SPONSORED 
FEATURED 
Donald John Trump is the 45th and current President of the United States; he took office on January 20, 2017. Previously, he was a real estate mogul and a former reality TV star.
Born in Queens, New York, in 1946, Trump became involved in large, profitable building projects in Manhattan. In 1980, he opened the Grand Hyatt New York, which made him the city's best-known developer.
In 2004, Trump began starring in the hit NBC reality series The Apprentice. Trump turned his attention to politics, and in 2015 he announced his candidacy for president of the United States on the Republican ticket.
After winning a majority of the primaries and caucuses, Trump became the official Republican candidate for president on July 19, 2016. That November, Trump was elected the 45th President of the United States, after defeating Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton.
Trump’s father, Frederick Trump, was a builder and real estate developer who specialized in constructing and operating middle-income apartments in Queens, Staten Island and Brooklyn.
Trump’s mother, Mary MacLeod, immigrated from Tong, Scotland, in 1929 at the age of 17. She and Fred Trump married in 1936. The couple settled in Jamaica, Queens, a neighborhood that was, at the time, filled with Western European immigrants. As the family’s wealth increased, Mary became a New York socialite and philanthropist.
Fred died in 1999, and Mary passed away the following year.
Donald was the fourth of five children.
Trump is currently married to former Slovenian model Melania Trump (née Knauss), who is more than 23 years his junior. In January 2005, the couple married in a highly-publicized and lavish wedding. Among the many celebrity guests at the wedding were Hillary Clinton and former President Bill Clinton.
In 1977, Trump married his first wife Ivana Trump, (née Zelnickova Winklmayr), a New York fashion model who had been an alternate on the 1972 Czech Olympic Ski Team. She was named vice president in charge of design in the Trump Organization and played a major role in supervising the renovation of the Commodore and the Plaza Hotel.
The couple had three children together: Donald Trump Jr., Ivanka and Eric. They went through a highly publicized divorce that was finalized in 1992.
In 1993 Trump married his second wife, Marla Maples, an actress with whom he had been involved for some time and already had a daughter, Tiffany.
Trump would ultimately file for a highly publicized divorce from Maples in 1997, which became final in June 1999. A prenuptial agreement allotted $2 million to Maples.
Trump has five children. He and his first wife, Ivana Trump, had three children together: Donald Trump Jr., born in 1977; Ivanka Trump, born in 1981, and Eric Trump, born in 1984. Trump and his second wife, Marla Maples, had daughter Tiffany Trump in 1993. And current wife Melania Trump gave birth to Trump’s youngest child, Barron William Trump, in March 2006.
Trump's sons — Donald Jr. and Eric— work as executive vice presidents for The Trump Organization. They took over the family business while their father serves as president.
Trump's daughter Ivanka was also an executive vice president of The Trump Organization. She left the business and her own fashion label to join her father's administration and become an unpaid assistant to the president. Her husband, Jared Kushner, is also a senior adviser to President Trump.
Trump was born on June 14, 1946, in Queens, New York. He was an energetic, assertive child. In the 1950s, the Trumps’ wealth increased with the postwar real estate boom.
At age 13, Trump’s parents sent him to the New York Military Academy, hoping the discipline of the school would channel his energy in a positive manner. He did well at the academy, both socially and academically, rising to become a star athlete and student leader by the time he graduated in 1964.
Trump entered Fordham University in 1964. He transferred to the Wharton School of Finance at the University of Pennsylvania two years later and graduated in 1968 with a degree in economics.
During his years at college, Trump worked at his father’s real estate business during the summer. He also secured education deferments for the draft for the Vietnam War and ultimately a 1-Y medical deferment after he graduated.
Trump was raised Presbyterian by his mother, and he identifies as a mainline Protestant.
