New U.S. President Donald J. Trump is the 45th president of the United States (2017–21) and the winner of the United States Presidential election of 2024. Upon his 2024 victory over Vice Pres. Kamala Harris, Trump became the first president to be elected to nonconsecutive terms since Grover Cleveland, the 22nd and 24th President of the United States (1885–89 and 1893–97).
He was born on June 14, 1946 in Queens, New York to parents Fred and Mary Trump. He has three older siblings and one younger brother. Trump attended the New York Military Academy and the Wharton School of Finance and Commerce at the University of Pennsylvania.
Following his father’s footsteps, Trump began a notable career as a real estate developer and businessman. He has written more than fourteen books. His first book, The Art of the Deal, was published in 1987. From 2004 to 2015, Trump hosted and produced the popular television show, The Apprentice.
Trump announced his candidacy on June 16, 2015. He accepted the Republican nomination in July of 2016. On November 8, 2016, Trump was elected President. He was inaugurated as the 45th President of the United States on January 20, 2017.
The work of the Trump Administration included reforming the U.S. tax code; renegotiating trade agreements with Mexico, Canada, China, Japan, and South Korea; expanding the military; defeating the self-proclaimed Islamic State (ISIS); responding to the opioid crisis; improving access to healthcare for veterans; responding to the COVID-19 global pandemic; appointing Federal judges, including the nomination of three U.S. Supreme Court justices; and lowering the cost of prescription drugs.
In 2019 President Trump was impeached by the U.S. House of Representatives for abuse of power by soliciting the interference of Ukraine in the 2020 U.S. presidential election and obstruction of Congress by directing defiance of certain subpoenas issued by the House of Representatives. A trial in the U.S. Senate found the President not guilty of the charges brought against him.
In 2021 President Trump was impeached by the U.S. House of Representatives for having incited an insurrection against the government of the United States. A trial in the U.S. Senate found the President not guilty of the charges brought against him.
President Trump has been married to his wife, Melania, since 2005. Together they have one son, Barron. Trump also has four adult children, Donald Jr., Ivanka, Eric, and Tiffany. He has 10 grandchildren.
In May 2024, Trump also became the first former president to be convicted of a felony crime. After being convicted of a felony crime in May 2024, Trump was sentenced without punishment in early Janaury 2025, officially becoming the first convicted felon to be elected president. At age 78, Trump is the oldest person to win the office.
On May 30, 2024, Trump was convicted by a New York state jury on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in connection with a hush-money payment in 2016 to the adult-film star Stephanie Clifford, known as Stormy Daniels, who claimed to have had an affair with Trump in 2006.
He was later indicted on dozens of other federal and state charges in cases relating to his efforts to overturn his defeat in the presidential election of 2020 and his removal of numerous classified documents from the White House upon leaving office. Following Trump’s election to a second term, special counsel Jack Smith, who led both federal criminal cases against Trump, requested that the election-related charges against Trump be dropped and that Trump be removed from the group of codefendants in the classified documents case. Smith’s decisions reflected a Justice Department policy that prohibits the criminal prosecution of a sitting president.
Trump was also found liable in a major civil suit alleging business fraud in New York state and in two civil suits accusing him of sexually abusing and defaming the writer E. Jean Carroll.
Trump is the third president in U.S. history to be impeached by the U.S. House of Representatives (after Andrew Johnson in 1868 and Bill Clinton in 1998) and the only president to be impeached twice—once (in 2019) for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress in connection with the Ukraine scandal and once (in 2021) for “incitement of insurrection” in connection with the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol by a violent mob of Trump supporters. Both of Trump’s impeachments ended in his acquittal by the U.S. Senate.
After the midterm elections of 2022, Trump declared his intention to run for a second term, and in primary elections in early 2024 he accumulated enough delegates to win his party’s nomination, despite the steady progress of the legal cases against him. Although some Republican Party leaders worried that a criminal trial could seriously weaken Trump’s appeal to moderate Republican and independent voters, others took the hopeful view that Trump would use his court appearances to solidify his support by casting himself as a political martyr—the victim of Democratic-led “witch hunts,” “hoaxes,” and “scams,” as he frequently characterized the many legal investigations he faced.
Trump is also a real estate developer and businessman who has owned, managed, or licensed his name to hotels, casinos, golf courses, resorts, and residential properties in the New York City area and around the world. Since the 1980s Trump has lent his name to scores of retail ventures—including branded lines of clothing, cologne, food, and furniture. In the early 21st century his private conglomerate, the Trump Organization, comprised some 500 companies involved in a wide range of businesses, including hotels and resorts, residential properties, merchandise, and entertainment and television.
From the 1980s Trump periodically mused in public about running for president, but those moments were widely dismissed in the press as publicity stunts. In 1999 he switched his voter registration from Republican to the Reform Party and established a presidential exploratory committee. Although he ultimately declined to run in 2000, he published a book that year, The America We Deserve, in which he set forth his socially liberal and economically conservative political views. Trump later rejoined the Republican Party, and he maintained a high public profile during the 2012 presidential election. He did not run for office at that time, but he gained much attention for popularizing “birtherism,” a conservative conspiracy theory based on the false claim that Democratic Pres. Barack Obama is not a natural-born U.S. citizen.
In June 2015 Trump announced that he would be a candidate in the U.S. presidential election of 2016. In July 2016 Trump announced that Indiana Gov. Mike Pence would be his vice presidential running mate. At the Republican National Convention the following week, Trump was officially named the party’s nominee.
