A one-man brand
HE IS part of a financial elite, but is still viewed as an outsider. He has billions of dollars, owns swathes of Manhattan, and has self-funded his presidential campaign, but is still most popular with low income, blue collar voters.
Many Americans see Donald Trump as a breath of fresh air; others as a dangerous threat to global security. How did a young man from the suburbs of New York rise to become a powerful real estate tycoon and the Republican contender for the White House?

BORN IN QUEENS
Donald was born into a substantial mock-Tudor home on Wareham Street, Queens at the height of the post-war ‘baby boom’. Real estate was in his blood.
His father, Fred Trump, was a self-made real estate broker who owned two chauffeur-driven limousines. Trump’s mother, Mary, was a Scottish immigrant whose father had been a fisherman. It was a strict house, wherein swearing was forbidden. Despite their wealth, all the Trump children were forced to make their own money through paper rounds and summer jobs. Donald was a rebellious child: In elementary school, he punched a teacher “because I didn’t think he knew anything about music.”

TRUMP THE TEENAGER
When his father discovered a switchblade in the 13-year-old Donald’s bedroom, he packed him off to military school to be straightened out.
New York Military Academy was a tough boarding school with a strong emphasis on discipline and physical fitness. Donald excelled as captain of the baseball team and winner of the ‘Neatness and Order’ medal, but made few close friends. He graduated in 1964, and, already strongly attracted to the limelight, flirted with the idea of going to film school. Instead, he attended Fordham University, and transferred after two years to Wharton Business School at the University of Pennsylvania.

MAKING IT IN MANHATTAN
Three years after graduating from college, Donald moved into an apartment in Manhattan, on Third Avenue and 75th Street.
As a suburban boy from Queens, he was an outsider on the Upper East Side, but his audacity still astonished many developers there. In a complicated deal, which included financial aid from his father, he bought the crumbling Commodore Hotel on 42nd Street for $70M and gutted and renovated the building. He relaunched it as The Grand Hyatt Hotel in 1980. It was a great success, and with Donald having maintained a 50% interest, the money started pouring in. Trump the tycoon had arrived.

TRUMP TOWER
Trump Tower is now an iconic feature of the Manhattan skyline, but Donald stirred up a lot of controversy during its construction.

Undocumented Polish labourers were an essential part of the operation, and The New York Times criticised Trump for demolishing two irreplaceable Art Deco features on the original site. However, once the 28-sided building was complete, 700 guests, including New York Mayor Ed Koch, joined Donald for the ‘topping off’ party; 10,000 balloons were released over Madison Avenue in celebration. The building literally cemented the Trump name into Manhattan; he still lives and works there today.

ART OF THE DEAL
‘The Art of the Deal’, Trump’s first book, was published in November 1987. Donald offered readers the chance to learn the secrets of his success.
It spent 48 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list, 13 of them at No. 1. Not only did the book generate millions of dollars in royalties, it expanded Donald’s renown far beyond New York; made him a global icon for business acumen, and promoted his image as a self-made man. Revenue for The Trump Organization went through the roof. In the coming years, he would launch Trump Airlines, construct hundreds of new buildings, and generate enough profit to buy his own yacht, ‘Trump Princess’.

TAKING A KNOCK
For Trump, the 1990s began with a costly divorce from his first wife, Ivana, after she discovered his affair with Marla Maples.
Donald’s finances were undercut by the 1990s recession which ripped apart the New York real estate market. Trump missed the deadline on two-thirds of his interest payments. In 1991, Trump’s Taj Mahal in Atlantic City filed for bankruptcy. It was followed by Trump Plaza in 1992, bringing his reputation as a business genius into question. At one point, Donald gestured to a homeless man in the street, and claimed to be $900M poorer than he due to his immense debt.

