Donald John Trump (born June 14, 1946) is the forty-fifth (2017 - 2021) and forty-seventh (2025 - present) President of the United States, the only person besides Grover Cleveland to win non-consecutive terms and, at his second inauguration, the oldest person ever sworn into the office. A Queens-born real estate developer and star of NBC's The Apprentice, he became the first president never to have held prior public office or military command.
Business and celebrity
Trump took over his father's outer-borough real estate business in the 1970s and drove it into Manhattan, building or branding towers, casinos, and golf resorts worldwide around the Trump name. The Art of the Deal (1987) made him a national figure; fourteen seasons of The Apprentice made him a television fixture in tens of millions of homes.
The first term (2017 - 2021)
Running on "Make America Great Again," Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in 2016 by winning the electoral college while losing the popular vote. His term brought the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, a historically low pre-pandemic unemployment rate, criminal justice reform in the First Step Act, Space Force, three Supreme Court appointments (Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Barrett), the USMCA trade agreement replacing NAFTA, and the Abraham Accords normalizing relations between Israel and four Arab states. He imposed broad tariffs on China, beginning a lasting shift in American trade policy.
The COVID-19 pandemic dominated his final year: Operation Warp Speed produced vaccines in record time, while the administration's handling of the crisis became the central issue of the 2020 election, which he lost to Joe Biden. His challenges to that result culminated in the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol by his supporters as Congress counted electoral votes. He was impeached twice by the House, over the Ukraine aid affair in 2019 and over January 6 in 2021, and acquitted by the Senate both times, the only president ever impeached twice.
The comeback and the second term
Out of office, Trump survived felony convictions in New York, two federal indictments later dismissed, and two assassination attempts during the 2024 campaign, including a bullet that grazed his ear at a Butler, Pennsylvania rally. He defeated Kamala Harris in November 2024, winning both the electoral college and the popular vote, and returned to the White House on January 20, 2025, with JD Vance as vice president.
His second term opened with sweeping executive action on immigration and the border, a new round of global tariffs, and the Department of Government Efficiency effort to shrink the federal workforce. As the term is ongoing, its full record belongs to the future editions of this page.
Highlights across two presidencies
- The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (2017) and pre-pandemic full employment.
- Three Supreme Court justices in a single term.
- The Abraham Accords (2020).
- Operation Warp Speed (2020).
- The 2024 comeback, the first non-consecutive reelection since Cleveland in 1892.