When voting proceeded on November 8, 2016, Trump defeated Democratic nominee, former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, in a chain of critical Rust Belt states. Although Trump won the Electoral College vote by 304 to 227, and thereby the presidency, he lost the nationwide popular vote by more than 2.8 million. After the election, Trump repeatedly claimed, without evidence, that 3–5 million people had voted for Clinton illegally. Trump was inaugurated on January 20, 2017.the Declaration for the Future of the Internet.
Major theme of Trump’s presidential campaign was his view that the United States had long been treated unfairly or taken advantage of by other countries, including by some traditional U.S. allies, and that under Obama’s leadership the United States had ceased to be respected in world affairs. In numerous speeches, tweets, and interviews, he threatened to impose tariffs on countries that engaged in what he deemed unfair trade practices; harshly criticized the World Trade Organization (WTO); and promised to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which he called “the worst trade deal” the United States had ever signed.
He also criticized the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), dismissing the alliance as “obsolete” but also insisting that other NATO countries devote more of their budgets to defense spending. In January 2017 he withdrew the United States from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a regional trade agreement between 12 Pacific Rim countries that had been a major foreign policy achievement of the Obama administration; Trump’s action was largely symbolic, however, because the Senate had never ratified the treaty.
In January and March 2018 the Trump administration announced steep tariffs on imports of solar panels (worth $8.5 billion per year) and washing machines (worth $1 billion), aimed particularly at China and South Korea, and on imports of aluminum and steel (worth $48 billion) made in several countries, most of them U.S. allies (initial exemptions from the aluminum and steel duties granted to Canada, the European Union [EU], and Mexico were lifted in June).
Dismissing warnings and criticisms from economists and business leaders that the tariffs could ignite a trade war, Trump insisted in a tweet that “trade wars are good, and easy to win.” In April China imposed retaliatory tariffs on a variety of U.S. goods worth $2.4 billion annually, approximately the dollar amount of Chinese aluminum and steel imports affected by the Trump tariffs.
The EU followed suit in June with tariffs on U.S. imports valued at $3.2 billion, as did Canada in July with tariffs on $12.8 billion of U.S. goods. Following its official finding that the Chinese had engaged in unfair trade practices, in June the Trump administration announced plans for tariffs on an additional $50 billion of dollars worth of Chinese products, prompting China to announce comparable duties. Threats and counterthreats of additional tariffs soon followed, and by July the two countries were engaged in a full-blown trade war.
Trump’s tariffs and his antipathy to the WTO overshadowed the meeting in early June of the Group of 7 in Quebec, Canada, which was marked by tense disagreement between Trump and other G7 leaders over language regarding free trade in the meeting’s final communiqué, usually a bland formality.
Following Trump’s early departure from the meeting, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau reiterated his country’s reluctant determination to respond in kind to Trump’s tariffs on aluminum and steel. Reacting to Trudeau’s remarks during a flight to Singapore aboard Air Force One, Trump withdrew his endorsement of the communiqué and called Trudeau “dishonest” and “weak.”
In Singapore Trump held a historic meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un, the first face-to-face encounter between sitting leaders of the two countries. Although Trump declared after the meeting that “there is no longer a Nuclear Threat from North Korea,” it was unclear what concrete commitments North Korea had made to nuclear disarmament. In July Trump attended the annual summit meeting of NATO in Brussels, where in a speech he called other NATO countries “delinquent” and insisted that they increase their defense spending “immediately.” The meeting ended with a joint communiqué in which member countries agreed to continue their efforts to devote 2 percent of their GDP to defense spending by 2024, a goal they had agreed to in 2014.
In May 2018 Trump announced the withdrawal of the United States from a 2015 accord between Iran and five major powers—formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA)—that had limited Iran’s uranium-enrichment activities and required it to submit to frequent international inspections of its nuclear facilities in return for the lifting of economic sanctions. After the United States killed Iran’s highest-ranking security and intelligence official in a drone strike ordered by Trump, Iran announced in January 2020 that it would no longer observe the JCPOA-imposed restrictions on its en-richment activities, though it stopped short of formally exiting the agreement.
After the midterm elections of 2022, Trump announced his candidacy for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination.
Trump, for his part, repeatedly exaggerated the high prices of gasoline and food while accusing Biden of having destroyed the U.S. economy. He also condemned the Biden administration’s efforts to develop clean-energy technologies, instead vowing to increase coal, oil, and natural gas pro-duction and to eliminate Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulations limiting air and water pollution from fossil fuels. In keeping with his rejection of clean energy, he repeatedly dismissed the existence of climate change as a “hoax.”
Another major theme of Trump’s campaign was his promise to deport all undocumented immigrants living in the United States (some 11 million people) by conducting raids on immigrant communities and employers and sending immigrants to military-controlled deportation camps. Trump’s anti-immigrant stance was based on numerous falsehoods-including that immigrants (by which he usually meant nonwhite people from non-European countries) were criminals and rapists-and on blatantly racist slurs, including that immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country.”
On July 21, former President Joseph Biden announced his withdrawal from the race and declared his support for Kamala Harris. In doing so Biden became the first president not to seek reelection since Democrat Lyndon B. Johnson in 1968. Shortly after Biden’s announcement, the Democratic National Committee approved a plan to officially nominate its presidential and vice-presidential candidates by a virtual vote of delegates in early August. Harris secured her presidential nomination with 99 percent of the vote, thus becoming the first Black woman and the first Asian American in U.S. history to win the presidential nomination of a major party.
Numerous polls conducted shortly before the November election indicated that Kamala Harris and Trump were neck and neck both nationally and in swing states. When vote counting began on election day (November 5, 2024), however, most of the polls proved to be inaccurate: Trump won both the national popular vote and the projected Electoral College vote, capturing all seven swing states.★
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