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, and brought up to date on 4 September 2026. Images are public-domain or freely licensed. The bars mark the eras of his working 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, 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. He wants glamorous towers, not the family's modest outer-borough apartment blocks, and he will spend the next decade getting them.
He marries the Czech model and skier Ivana Zelnickova. 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: 58 storeys of dark glass and pink marble, with a five-storey waterfall in the 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. It turns a New York developer into a national celebrity of business, which is a different asset from the buildings and outlasts several of them.
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 and never declares 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. The catchphrase, You're fired, becomes a national sensation and reinvents his image for a generation that never saw the Atlantic City accounts.
He marries the Slovenian model Melania Knauss at a 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. The persona he tests here, combative and indifferent to correction, is the one he will run on four years later.
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. The pundits give an outsider bid 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. He is 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 US president to be criminally charged, facing four separate cases: hush-money payments, classified documents kept at Mar-a-Lago, and two over efforts to overturn the 2020 election. His Georgia booking photograph goes around the world within the hour.
In May a New York jury convicts him on 34 felony counts, making him the first US 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. He is 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.
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.
A return to the White House as the 47th President, remaking American trade, immigration and foreign policy at speed.
In February the Supreme Court rules that the emergency tariffs at the centre of his second-term trade policy were imposed unlawfully, and strikes them down. It is the most significant judicial defeat of the term to that point. The tariffs come back within months under other statutory authorities. What the ruling changes is the legal architecture, not the policy.
On 27 February 2026 he authorises coordinated strikes on Iran. American and Israeli aircraft go in the following day, under the names Operation Epic Fury and Operation Roaring Lion, against leadership, military installations and nuclear facilities, while nuclear negotiations are still in progress. Iran's Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, is killed. The war does not end quickly. Iran closes the Strait of Hormuz, Hezbollah escalates in Lebanon, Israel invades southern Lebanon by land, and the oil market suffers what is later described as the largest supply disruption it has recorded. By June the direct cost to the United States is put at 113 billion dollars. It is the largest American military commitment since Iraq, and it began with a decision taken on a single evening.
On 1 April he sits in the courtroom for oral argument at the Supreme Court in Trump v. Barbara, the birthright citizenship case. The official records show no previous instance of a sitting president attending an argument in a case bearing his own name. The following day he dismisses Attorney General Pam Bondi, over a leak concerning an investigation into Representative Eric Swalwell and over her handling of the Epstein files. Todd Blanche takes the department temporarily and is sworn in as Attorney General on 10 August.
He announces a two-week ceasefire with Iran on Truth Social on 7 April, two hours before his own deadline expires. It takes effect on the 8th and comes under strain almost at once when Iran resumes the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. An Islamabad Memorandum signed on 17 June lifts the dual blockade, and on 28 June both sides agree to stop attacking each other. That agreement lasts ten days. On 8 July Iran attacks commercial shipping in the Strait and the war resumes. By September the fighting is in its sixth month.
Six months after the Supreme Court struck down the emergency tariffs, the tariffs are back. On 22 August, 50 per cent duties on roughly 28 billion dollars of Canadian goods take effect at one minute past midnight, claimed this time under Section 338 of the Tariff Act of 1930 rather than emergency powers. Prime Minister Mark Carney had suspended trade negotiations the day before, citing late changes he called unfair. The pattern of the second term is visible in the sequence. A policy is announced, a court stops it, and the policy reappears resting on a different clause. The February ruling settled the law and changed almost nothing about the trade.
The midterm elections fall on 3 November 2026 and will settle whether the second half of the term is governed with a Congress or against one. Democratic Party leaders went to court in April to block his attempt to restrict mail-in voting ahead of them. He is 80 years old and constitutionally barred from a third term. Every previous chapter of this page ended with him running for something. This one does not.