Donald Trump — 45th and 47th President of the United States

WASHINGTON — Few figures in modern American history have generated as much controversy, devotion, and global scrutiny as Donald John Trump. Businessman, entertainer, and twice-elected president of the United States, Trump occupies a singular position in the American imagination — a disruptor whose political project has redrawn the Republican Party, tested the limits of executive power, and sent shockwaves through the international order that continue to reverberate in 2026.

He is the only president in American history to be impeached twice, the first convicted felon elected to the office, and only the second person after Grover Cleveland to win two nonconsecutive terms. At 79, he is also the oldest sitting president the country has ever had. Each of those distinctions arrived not despite his political style but because of it.

Early Life and Education

Donald John Trump was born on June 14, 1946, in Jamaica, Queens, New York — the fourth of five children born to Frederick Christ Trump and Mary Anne MacLeod Trump. His father, known as Fred Trump, was one of New York City’s most prolific builders of middle-income housing in Brooklyn and Queens, constructing thousands of rental units through his company Elizabeth Trump & Son. His mother, Mary Anne, had emigrated from the Isle of Lewis in Scotland in 1930 at the age of 18.

Trump grew up in the Jamaica Estates neighborhood of Queens in a large colonial revival house his father had built. By his own account, he was energetic and combative from an early age. At 13, his parents enrolled him at the New York Military Academy in Cornwall-on-Hudson, where he spent five years and rose to captain of the cadets. He has credited the academy with instilling discipline, though the institution also suited his competitive temperament.

He attended Fordham University in the Bronx for two years before transferring to the Wharton School of Finance at the University of Pennsylvania, from which he graduated with a bachelor’s degree in economics in 1968. The Wharton credential became a fixture of his self-presentation for decades afterward — shorthand, in his telling, for intellectual legitimacy that his critics and the press were never quite willing to grant him.

Business Career: From Queens to Manhattan

Trump entered his father’s real estate business immediately after graduation, receiving his first significant financial boost through loans and an inheritance that would later be documented, in a 2018 New York Times investigation, as totaling more than $400 million in today’s terms. He moved quickly to distinguish himself from his father’s outer-borough focus, setting his sights on Manhattan.

His earliest major deal came in 1974, when he optioned the old Commodore Hotel adjacent to Grand Central Terminal and, in partnership with the Hyatt Corporation, converted it into the Grand Hyatt New York — completed in 1980. The project, financed partly through a 40-year tax abatement negotiated with a financially struggling New York City, established Trump’s template: find a distressed asset, leverage public subsidies, attach his name to the result, and market the outcome as proof of genius.

Trump Tower, completed in 1983 on Fifth Avenue at 56th Street, became the most visible embodiment of his brand. The 58-story mixed-use skyscraper, with its distinctive bronze glass facade and pink marble atrium, was designed to attract luxury retail and high-net-worth residents. It succeeded on both counts and anchored the Trump name in the Manhattan luxury market for the following four decades. It later served as his presidential campaign headquarters and, after his 2016 election, as the de facto transition office.

Through the 1980s, Trump expanded aggressively into Atlantic City casinos — the Trump Plaza, Trump Castle, and the Taj Mahal, which opened in 1990 as the largest casino in the world at the time. The casino empire was financed through junk bonds carrying interest rates that the properties could not sustain. Between 1991 and 2009, Trump’s casino companies filed for bankruptcy four times. Trump himself was never personally bankrupted — a distinction he has frequently made — but creditors absorbed enormous losses and thousands of contractors and workers were left unpaid.

The financial reversals of the early 1990s effectively ended Trump’s access to major bank lending. Deutsche Bank became one of his primary lenders through the 2000s, a relationship that survived multiple defaults and became the subject of congressional investigation after his 2016 election. His business focus shifted toward licensing his name to properties built and operated by others — a model that generated revenue without requiring capital and expanded the Trump brand globally to golf courses, hotels, and residential towers from Scotland to the Philippines to Indonesia.

Trump University, launched in 2005 as a for-profit real estate education program, became one of his most damaging ventures. It was shut down in 2010 following investigations by state attorneys general. In 2016, Trump agreed to pay $25 million to settle fraud lawsuits brought by former students — without admitting wrongdoing — in a settlement reached weeks after his election as president.

