Donald Trump: Life Story | Biography | Business Career

Donald John Trump was born on June 14, 1946, the fourth child of five children to Mary Anne MacLeod Trump and her husband, Frederick Christ Trump, Sr. Trump's mother was born in Scotland and immigrated to the United States in 1930. His father was born in New York City, a son of German-born parents. The family grew up in an affluent community of the Queens Borough of New York City called Jamaica Estates.

Fred Trump ran and owned a prosperous real estate firm known as Elizabeth Trump & Son, named after Fred Trump's mother and himself, which built housing for white middle-class families in Queens, Brooklyn, and Staten Island. When Donald was old enough, the three Trump sons—Fred, Jr., Donald, and Robert—labored for the company at construction sites and offices. The Trumps' daughters, Elizabeth and Maryanne, did not labor for the family business. Donald and Robert Trump later got involved in their father's business as adults. Their brother Fred became a pilot for airlines and died of alcoholism in 1981. Donald Trump attributes his brother's ultimately lethal struggle with addiction to why he is abstinent. Robert passed away in 2020 and Maryanne passed away in 2023.

Trump exhibited behavioral problems as a child. "He was a rather tough kid when he was little," his father recalled later. His parents sent him at age 13 to the New York Military Academy, upstate from New York City. Trump said he liked the discipline and way of life but that the academy was as far as he went with the military. He attended Fordham University in New York City and then transferred to the University of Pennsylvania, where he graduated with a degree in economics through Penn's Wharton School of Finance and Commerce in 1968.

In the Vietnam War of the late 1960s, when Trump was around his early 20s, he employed college and medical deferments (on the basis of a physician's diagnosis of bone spurs) to evade being drafted into the military. When the United States implemented a draft lottery system in 1969, an attempt to randomize conscription and reduce the reliance on exemptions, Trump's birthday was the 356th out of 366 in the lottery. He was not drafted.

Trump started his business career while still in college, buying Philadelphia real estate. After finishing his undergraduate degree in 1968, he went back to New York and worked in his father's business on a full-time basis. Public scandal and criticism befell Trump early in his career. In 1973, the US Justice Department charged that the Trump firm was discriminating against would-be African American renters. The company did not confess, but it resolved the issue by agreeing to lease more apartments to Black tenants.

During the 1970s, Trump assisted in the expansion of the business, acquiring properties beyond New York City in states like Virginia, Ohio, Nevada, and California. He also indicated a desire to expand the company's real estate activities nearer to home, transitioning beyond New York's outer boroughs and into Manhattan, historically a more upscale and "high society" region. By the mid-1970s, the newly rechristened Trump Organization had diversified into Manhattan skyscrapers.

Trump's first major move, in 1976, was to build the Grand Hyatt Hotel on the site of the then-bankrupt Penn Central Railroad's Commodore Hotel. Even though the Trump Organization lacked the funds to buy the hotel, Trump employed his personal connection with the Hyatt hotel chain and his father's political influence (Fred Trump was an influential member of Brooklyn's Democratic Party) to arrange an atypical agreement with the government of New York City. Trump was given a 40-year tax abatement, or exemption from paying property taxes on the hotel. Initially valued at $4 million annually, the abatement amounted to about $400 million over 40 years as a result of the inflation in the worth of the property and tax code revisions. He went on to employ the promise of that saving to convince Commodore to sell to him and Hyatt to invest with him. Whatever my friends Fred and Donald want in this town, they get," New York Mayor Abraham Beame was quoted as saying of the deal.

During the 1980s, Donald Trump became known as a leading real estate developer. He constructed the 36-story cooperative apartment building known as Trump Plaza and Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue, featuring high-end stores and Trump's own multi-story residence and business headquarters. He also ventured into casino operations in Atlantic City, New Jersey, constructing Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino (initially named Harrah's at Trump Plaza) and Trump Castle. In 1990, he constructed the Trump Taj Mahal at a cost of almost $1 billion—namely, he referred to it as the "eighth wonder of the world."

Although these massive business ventures were undertaken by the Trump Organization, it was confronted by extreme financial difficulties. Trump took out large sums of money to finance the casinos and hotels. The problem became so bad in 1990 that Fred Trump, then in his 80s, bought over $3 million worth of chips from Trump Castle so that the casino could pay an interest payment. That transaction was subsequently ruled to be an illegal loan, and New Jersey imposed a $65,000 fine. Two of Trump's companies went bankrupt between then and now: the Trump Taj Mahal in 1991 and the Trump Plaza Hotel in 1992. A discreditable biography of Donald Trump, released in 1993, was named Lost Tycoon and stated that he has become a "public laughingstock" since his business failures.

In the years that followed, Trump used bankruptcy protection to reconfigure the debts of the many companies that comprised the Trump Organization, successfully making debt payments even as he accumulated more total debt at higher interest rates. As he explained, looking back in 2011: “I’ve used the laws of this country to pare debt.”

He also established a publicly traded corporation, Trump Hotels and Casino Resorts, both insulating himself from financial responsibility and enabling him to distribute shares to the general public. He initially held 56 percent of the company, which meant he had majority and therefore complete control of the business, which purchased numerous of the Trump Organization's properties and businesses. In 2004, the company couldn't service its loans and hadn't made a profit. It went into bankruptcy protection, and Trump scaled back his shareholdings to 27 percent, relinquishing an active role in the business.