Trump followed his father into a career in real estate development, bringing his grander ambitions to the family business. Trump’s business ventures include The Trump Organization, Trump Tower, casinos in Atlantic City and television franchises like The Apprentice and Miss Universe. Trump has business deals with the Javits Center and the Grand Hyatt New York, as well as other real estate ventures in New York City, Florida and Los Angeles.
Federal income disclosure forms Trump filed in 2017 list Trump's golf courses, including Trump National Doral and Mar-a-Lago in Florida, as earning about half of his income. Other financial ventures include aircraft, merchandise and royalties from his two books, The Art of the Deal and Crippled America: How to Make America Great Again.
In 1987, Trump published the book The Art of the Deal, co-authored with Tony Schwartz. In the book, Trump describes how he successfully makes business deals.
“I DON’T do it for the money. I’ve got enough, much more than I’ll ever need. I do it to do it. Deals are my art form,” Trump wrote.
The book made the New York Times best-seller list, although the number of copies sold has been debated; sales have been estimated at between 1 to 4 million copies to-date. Schwartz later became an outspoken critic of the book and of Trump, saying he felt remorseful for helping make the president “more appealing than he is.”
Over the years, Trump’s net worth have been a subject of public debate. Because Trump has not publicly released his tax returns, it’s not possible to definitively determine his wealth in the past or today. However Trump valued his businesses at at least $1.37 billion on his 2017 federal financial disclosure form, 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.
In 1990, Trump asserted his own net worth in the neighborhood of $1.5 billion. At the time, the real estate market was in decline, reducing the value of and income from Trump's empire. The Trump Organization required a massive infusion of loans to keep it from collapsing, a situation which raised questions as to whether the corporation could survive bankruptcy. Some observers saw Trump's decline as symbolic of many of the business, economic and social excesses that had arisen in the 1980s.
A May 2019 investigation by The New York Times of 10 years of Trump’s tax information found that between 1985 and 1994, his businesses lost money every year. The newspaper calculated that Trump’s businesses suffered $1.17 billion in losses over the decade.
Trump later defended himself on Twitter, calling the Times’s report “a highly inaccurate Fake News hit job!” He tweeted that he reported “losses for tax purposes,” and that doing so was a “sport” among real estate developers.
Trump’s net worth was questioned over the course of his 2016 presidential run, and he courted controversy after repeatedly refusing to release his tax returns while they were being audited by the Internal Revenue Service. He did not release his tax returns during the election, and he has not to date. It was the first time a major party candidate had not released such information to the public before a presidential election since Richard Nixon in 1972.
After Democrats regained control of the House with the 2018 elections, Trump again faced calls to release his tax returns. In April 2019, Congressman Richard Neal, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, requested six years' worth of the president's personal and business tax returns from the IRS. Treasury secretary Steve Mnuchin rejected the request, as well as Neal's follow-up subpoena for the documents.
In May the New York State Assembly passed legislation that authorized tax officials to release the president's state returns to the chairmen of the House Ways and Means Committee, the Senate Finance Committee and the Joint Committee on Taxation for any "specified and legitimate legislative purpose." With New York City serving as the home base for the Trump Organization, it was believed that the state returns would contain much of the same information as the president's federal returns.
In September 2019, Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. subpoenaed the accounting firm Mazars USA for Trump's personal and corporate tax returns dating back to 2011, prompting a challenge from the president's lawyers. A Manhattan federal district judge dismissed Trump's lawsuit in October, though the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit agreed to temporarily delay enforcement of the subpoena while considering arguments in the case. A few days later, that same appeals court rejected Trump's bid to block another subpoena issued to Mazars USA, this one from the House Committee on Oversight and Reform.
In December 2019, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear arguments over whether the president could block the disclosure of his financial information to congressional committees and the Manhattan district attorney.
In 1973, the federal government filed a complaint against Trump, his father and their company alleging that they had discriminated against tenants and potential tenants based on their race, a violation of the Fair Housing Act, which is part of the Civil Rights Act of 1968.
