Donald Trump (born June 14, 1946, New York, New York, U.S.) is the 45th and 47th president of the United States (2017–21; 2025– ). Following his inauguration on January 20, 2025, Trump became only the second president to serve two nonconsecutive terms, the first being Grover Cleveland (1885–89; 1893–97). In January 2025, upon his sentencing without punishment for a felony conviction in 2024, Trump officially became the first convicted felon to be elected president. At age 78, Trump is the oldest person to win the office.
Trump’s conviction took place on May 30, 2024, when a New York state jury found him guilty 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 had also been 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 (after Andrew Johnson in 1868 and Bill Clinton in 1998) to be impeached by the U.S. House of Representatives 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.
Early life and business career
Trump was the fourth of five children of Frederick (Fred) Christ Trump, a successful real estate developer, and Mary MacLeod. Donald’s eldest sister, Maryanne Trump Barry, eventually served as a U.S. district court judge (1983–99) and later as a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit until her retirement in 2011. His elder brother, Frederick, Jr. (Freddy), worked briefly for their father’s business before becoming an airline pilot in the 1960s. Freddy’s alcoholism led to his early death in 1981, at the age of 43.
Beginning in the late 1920s, Fred Trump built hundreds of single-family houses and row houses in the Queens and Brooklyn boroughs of New York City, and from the late 1940s he built thousands of apartment units, mostly in Brooklyn, using federal loan guarantees designed to stimulate the construction of affordable housing. During World War II he also built federally backed housing for naval personnel and shipyard workers in Virginia and Pennsylvania. In 1954 Fred was investigated by the Senate Banking Committee for allegedly abusing the loan-guarantee program by deliberately overestimating the costs of his construction projects to secure larger loans from commercial banks, enabling him to keep the difference between the loan amounts and his actual construction costs. In testimony before the Senate committee in 1954, Fred admitted that he had built the Beach Haven apartment complex in Brooklyn for $3.7 million less than the amount of his government-insured loan. Although he was not charged with any crime, he was thereafter unable to obtain federal loan guarantees. A decade later a New York state investigation found that Fred had used his profit on a state-insured construction loan to build a shopping center that was entirely his own property. He eventually returned $1.2 million to the state but was thereafter unable to obtain state loan guarantees for residential projects in the Coney Island area of Brooklyn.