Media Career and the Making of a Brand

Before he was a politician, Trump was a media phenomenon. His 1987 book The Art of the Deal, co-written with journalist Tony Schwartz, spent 51 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and cemented his image as the archetype of the self-made dealmaker — an image that subsequent reporting has complicated considerably but that proved remarkably durable with large segments of the American public.

The NBC reality competition show The Apprentice, which premiered in January 2004, was the single most consequential element of his pre-political career. The show, produced by Mark Burnett, featured Trump presiding over a competition among aspiring executives, culminating each week in the phrase “You’re fired.” It ran for 14 seasons, drew tens of millions of viewers at its peak, and transformed Trump from a New York tabloid personality known largely for his divorces and bankruptcies into a nationally recognized figure of business authority. The show’s premise — Trump as the ultimate arbiter of competence — laid the psychological groundwork for his political appeal a decade later.

Entry Into Politics and the 2016 Election

Trump’s flirtation with presidential politics dated to 1987, when he took out full-page advertisements in major newspapers criticizing U.S. foreign policy. He explored runs in 2000 (briefly, on the Reform Party ticket) and 2012 before announcing his candidacy for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination on June 16, 2015, descending an escalator at Trump Tower before a crowd partly composed of paid actors, according to subsequent reporting.

His announcement speech, which included the claim that Mexico was sending rapists and criminals across the border, was dismissed by most political analysts as the opening of a publicity stunt. What followed was one of the most consequential miscalculations in the history of American political forecasting. Trump methodically dismantled a field of seventeen Republican candidates — including Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, and Ted Cruz — through a combination of relentless media coverage, an instinctive grasp of grievance politics, and a willingness to violate every norm of political decorum that his opponents felt bound by.

He secured the Republican nomination in July 2016 and faced Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton in the general election. Clinton led in virtually every major poll through election eve. On November 8, 2016, Trump won 306 Electoral College votes to Clinton’s 232, carrying the decisive Rust Belt states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin by combined margins of fewer than 80,000 votes. He lost the national popular vote by 2.87 million ballots. The outcome sent shockwaves through the American political establishment and international capitals that had assumed his candidacy was theater.

The First Term: 2017–2021

Trump was inaugurated on January 20, 2017, before a crowd whose size became the subject of his first public dispute with the press. His administration moved quickly on several fronts simultaneously — an executive order imposing a travel ban on citizens of several Muslim-majority countries, an attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act, and the nomination of Neil Gorsuch to fill the Supreme Court vacancy left by the death of Antonin Scalia.

The travel ban was challenged in courts and revised multiple times before a version was upheld by the Supreme Court in June 2018. The ACA repeal failed in the Senate in July 2017 when Republican Senator John McCain cast the decisive vote against it. Gorsuch was confirmed. Two further Supreme Court appointments followed: Brett Kavanaugh in 2018, confirmed after a bitter Senate battle over sexual assault allegations he denied, and Amy Coney Barrett in October 2020, confirmed eight days before the presidential election in a process Republicans rushed through after refusing to hold hearings on Barack Obama’s nominee Merrick Garland for nearly a year in 2016.

On trade, Trump imposed steep tariffs on steel and aluminum imports in 2018, triggering retaliatory measures from allies including the European Union, Canada, and Japan, alongside a broader trade confrontation with China that included tariffs on hundreds of billions of dollars of Chinese goods. He renegotiated NAFTA as the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, which took effect in July 2020 and retained most of NAFTA’s core framework while adding provisions on labor standards, dairy access, and automotive rules of origin.

His signature legislative achievement was the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of December 2017, which reduced the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent and provided temporary cuts to individual income tax rates. Supporters credited it with stimulating investment and employment. Critics noted that the bulk of the benefits accrued to corporations and high-income earners and that it added an estimated $1.9 trillion to the national debt over a decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

In foreign policy, Trump withdrew the United States from the Paris climate accord in June 2017 and from the Iran nuclear deal, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, in May 2018. He pursued direct diplomacy with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un through three summits between 2018 and 2019 — a departure from decades of U.S. policy — that produced no lasting denuclearization agreement but generated significant global attention. His relationship with NATO allies was persistently adversarial, characterized by demands that member states increase their defense spending and suggestions that the United States might not honor its Article 5 collective defense obligations. He brokered the Abraham Accords in 2020, normalizing relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco — widely regarded as his most consequential foreign policy achievement of the first term.

