identity and sexual orientation. His administration took an anti-marijuana position, revoking Obama-era policies that provided protections for states that legalized marijuana. Trump is a long-time advocate of capital punishment, and his administration oversaw the federal government execute 13 prisoners, more than in the previous 56 years combined, ending a 17-year moratorium.