After a lengthy legal battle, the case was settled in 1975. As part of the agreement, the Trump company had to train employees about the Fair Housing Act and inform the community about its fair housing practices.
Trump wrote about the resolution of the case in his 1987 memoir Art of the Deal: "In the end, the government couldn’t prove its case, and we ended up taking a minor settlement without admitting any guilt."
In 2005, Trump launched his for-profit Trump University, offering classes in real estate and acquiring and managing wealth. The venture had been under scrutiny almost since its inception and at the time of his 2015 presidential bid, it remained the subject of multiple lawsuits.
In the cases, claimants accused Trump of fraud, false advertising and breach of contract. Controversy about the suits made headlines when Trump suggested that U.S. District Court Judge Gonzalo Curiel could not be impartial in overseeing two class action cases because of his Mexican heritage.
On November 18, 2016, Trump, who had previously vowed to take the matter to trial, settled three of the lawsuits for $25 million without admission of liability. In a statement from New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, he called the settlement, “a stunning reversal by Trump and a major victory for the over 6,000 victims of his fraudulent university.”
Later, in a separate incident related to Trump University, it was reported that Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi decided not to join the existing New York fraud lawsuit. This came just days after she had received a sizable campaign donation from the Donald J. Trump Foundation, which was founded in 1988 as a private charity organization designed to make donations to nonprofit groups. In November 2016, it was reported that Bondi's name was on Trump's list as a possible U.S. Attorney General contender.
As a result of the improper donation to Bondi's campaign, Trump was required to pay the IRS a penalty and his foundation came under scrutiny about the use of its funds for non-charitable activities. According to tax records, The Trump Foundation itself was found to have received no charitable gifts from Trump since 2008, and that all donations since that time had come from outside contributors.
In fall 2019, after Trump admitted to misusing money raised by his foundation to promote his presidential campaign and settle debts, he was ordered to pay $2 million in damages.
Trump is currently registered as a Republican. He has switched parties several times in the past three decades.
In 1987, Trump registered as a Republican; two years later, in 1989, he registered as an Independent. In 2000, Trump ran for president for the first time on the Reform platform. In 2001, he registered as a Democrat.
By 2009, Trump had switched back to the Republican party, although he registered as an Independent in 2011 to allow for a potential run in the following year’s presidential election. He finally returned to the Republican party to endorse Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential run and has remained a Republican since.
Trump became the official Republican nominee for president in the 2016 presidential election against Democrat Hillary Clinton. Defying polls and media projections, he won the majority of electoral college votes in a stunning victory on November 8, 2016. Despite losing the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by almost 2.9 million votes, Trump's electoral win — 306 electoral college votes to Clinton's 232 — clinched his victory as the 45th president of the United States.
After one of the most contentious presidential races in U.S. history, Trump's rise to the office of president was considered a resounding rejection of establishment politics by blue-collar and working-class Americans.
In his victory speech, Trump said: “I pledge to every citizen of our land that I will be president for all Americans." About his supporters, he said: "As I’ve said from the beginning, ours was not a campaign, but rather an incredible and great movement made up of millions of hard-working men and women who love their country and want a better, brighter future for themselves and for their families.”
On July 21, 2016, Trump accepted the presidential nomination at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland. In his speech, he outlined the issues he would tackle as president, including violence in America, the economy, immigration, trade, terrorism, and the appointment of Supreme Court justices.
On immigration, he said: “We are going to build a great border wall to stop illegal immigration, to stop the gangs and the violence, and to stop the drugs from pouring into our communities.”
He also promised supporters that he would renegotiate trade deals, reduce taxes and government regulations, repeal the Affordable Care Act (otherwise known as Obamacare), defend Second Amendment gun rights, and “rebuild our depleted military,” asking the countries the U.S. is protecting "to pay their fair share."