The COVID-19 pandemic, which reached the United States in early 2020, defined the final year of his first term. His administration launched Operation Warp Speed, which accelerated the development and distribution of vaccines with remarkable speed — the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines both received emergency use authorization in December 2020. His public handling of the pandemic, however, was widely criticized: he downplayed the severity of the virus in its early weeks, promoted unproven treatments including hydroxychloroquine, and repeatedly undermined public health guidance on masks and social distancing. More than 400,000 Americans died of COVID-19 before he left office.

Two Impeachments

Trump was impeached by the House of Representatives on December 18, 2019, on charges of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, arising from a July 25, 2019, phone call in which he pressured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to announce an investigation into Joe Biden and his son Hunter. The Senate acquitted him on February 5, 2020, on a near party-line vote, with Republican Senator Mitt Romney the sole crossover vote for conviction on the abuse of power charge.

The second impeachment came on January 13, 2021, one week after a mob of his supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to disrupt the congressional certification of his electoral loss to Joe Biden. The House charged him with incitement of insurrection, in the most bipartisan impeachment in American history — ten Republican members voted in favor. The Senate trial, held after Trump had already left office, ended in acquittal on February 13, 2021, with 57 senators voting to convict, short of the 67 required. Seven Republicans voted with all Democrats for conviction. Trump remains the only president in American history to have been impeached twice.

The 2020 Election, Its Aftermath, and Criminal Indictments

Trump lost the November 3, 2020, presidential election to Democrat Joe Biden by 306 to 232 Electoral College votes and by more than seven million in the national popular vote. He refused to concede, instead pursuing a campaign of legal challenges and pressure on state officials to overturn the results. His campaign and allies filed more than 60 lawsuits contesting the election results; virtually all were dismissed by courts, including by judges he had appointed. His attorney general, William Barr, publicly stated that the Justice Department had found no evidence of fraud sufficient to change the outcome.

On January 6, 2021, following a rally near the White House at which Trump and allies repeated claims of a stolen election, thousands of his supporters marched to the Capitol and breached its security perimeter. Lawmakers were evacuated or sheltered in place as rioters occupied the Senate chamber and ransacked offices. The certification of Biden’s victory was delayed for hours. More than 1,200 people were subsequently charged with crimes related to the assault.

Out of office, Trump became the first former president in American history to face criminal indictment. Four separate cases were filed between 2023 and 2024. In New York, the Manhattan District Attorney charged him with 34 counts of falsifying business records related to hush-money payments made to adult film actress Stormy Daniels before the 2016 election. A jury found him guilty on all 34 counts in May 2024 — making him the first former U.S. president convicted of felony crimes.

Federal prosecutors charged him with 40 counts related to his retention of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida and his alleged obstruction of government efforts to retrieve them. A separate federal indictment in Washington covered four counts related to his efforts to overturn the 2020 election. In Georgia, a Fulton County grand jury indicted him and 18 co-defendants on 13 counts under the state’s RICO statute for alleged efforts to reverse Biden’s victory in that state. All four cases cast a long shadow over his 2024 campaign and were watched closely by courts and constitutional scholars for their implications about the prosecution of a former and potentially future president.

The 2024 Campaign and Return to the White House

Trump announced his 2024 candidacy on November 15, 2022, earlier than any previous major-party candidate in modern history, partly as a legal strategy — his advisers believed candidate status would complicate prosecution efforts — and partly to freeze the Republican field. He secured the nomination with remarkable ease, his only significant challenger being former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, who withdrew in March 2024.

On July 13, 2024, at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, a 20-year-old gunman opened fire from a rooftop approximately 130 meters from the stage. A bullet grazed Trump’s right ear. He rose almost immediately, fist raised, blood streaking his face and neck, before Secret Service agents surrounded him. The image became one of the defining photographs of the 2024 campaign. Questions about Secret Service failures in allowing the gunman to position himself on the rooftop persisted for months afterward.

He chose Ohio Senator J.D. Vance as his running mate at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee in July 2024. Vance, a former Marine and the author of Hillbilly Elegy, had been a vocal Trump critic before becoming one of his most ardent supporters — a conversion that illustrated the thoroughness of Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party.

His opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, had replaced Biden as the Democratic nominee in July 2024 after Biden withdrew from the race under pressure from party leaders and donors following a debate performance that raised acute concerns about his cognitive fitness. Harris ran a energetic campaign but struggled to distance herself from the Biden administration’s record on inflation and immigration. On November 5, 2024, Trump defeated her decisively — 312 Electoral College votes to 226, carrying all seven major swing states. He also won the national popular vote, the first Republican presidential candidate to do so since George W. Bush in 2004. He became only the second person in American history, after Grover Cleveland, to win two nonconsecutive presidential terms.

The Second Term: 2025–Present

Trump was inaugurated on January 20, 2025, at the age of 78 — the oldest person ever to take the presidential oath. The ceremony took place inside the Capitol Rotunda, moved indoors from the traditional outdoor setting on the West Front owing to extreme cold. In his inaugural address, he declared that America’s “decline is over” and that a “golden age” had begun.

The pace of executive action in the first days and weeks of the second term was without modern precedent. Trump signed more than 100 executive orders in his first month, rescinding Biden-era policies on climate, diversity and inclusion programs across the federal government, student loan forgiveness, and the approach to immigration enforcement. He declared a national emergency at the southern border and directed military resources to support deportation operations.

The Department of Government Efficiency, an advisory body led by Elon Musk and operating outside standard federal structures, moved through executive agencies with a speed that drew both enthusiasm from fiscal conservatives and legal challenge from federal employee unions, Democratic state attorneys general, and civil liberties organizations. Musk’s team gained access to sensitive federal payment systems and personnel databases, triggering court injunctions that slowed but did not stop their work. The relationship between Trump and Musk subsequently frayed publicly over disagreements related to the administration’s major tax and spending legislation — known internally as the “big beautiful bill” — before a reported reconciliation in mid-2025. The episode exposed tensions between Trump’s political coalition and the Silicon Valley wing of his movement.

On immigration, the second term delivered on the most aggressive enforcement posture in modern American history. Mass deportation operations, carried out by ICE with military logistical support, targeted undocumented immigrants across the country. The administration invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 — a statute last used during World War II — to expedite removal of Venezuelan nationals it designated as affiliated with the Tren de Aragua gang, bypassing standard immigration court proceedings. The legal battles over that invocation reached the Supreme Court multiple times through 2025 and into 2026, including a separate challenge to Trump’s executive order ending birthright citizenship for children of undocumented immigrants — a provision legal scholars across the spectrum viewed as constitutionally dubious.

The trade agenda of the second term was broader and more confrontational than the first. In April 2025, Trump imposed sweeping tariffs across virtually every major trading partner — the most expansive use of tariff authority since the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930. The European Union, China, Canada, Mexico, and Japan all announced retaliatory measures. The administration framed the tariffs as a tool to reshore manufacturing and reduce chronic trade deficits. Critics, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and a broad coalition of economists, pointed to the resulting surge in consumer prices and a wave of more than 700 corporate bankruptcy filings by year’s end. The Supreme Court, in the landmark 2026 ruling Learning Resources v. Trump, found that Trump lacked statutory authority under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to impose tariffs unilaterally. The administration was contesting the ruling through alternative legal theories as of June 2026.

The four criminal cases that had defined his 2024 campaign were substantially resolved within months of his return to office. The two federal cases were dismissed on the grounds that a sitting president cannot be prosecuted. The Georgia RICO case stalled amid protracted proceedings over alleged prosecutorial misconduct by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis. The New York sentencing, deferred repeatedly through the election period, concluded with a conditional discharge and no jail time — a result the judge described as appropriate given the unprecedented circumstance of sentencing a sitting president.

Foreign Policy in the Second Term

Trump’s second-term foreign policy has been defined by three major arcs: the end of American support for Ukraine, a military confrontation with Iran, and a sustained effort to leverage the Abraham Accords framework into a broader regional realignment in the Middle East.

On Ukraine, Trump moved quickly to reduce and ultimately suspend U.S. military assistance, fulfilling a campaign pledge to end the war rapidly. His administration engaged in direct diplomacy with Moscow. A self-imposed June 2026 deadline for a peace agreement arrived without a deal, as Russia’s territorial demands and Ukraine’s refusal to cede sovereignty over occupied regions remained incompatible. The episode illustrated the limits of Trump’s transactional approach to a conflict with deep structural drivers.

