Childhood & Education · 1946–1968
From a privileged childhood in Queens to a degree from an Ivy League business school.
The life of Donald J. Trump as a factual timeline: the Queens building business, Manhattan real estate, reality television, and two terms as President of the United States. Compiled from public reporting and reference works. Images are public-domain or freely licensed. The bars mark the eras of his life.
From a privileged childhood in Queens to a degree from an Ivy League business school.
Donald John Trump is born in Queens, New York, the fourth of five children of Fred Trump, a wealthy outer-borough real-estate developer, and Mary Anne MacLeod, a Scottish immigrant. He grows up in a 23-room house in Jamaica Estates, already surrounded by the family building business.
A boisterous, headstrong boy, at thirteen he is sent to the New York Military Academy, a strict boarding school up the Hudson. He takes to its discipline and fierce competition, rises to cadet captain, and stars on the baseball team.
He graduates from the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School with a degree in economics. During the Vietnam War he receives five draft deferments — four for his studies and one medical deferment for bone spurs in his heels.
Three decades building — and gilding — the Trump brand across Manhattan and Atlantic City, through spectacular success and repeated financial crises.
At twenty-five he takes the reins of his father's company, renames it the Trump Organization, and sets his sights on Manhattan — determined to build glamorous towers rather than the family's modest outer-borough apartments.
He marries the Czech model and skier Ivana Zelníčková. Together they become fixtures of 1980s New York society and have three children — Donald Jr., Ivanka and Eric.
His first major Manhattan coup: transforming the derelict Commodore Hotel beside Grand Central into the gleaming Grand Hyatt, financed with a large city tax break. The gamble pays off and announces his arrival.
Trump Tower opens on Fifth Avenue — a 58-storey skyscraper of dark glass and pink marble, with a five-storey waterfall in its atrium. It becomes his home, his headquarters, and the enduring symbol of the brand.
His memoir The Art of the Deal — ghost-written by the journalist Tony Schwartz — tops the bestseller lists for nearly a year and turns a New York developer into a national celebrity of business.
He opens the lavish Trump Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City just as his debts spiral. Over the next two decades his casino and hotel companies file for bankruptcy protection six times — he restructures the debts each time, without ever declaring personal bankruptcy.
A decade as a prime-time reality-TV star that made his name a household word far beyond real estate.
NBC's reality show The Apprentice premieres, casting him as a decisive tycoon in a marble boardroom. His catchphrase — “You're fired!” — becomes a national sensation and reinvents his image for a new generation.
He marries the Slovenian model Melania Knauss in a star-studded Palm Beach wedding. Their son, Barron, is born the following year — Trump's fifth child.
He becomes the most prominent promoter of the false “birther” claim that President Barack Obama was not born in the United States, and openly flirts with a presidential run — road-testing a combative political persona.
From a long-shot outsider candidacy to the White House in just eighteen months.
On 16 June, riding the golden escalator down through Trump Tower's atrium, he announces his campaign for president — an outsider bid the pundits give almost no chance. Within a year he has swept the Republican primaries.
In one of the great upsets in American political history, he defeats Hillary Clinton — winning the Electoral College while losing the popular vote, and becoming the first president with no prior political or military experience.
One term as the 45th President — tax cuts and three Supreme Court justices, two impeachments, a pandemic, and a contested defeat.
He is sworn in on the Capitol steps, promising in his address to end what he called “American carnage.” The next day brings the Women's March, one of the largest single-day protests in U.S. history.
He signs the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, the largest overhaul of the tax code in a generation and his signature law. Across his term he also appoints three Supreme Court justices, locking in a conservative majority for decades.
The House of Representatives impeaches him for pressuring Ukraine to investigate a political rival while withholding military aid. The Senate acquits him, largely along party lines, in February 2020.
The COVID-19 pandemic upends his presidency; his administration's Operation Warp Speed delivers vaccines in record time even as the death toll climbs. In November he loses re-election to Joe Biden and disputes the result.
As Congress meets to certify Biden's victory, a crowd of his supporters storms the U.S. Capitol. Days later the House impeaches him a second time, for incitement of insurrection; the Senate again acquits him.
Four years in the political wilderness — criminal indictments, a felony conviction, two attempts on his life, and an improbable comeback.
He becomes the first former U.S. president to be criminally charged, facing four separate cases — over hush-money payments, classified documents kept at Mar-a-Lago, and two over efforts to overturn the 2020 election. His Georgia booking photograph flashes around the world.
In May a New York jury convicts him on 34 felony counts — the first U.S. president ever convicted of a crime. Weeks later, on 13 July, a gunman opens fire at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, grazing his ear; bloodied, he raises a fist to the crowd. A second attempt on his life follows in September.
On 5 November he defeats Vice-President Kamala Harris to win a second term — the first president since Grover Cleveland in 1892 to win two non-consecutive terms, and, at 78, the oldest person ever elected to the office.
A return to the White House as the 47th President, remaking American trade, immigration and foreign policy at speed.
He is inaugurated as the 47th President. On his first day he pardons or commutes some 1,500 people charged over January 6, withdraws from the Paris climate accord, renames the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America,” creates a government-efficiency office, and moves to impose sweeping tariffs and to broker an end to the war in Ukraine.
His second term reshapes American trade, immigration and diplomacy at speed — but in February the Supreme Court rules his signature emergency tariffs were imposed unlawfully and strikes them down. The presidency continues amid a trade war, a conflict with Iran, and ongoing diplomacy over Ukraine.