On January 20, 2017, Trump was sworn in as the 45th president of the United States by Chief Justice of the United States John Roberts. Trump took the oath of office placing his hand on the Bible that was used at Abraham Lincoln's inauguration and his own family Bible, which was presented to him by his mother in 1955 when he graduated from Sunday school at his family's Presbyterian church.
In his inaugural speech on January 20th, Trump sent a populist message that he would put the American people above politics. “What truly matters is not which party controls our government, but whether our government is controlled by the people,” he said. “January 20, 2017, will be remembered as the day the people became the rulers of this nation again.”
He went on to paint a bleak picture of an America that had failed many of its citizens, describing families trapped in poverty, an ineffective education system, and crime, drugs and gangs. “This American carnage stops right here and stops right now," he said.
The day after Trump's inauguration, millions of protesters demonstrated across the United States and around the world. The Women's March on Washington drew over half a million people to protest Trump's stance on a variety issues ranging from immigration to environmental protection.
Activists and celebrities taking part in the protests included Gloria Steinem, Angela Davis, Madonna, Cher, Ashley Judd, Scarlett Johansson, America Ferrera, Alicia Keys and Janelle Monáe.
The first 100 days of Trump’s presidency lasted from January 20, 2017 until April 29, 2017. In the first days of his presidency, Trump issued a number of back-to-back executive orders to make good on some of his campaign promises, as well as several orders aimed at rolling back policies and regulations that were put into place during the Obama administration.
Several of Trump’s key policies that got rolling during Trump’s first 100 days in office include his Supreme Court nomination; steps toward building a wall on the Mexico border; a travel ban for several predominantly Muslim countries; the first moves to dismantle the Affordable Care Act; and the U.S. withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement.
In addition, Trump signed orders to implement a federal hiring freeze, withdraw from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and reinstate the Mexico City policy that bans federal funding of nongovernmental organizations abroad that promote or perform abortions.
He signed an order to scale back financial regulation under the Dodd-Frank Act, created by the Obama administration and passed by Congress after the financial crisis of 2008. And he called for a lifetime foreign-lobbying ban for members of his administration and a five-year ban for all other lobbying.
On March 16, 2017, the president released his proposed budget. The budget outlined his plans for increased spending for the military, veterans affairs and national security, including building a wall on the border with Mexico.
It also made drastic cuts to many government agencies including the Environmental Protection Agency and the State Department, as well as the elimination of the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the Community Development Block Grant program which supports Meals on Wheels.
Trump has nominated two Supreme Court Justices: Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh.
On January 31, 2017, Trump nominated Judge Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court. The 49-year-old conservative judge was appointed by President George W. Bush to the United States Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit in Denver.
Judge Gorsuch was educated at Columbia, Harvard and Oxford and clerked for Justices Byron White and Anthony Kennedy. The nomination came after Merrick Garland, President Obama's nominee to replace the late Antonin Scalia, was denied a confirmation hearing by Senate Republicans.
As Gorsuch's legal philosophy was considered to be similar to Scalia's, the choice drew strong praise from the conservative side of the aisle. "Millions of voters said this was the single most important issue for them when they voted for me for president," Trump said. "I am a man of my word. Today I am keeping another promise to the American people by nominating Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court."
After Gorsuch gave three days of testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee in March, the Senate convened on April 6 to advance his nomination. Democrats mostly held firm to deny the 60 votes necessary to proceed, resulting in the first successful partisan filibuster of a Supreme Court nominee.
But Republicans quickly countered with another historic move, invoking the "nuclear option" to lower the threshold for advancing Supreme Court nominations from 60 votes to a simple majority of 50. On April 7, Gorsuch was confirmed by the Senate to become the 113th justice of the Supreme Court.
On July 9, 2018, Trump nominated Brett Kavanaugh following the retirement of Justice Kennedy. A textualist and orginalist in the mold of Scalia, the nomination continued the rightward push of the Supreme Court.
Democrats vowed to fight the nomination, and Kavanaugh was nearly derailed by accusations of sexual assault. He earned confirmation in a close vote that October.