Trump himself attributed the overall decline of Atlantic City to the failure of his company, though critics noted that his casinos had never prospered even when Atlantic City's economy of gambling was robust. Attempts at reviving the company fell through, and it went into bankruptcy in 2009 and 2014. Trump's gambling enterprises had all ceased operations by the time Trump declared his candidacy for president in 2015. The shareholders of the company lost their investments, and a good number of vendors and creditors incurred losses, but the personal financial losses of Trump were alleviated by his legal and financial measures.

Throughout his stormy career in business, Donald Trump managed to maintain the public aura of soaring success. As his real estate and casino ventures went bust, he managed to uphold his brand and transition to licensing businesses in the US and worldwide. In 2004, the New York Times wrote: "His name has become such a byword for success that even the most humiliating reverses barely dent his reputation….The rules that govern others just don't apply to Trump."

Collaborating with experts who wrote under pseudonyms, or ghostwriters, Trump authored a series of how-to and business strategy books, most notably widely read Trump: The Art of the Deal, which first appeared in 1987. He sold the "Trump" name to golf courses, hotel resorts, and branded goods ranging from steaks to vodka to bottled water. From 1996 until 2015, he owned the Miss USA, Miss Teen USA, and Miss Universe beauty contests. In 2015, television broadcasters Univision and NBC declined to broadcast the pageants in response to Trump’s racist attacks on Latin American immigrants during his presidential campaign. The next year, Trump announced that he had settled lawsuits with them and sold his stake in the pageants.

Trump's foray into entertainment hit its peak with his appearance on the popular reality TV series The Apprentice, which aired on NBC from 2004-2015. Trump appeared as himself on the show, which had contestants aspiring to become business leaders compete against one another in a variety of challenges. Trump judged their efforts and whittled down the contestant pool, each week telling one losing contender “You’re fired.” The show and its companion program, Celebrity Apprentice, were widely watched. They helped Trump reach national audiences and confirmed, to many viewers, Trump’s image as a successful and charismatic businessperson who was a straight talker, telling people the hard-to-hear truths. Only after Trump publicly declared his campaign for president with anti-immigrant and racist rhetoric did NBCUniversal officially terminate his affiliation with the show.

Trump's commercial ambitions are packaged into an organization known as the Trump Organization, the heir to the firm founded by his grandmother and father. Trump acquired the company in 1971, rechristened it in 1973, and formally appointed his sons Donald, Jr. and Eric as leaders of it in 2017. As opposed to a standard business corporation with officially owned subsidiary components, the Trump Organization is an aggregation of about 500 discrete business entities with all of them being owned primarily or entirely by Donald Trump himself. None of those constituent elements are publicly traded corporations, and thus are not obligated to publicly reveal their financial standing or worth (as are public corporations). As Donald Trump, breaking with recent custom going back to President Richard Nixon, never made his individual income tax returns public, a full review of the finances of the Trump Organization has been impossible.

By the time of Donald Trump's initial election to the presidency in November 2016, the Trump Organization controlled a tremendous amount of companies, products, and licensing deals. These include at least a dozen United States golf resorts and five others internationally; eight United States hotel properties and six internationally; and dozens of other real estate investments globally. In August 2016, the New York Times had reported his real estate holdings accumulated at least $650 million of debt. As a candidate, Trump was proud of his high debt levels and his skill at writing off or minimizing his income tax bill, even though he had very high personal wealth. (Accurate details of his fortune have been and remain controversial.) Dodging taxes, he remarked in a debate against Hillary Clinton in the autumn of 2016, "makes me smart."

Trump's companies were also party to a great many lawsuits, both plaintiff and defendant. According to the newspaper USA Today, as of 2016, Trump or one of his businesses was a party to, in 3,500 federal and state court cases. Trump sued someone else in 1,900, the plaintiff; in 1,450, he was the defendant. The rest were other kinds of cases, such as bankruptcies.

Since his 2016 election, the Trump Organization resolved a number of high-profile lawsuits. Three were for consumer-fraud allegations by then-defunct Trump University, a for-profit business he started in 2005 that sold courses in real estate and guaranteed to impart the secrets of Trump's own success. Trump settled those lawsuits for $25 million without admitting any wrongdoing. He also shut down the philanthropic non-profit Trump Foundation amid allegations that he had not donated his own money to the foundation since 2008 but instead used it to make payouts of money he requested from others and may have conducted illegal self-dealing.

Trump's corporate career, the Trump Organization's idiosyncratic style, and the unquantified but enormous amounts of personal debt tied to his worldwide scope of holdings created a new set of circumstances when he became president. Political analysts were concerned there could be conflicts of interest between his business interests and his presidential actions.

Opponents feared that he would inevitably offend the US Constitution's emoluments clause, which forbids federal officials to receive gifts or payments (or anything of value) from a foreign leader. Any company or foreign leader conducting business with a Trump-owned facility, those opponents claimed, would be putting money in Donald Trump's pocket. Trump himself rejected calls to completely disentangle himself from his businesses, stating that he would instead transfer day-to-day management of the Trump Organization to his elder sons. They vowed in turn not to make fresh deals with foreign nations. Those actions did little to stem critics' worries about the possibility of conflicts of interest.