Donald Trump Biography: Early Life, Career, Wife, Children, Net Worth
Donald Trump is the 45th and 47th president of the United States, and his second term begins in January 2025. Before his political career, the real estate developer took over his father’s middle-income housing company and turned it into a global luxury brand with hotels, golf courses, and commercial assets. Trump became a best-selling author in 1987 with his book The Art of the Deal and a reality TV celebrity in the 2000s with The Apprentice. Despite his underdog position, Trump was elected President in November 2016, served one term from 2017 to 2021, and failed his reelection campaign in 2020. Four years later, he was reelected to his current presidential term.
Donald Trump Biography
Photo Credit: SeongJoon Cho/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Donald John Trump was born on June 14, 1946, in Jamaica Hospital in Queens, New York, as the fourth child of Fred Trump and Mary Anne MacLeod Trump. He is of German and Scottish heritage. He grew up in a 23-room mansion in Queens’ Jamaica Estates neighbourhood with his older siblings Maryanne, Fred Jr., and Elizabeth, as well as his younger brother Robert.
Fred Trump paid his children roughly $20,000 per year, which is equivalent to $265,000 in 2024. By the age of eight, Trump had amassed a million in inflation-adjusted dollars. Trump attended the elite Kew-Forest School till seventh grade. He was a challenging boy who had an early interest in his father’s business. His father enrolled him in New York Military Academy, a private boarding institution, to complete his secondary education.
The institution pushed kids into sports and taught them the value of winning. He graduated from high school with a B average. Trump pondered a career in the show industry, but ultimately chose to attend Fordham University in 1964 to be closer to his family.
He took part in the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps program during his first year, attending classes in a military uniform every Wednesday, but dropped out in his second year. He quit football after three or four weeks and became a mediocre squash and tennis player. His Fordham pals introduced him to golf. During his junior year, he transferred to the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, commuting to his father’s workplace on weekends and graduating in May 1968 with a Bachelor of Science in Economics.
He was not the top student in college, despite his claims. By the time he arrived at Wharton—where he did not appear on the list of those receiving honors—he was considering a career in real estate. He was excused from the draft during the Vietnam War because he claimed to have bone spurs in his heels. Despite five years of military education, he had no desire to go to war.
Career
After college, Trump pursued his father’s career in real estate development and brought his own goals to the family firm. He took over the company in 1971, rebranded it The Trump Organisation two years later, and broadened its geographic reach and overall scope to include hotels, golf courses, commercial properties, and other assets.
By the 1980s, Trump had established himself as one of America’s most well-known businessmen, and he used that notoriety to become a best-selling author and reality TV star on The Apprentice and its offshoot, Celebrity Apprentice.
From 1996 to 2015, he was a part-owner of the Miss USA, Miss Teen USA, and Miss Universe beauty pageants. When Donald Trump became President of the United States in January 2017, he delegated the operation of The Trump Organisation to his sons, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump.
In the early 1970s, Donald led the Trump Organization’s expansion into Manhattan real estate. His first significant commercial job was transforming the historic Commodore Hotel into the Grand Hyatt Hotel and repairing the facade of the nearby Grand Central Station. To complete the building, Trump obtained a 40-year property tax abatement agreement, the first of its kind in New York City for commercial property.
Trump’s other business ventures over the years have included golf courses in ten American cities and five foreign countries, such as Trump International Golf Club; The Mar-a-Lago Club, his personal estate turned private club in Palm Beach, Florida; Trump University, a for-profit real estate seminar series; an air-shuttle service; the New Jersey Generals, a team in the United States Football League; and numerous Trump-related licensing deals.
Books
Trump has co-written more than 15 books,
The Art of the Deal
Surviving at the Top (1990)
The Art of the Comeback (1997)
The Way to Success (2007)Crippled America: How to Make America Great Again (2015)
Letters to Trump (2023)
Photo Credit: SeongJoon Cho/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Trump, a registered Republican, has done more to change his political party than anyone else during the last decade. He has not always been a member of the GOP, however. Trump enrolled as a Republican in 1987 before changing his party affiliation two years later to Independent.
By 2000, the businessman was a member of the Reform Party, which famously supported fellow entrepreneur Ross Perot’s presidential runs in the 1990s. In 2001, Trump enrolled as a Democrat. By 2009, Trump had returned to the Republican Party; however, he registered as an Independent in 2011 in preparation for a possible run in the following year’s presidential election.