During the 2016 presidential election, Trump called climate change a “hoax.” He later recanted, saying, "I don't think it's a hoax, I think there's probably a difference."
However in an October 2018 interview on Fox News, Trump accused climate scientists of having a “political agenda” and said that he was unconvinced that humans were responsible for rising temperatures.
In November 2018, The Fourth National Climate Assessment, compiled by 13 federal agencies including the EPA and Department of Energy, found that, left unchecked, climate change would be catastrophic for the U.S. economy. Trump told reporters, "I don't believe it."
In June 2019, Trump met with Prince Charles and reportedly discussed climate change at length. In an interview with British TV host Piers Morgan, Trump said "I believe that there is a change in weather and I think it changes both ways...It used to be called global warming, that wasn't working, then it was called climate change and now actually it is called extreme weather."
Trump later told ITV’s Good Morning Britain that he pushed back Prince Charles’ suggestions that the United States do more to combat climate change, saying that the U.S. “now has among the cleanest climates there are based on all statistics.”
On June 1, 2017, Trump withdrew from the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement, which President Obama had joined along with the leaders of 195 other countries. The accord requires all participating nations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in an effort to curb climate change over the ensuing century and also to allocate resources for the research and development of alternative energy sources.
With Trump’s decision, the United States joined Syria and Nicaragua as the only three countries to reject the accord. However, Nicaragua eventually joined the Paris Climate Agreement months later.
Soon after taking office, Trump revived the controversial Keystone XL and Dakota Access Pipelines to transfer oil extracted in Canada and North Dakota. The pipelines had been halted by President Obama following protests from environmental and Native American groups.
Trump owned shares of Energy Transfer Partners, the company in charge of construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline, but sold his stake in the company in December 2016. Energy Transfer Partners CEO Kelcy Warren also contributed to Trump’s presidential campaign, raising concerns over conflict of interest.
On March 28, 2017, the president, surrounded by American coal miners, signed the "Energy Independence" executive order, calling for the Environmental Protection Agency to roll back Obama's Clean Power Plan, curb climate and carbon emissions regulations and to rescind a moratorium on coal mining on U.S. federal lands.
In August 2019, the Trump administration announced it was overhauling the Endangered Species Act. This included changes to legislation that gave the government increased discretion over matters of climate change and economic cost when determining whether a species should be protected.
One of Trump’s first executive orders in office was calling on federal agencies to "waive, defer, grant exemptions from, or delay" aspects of the Affordable Care Act to minimize financial burden on states, insurers and individuals.
On March 7, 2017, House Republicans, led by Speaker Paul Ryan, introduced the American Health Care Act, a plan to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act (ACA). However, the controversial bill ultimately didn't have enough Republican votes and was withdrawn a few weeks later, representing a major legislative setback for Speaker Ryan and Trump.
After intense negotiations among party factions, a new Republican health care plan was brought to a vote in the House of Representatives on May 4, 2017, and passed by a slim margin of 217 to 213. That passed the buck to the Senate.
Almost immediately after a draft was unveiled on June 22, conservative senators such as Ted Cruz declared they could not support the bill's failure to significantly lower premiums, while moderates like Susan Collins voiced concerns over its steep cuts to Medicaid. On June 27, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell elected to delay his planned vote for the bill. When the third, so-called “skinny repeal,” bill finally went to a vote on in the Senate July 28, it failed by three votes.
In September, a new bill to repeal the Affordable Care Act was put forth by Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana. However, on September 26, Senate Republicans announced they would not move forward with the current plan, as they were short of the required votes. “We are disappointed in certain so-called Republicans,” Trump responded.
On October 12, 2017 Trump signed an executive order in a move that could dismantle the ACA without Congress’s approval, expanding health insurance products — mostly less comprehensive plans through associations of small employers and more short-term medical coverage.
No Stickers to Show