MISS UNIVERSE
Despite the pitfalls of the early 1990s, Trump took drastic steps to balance his books.
He sold his yacht and Trump Airlines. Then, making an unexpected move into mass entertainment, he bought the Miss Universe franchise (which included the Miss USA and Miss Teen USA pageants). He even managed to capitalise on his financial trouble by publishing his second book, ‘The Art of the Comeback’. His second best-seller peppered the story of overcoming his debts with anecdotes about his short marriage to Marla Maples, from 1993-1997, which gave him his second daughter, Tiffany Trump.

FATHER DIES
Frederick Christ Trump died at the age of 93 on June 25, 1999, leaving behind an estate of $250-$300 million.
Six hundred and fifty people attended the funeral at Marble Collegiate Church. In his speech, Donald said it was the toughest day of his life. Donald received a letter of condolence from John F. Kennedy Jr. who advised, “No matter where you are in life, losing a parent changes you.” Things were bad, too, for the family of Donald’s predeceased older brother, Fred Jr, who died of alcoholism in 1981. They had been cut out of the inheritance.

REFORM PARTY
Trump’s campaign against Hillary Clinton is not the first time he made an attempt to enter the White House.
In 1999, he actively pushed to be the Reform Party’s 2000 candidate for President, and said Oprah Winfrey would be his ideal running mate. His policies included a one-time 14.25% tax on the super-wealthy to reduce the federal deficit, amending the 1964 Civil Rights Act to ban discrimination against gays, and universal healthcare funded by increased corporate taxation. However, he pulled out in February 2000 due to infighting in the Reform Party, which he dismissed as “A total mess.”

THE APPRENTICE
At the start of the millennium, Trump was approached by producer Mark Burnett with a new TV format.
Burnett pitched a bold idea, wherein contestants would compete for a job with Donald by performing a variety of executive tasks. The series presented the Trump Organisation as a desirable place to work, and Trump as a financial sage. It gave the tycoon the chance to make even more money through presenter fees and an Executive Producer credit.
The first season finale had the highest ratings on television that year after the Superbowl, and earned him a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2007.

TRUMP UNIVERSITY
A mere four months after his wedding, Trump launched a controversial educational enterprise called Trump University.
It offered “graduate programmes and post-graduate programmes” in real estate to the general public, offering to teach the secret of Trump’s business success. It subsequently closed, following lawsuits from students who alleged the scheme was a racket. The New York Attorney General’s Office warned the company that it was breaking the law by calling itself a university (it had no charter). Ronald Schnackenberg, a former salesman for Trump University, went on record, calling it “a fraudulent scheme”.

SCOTTISH GOLF COURSE
In 2006, Trump gained his first bit of notoriety in the UK when he arrived in Scotland to build a golf course in Aberdeenshire.
Trump claimed the project was in honour of his Scottish mother, Mary. It turned out to be one of the most difficult real estate projects of his career, due to clashes with sections of the local community and environmentalists. Although the local council rejected Trump’s initial proposal, an intervention by First Minister Alex Salmond (on whose MSP constituency the course was being built) allowed construction to begin in 2010. The course officially opened in 2012.

PRESIDENTIAL BID
At a press conference at Trump Tower in June 2015, Donald came down the escalator with Melania and announced his bid to be US President.
He vowed his campaign would be self-funded, so he would never be beholden to lobbyists or donors. He also expressed the opinion that many Mexican immigrants were rapists and drug dealers, and laid out policies to defend the Second Amendment, build a wall along the Mexican border, repeal Obamacare, and renegotiate foreign trade deals. His controversial statements did not go unnoticed; within weeks NBC, Macy’s and Univision all issued statements distancing themselves from the campaign.

REPUBLICAN CANDIDATE
On a hot summer’s day in July 2016 in North Dakota, Trump discovered that he had beaten the 16 other contenders to become the official Republican nominee.
He had recently announced Indiana Governor Mike Pence as his running mate, and his win was an astonishing achievement in the face of stark internal criticism from the Republican Party.
Trump was officially selected as nominee at the Republican Convention in Cleveland, Ohio, surrounded by Melania and his five children. He delivered his speech to a crowd who brandished ‘Hillary for Prison’ and ‘Make America Great Again’ signs, and reinforced his promise to build a wall along the Mexican border.