The confrontation with Iran escalated through the first half of 2026 to military strikes, the most significant direct U.S.-Iran military exchange since the killing of General Qasem Soleimani in January 2020. Trump framed the action as necessary to prevent Iranian nuclear weapons development and conditioned any ceasefire on additional Arab states joining the Abraham Accords. That linkage drew skepticism from regional analysts who questioned whether Gulf states would normalize with Israel during an active military conflict.

Relations with NATO allies remained strained. Trump continued to publicly question the alliance’s value and demand higher defense spending from member states, while the administration’s posture toward Russia created anxiety in Eastern European capitals that U.S. security guarantees were conditional rather than categorical.

Health, Age, and the Question of Fitness

Trump turned 79 on June 14, 2026. He underwent his annual physical examination at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in May 2026 — his third such examination since becoming the oldest president ever inaugurated — and declared on his return to the White House that everything had checked out “PERFECTLY.” The White House physician’s report described him as in good health for his age.

Visible signs of aging — including hand bruising and leg swelling observed by press photographers — prompted the White House to disclose new details about his health that it might otherwise have withheld. Questions about his cognitive fitness have become a persistent element of news coverage, though Trump and his allies note the irony: concerns about presidential age dominated the 2024 campaign against Biden, and Trump has maintained a schedule of public appearances and policy activity that his critics have been unable to characterize as diminished.

Personal Life

Trump has been married three times. His first marriage, to Ivana Marie Zelníčková — a Czech model and athlete who had emigrated to Canada — lasted from 1977 to 1991 and produced three children: Donald John Trump Jr. (born 1977), Ivanka Marie Trump (born 1981), and Eric Frederick Trump (born 1984). The divorce was acrimonious and heavily covered by the New York tabloids, which detailed an affair Trump had conducted with actress and model Marla Maples. Ivana Trump died on July 14, 2022, from blunt impact injuries sustained in a fall at her Manhattan home. She was 73.

Trump married Maples in December 1993. Their daughter, Tiffany Ariana Trump, was born in October 1993. The marriage ended in divorce in 1999.

He met Melania Knauss, a Slovenian model, in New York in 1998. They married on January 22, 2005, at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida. Their son, Barron William Trump, was born in March 2006. Melania Trump is the only foreign-born First Lady since Louisa Adams, wife of John Quincy Adams, in the 1820s. Her role in the second administration has been more publicly visible than in the first, though she has continued to maintain a degree of distance from Washington political life.

Mar-a-Lago, the 126-room Palm Beach estate Trump purchased from the Post family’s cereal heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post in 1985, has functioned as a de facto second White House through both terms of his presidency. He has spent more weekends there than at Camp David and has hosted foreign leaders and conducted diplomatic business at the property — an arrangement that has generated persistent legal questions about the emoluments clause of the Constitution, which prohibits presidents from receiving financial benefits from foreign governments.

Political Legacy and Standing

Trump’s approval ratings as of May 2026 hovered in the high thirties to mid-forties depending on the poll — consistent with deep divisions in American public opinion that have barely moved across eight years of his political dominance. His floor is remarkably firm; so is his ceiling.

His electoral coalition — built on working-class voters without college degrees, evangelical Christians, rural communities, and a growing share of Hispanic men — reshaped the American electoral map in ways that political scientists are still analyzing. The 2024 election confirmed that the 2016 result was not an anomaly. Trump had built a durable majority coalition, even if a narrow one, that the Democratic Party had not yet found an answer to.

The Republican Party he leaves behind bears little resemblance to the institution he inherited in 2015. Its foreign policy orthodoxies, its free-trade commitments, its deference to institutional norms of executive conduct — all have been either abandoned or subordinated to his preferences. The party’s elected officials, with few exceptions, have competed to demonstrate loyalty rather than independence. Whether that transformation is permanent or contingent on his continued presence is a question American conservatism has not yet been forced to answer.

Whether the Trump era represents a durable political realignment or a prolonged stress test of democratic institutions is the central argument of American political life in 2026. What is beyond dispute is that Donald Trump, from a Queens real estate office to the Oval Office and back again, has altered the terms of that argument more than any other political figure of his generation.