He returned to the Republican Party to support Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign and has remained a Republican since. Since his first election to the presidency in 2017, Trump has brought in a more populist and conservative character for the Republican Party. His hardline stance on immigration and “America first” mindset have been especially well embraced by voters.
Many moderate Republicans in Congress and other elected posts have lost primary races because they do not support Trumpism, even after the former president’s term ends in early 2021. Hillary Clinton talks while Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump listens during the Presidential Debate at Hofstra University on September 26, 2016, in Hempstead, New York.
In mid-June 2015, Trump announced that he would run for president of the United States as a Republican in the 2016 election. His platform included promises to renegotiate trade deals with American interests in mind, reduce taxes and government regulations, repeal the Affordable Care Act enacted by outgoing President Barack Obama, defend Second Amendment gun rights, “rebuild our depleted military,” and combat illegal immigration, which he blamed for a variety of crimes.
Following one of the most heated presidential campaigns in American history, blue-collar and working-class Americans saw Trump’s election as a resounding rejection of establishment politics. Trump, who had never held public office before, quickly rose to the position of president of the United States. Only prior Presidents Zachary Taylor, Ulysses S. Grant, and Dwight D. Eisenhower were similarly inexperienced at the time of their elections, despite having substantial combat experience.
On January 20, 2017, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts swore Trump in as the 45th president of the United States. Throughout his presidency, Trump issued executive orders to fulfill several of his campaign promises, as well as other directives aimed at deregulation.
His administration saw the implementation of a number of controversial immigration policies, including a travel ban for several predominantly Muslim countries; the United States’ withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement and the Trans-Pacific Partnership; a reduction in financial regulations and environmental protections; and Trump’s appointment of three Supreme Court justices.
The president presented a budget that increased expenditure on the military, veterans affairs, and national security, including the construction of a wall along the Mexican border, as well as significant cuts to federal agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Endowment for the Arts. One of his most notable financial achievements was passing a 2017 tax package into law, which reduced taxes for people and corporations.
Throughout the Trump administration, the president and several members of his staff have been mired in controversy or are the subject of federal investigations. The Mueller investigation looked into Russian influence in the 2016 election and the foreign country’s potential, but ultimately baseless, ties to the Trump campaign.
Trump was impeached twice: once in 2019 for abuse of authority and obstructing Congress in connection with a campaign scandal involving Ukraine, and again in 2021 for inciting insurrection in connection with the January 6 attack on the Capitol. In both cases, the Senate opposed the president’s removal from office.
Citizens criticised Trump’s policies and positions on critical topics such as immigration, climate change, and women’s rights. The Women’s March, conducted the day following the president’s inauguration, became the greatest single-day demonstration in American history, with over half a million people marching in Washington, D.C., and hundreds of thousands more rallying nationwide.
Trump’s second term began on January 20, 2025, with his inauguration. He became the oldest president in history, the first with a felony conviction, and just the second to serve two nonconsecutive terms. His efforts to enhance presidential power and clashes with the courts have been cited as distinguishing features of his second administration.
On September 6, 2025, U.S. President Donald Trump has signed an executive order renaming the Department of Defence the “Department of War,” reinstating its historic moniker that was lost in 1949. The declaration was made Friday during a ceremony in the Oval Office, when Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth was introduced as ‘Secretary of War’, along with Deputy Secretary Steve Feinberg, who was redesignated ‘Deputy Secretary of War’.
Donald Trump Wife
In 1977, Donald Trump married Ivana Zelníčková. They have three children: Donald Jr. (born 1977), Ivanka (born 1981), and Eric (born 1984). The couple split in 1990, after he had an affair with model and actress Marla Maple. He married Maples in 1993, and they divorced in 1999. Maples raised their daughter, Tiffany (born 1993,) in California. In 2005, he married Melania Knauss, a Slovenian model. They have one son, Barron (born in 2006).
Trump has a 15-year connection with Jeffrey Epstein. People who knew them at the time stated they were always hitting on and competing for women. Media interest and public pressure increased in 2025, as his administration failed to release Epstein-related information, despite Trump’s vow to do so during the 2024 campaign.
Donald Trump Net Worth
Trump’s net worth has been a topic of public debate over the years. Because Trump has not publicly released his tax returns, it is impossible to definitively determine his wealth in the past or today. However, Trump valued his businesses at least $1.37 billion on his 2017 federal financial disclosure form, which was published by the Office of Government Ethics. Trump’s 2018 disclosure form put his revenue for the year at a minimum of $434 million from all sources.
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