Business Career And Reality Television
The son of a wealthy apartment-building developer in New York’s Queens borough, Trump graduated from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Finance in 1968. In that year he was diagnosed with bone spurs in both heels, which qualified him for a permanent medical exemption from the military draft (he had received four earlier deferments for education).
He went to work in his father’s company, the Trump Organization, and worked to expand its holdings of rental housing. In the 1970s he made a series of shrewd property purchases in Manhattan, obtaining generous tax concessions from the city, which was eager for new investment at a time of severe fiscal crisis. Trump bought and renovated several aging hotel complexes and apartment towers in Manhattan and built new ones there as well. He also made a brief foray into sports, purchasing in 1983 the New Jersey Generals, which played in the short-lived U.S. Football League and lasted, like the entire league, for only two seasons. By the 1990s Trump’s business empire encompassed a number of high-rises, including the Empire State Building, hotels, condominiums, and Trump Tower (opened 1983); more than 25,000 rental and co-op apartment units in Queens and Brooklyn; and several hotel-casino complexes in the nearby gambling centre of Atlantic City, New Jersey.
In 1977 Trump married Ivana Zelnickova, a Czech model, with whom he had three children -Donald, Jr., Ivanka, and Eric-before the couple divorced in 1992. Their married life, as well as Trump’s business affairs, were a staple of the tabloid press in New York City during the 1980s. Trump married the American actress Marla Maples after she gave birth to Trump’s fourth child, Tiffany, in 1993. Their marriage ended in divorce in 1999. In 2005 Trump married the Slovene model Melania Knauss, and their child, Barron, was born the following year. Melania Trump became first lady of the United States upon her husband’s inauguration in 2017.
In 1989 Trump bought an East Coast air shuttle service from American Airlines. During his period of financial difficulties in 1991, the airline was taken over by USAir, and Trump’s Trump Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City declared bankruptcy. Two other casinos owned by Trump, as well as his Plaza Hotel in New York City, went bankrupt in 1992. Estimates of his net worth during that period ranged from zero to $2 billion.
Trump’s fortunes rebounded with the strong economy of the 1990s. In 1996 he partnered with NBC to purchase the Miss Universe Organization, which produces the Miss America, Miss USA, and Miss Teen USA beauty pageants.
By the early 21st century Trump had begun developing several major hotel, residential, and resort complexes around the world, including Trump World Tower in New York City (2001), Trump International Hotel Las Vegas (2008), and the Trump International Hotel and Tower in Chicago (2009). He purchased the sprawling Mar-a-Lago mansion in Palm Beach, Florida, in 1985 and converted it into a private club 10 years later. In 2004, however, his company Trump Hotels and Casino Resorts filed for bankruptcy after several of its properties accumulated unmanageable debt. The same company, renamed Trump Entertainment Resorts, went bankrupt again in 2009.
In addition to his real-estate ventures, in 2004 Trump premiered a reality television series, The Apprentice, which featured contestants competing in various challenges to become one of his employees. The Emmy-nominated show, in which Trump starred, popularized the phrase “You’re fired” and solidified Trump’s reputation as a shrewd outspoken businessman. In 2008 the show was revamped as The Celebrity Apprentice, with newsmakers and entertainers as contestants.
Trump marketed his name as a brand in various business ventures including Trump Financial, a mortgage company, and the Trump Entrepreneur Initiative (formerly Trump University), an online education company focusing on real-estate investment and entrepreneurialism. The latter company, which was dissolved in 2010, was the target of class-action lawsuits by former students and a separate action by the attorney general of New York alleging fraud. After initially denying the allegations, Trump settled the lawsuits for $25 million in November 2016.
Trump coauthored a number of books on entrepreneurship and his business career, including Trump: The Art of the Deal (1987), Trump: The Art of the Comeback (1997), Why We Want You to Be Rich (2006), Trump 101: The Way to Success (2006), and Trump Never Give Up: How I Turned My Biggest Challenges into Success (2008).
Politics
Trump was active in politics. From the 1980s he periodically mused in public about running for president, but those moments were widely downplayed 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. Though he ultimately declined to run in 2000, he set forth his socially liberal and economically conservative political views in The America We Deserve (2000). Trump later rejoined the Republican Party, and he maintained a high public profile during the 2012 presidential election. Though he did not run for office at that time, he gained much attention for repeatedly questioning whether Pres. Barack Obama was 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. Pledging to “make America great again,” he promised to create millions of new jobs, to punish American companies that exported jobs overseas, to repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA), to revive the U.S. coal industry, to “drain the swamp” in Washington, D.C., by reducing the influence of lobbyists, to withdraw the United States from the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change, to construct a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border to prevent illegal immigration from Latin America, and to ban immigration by Muslims. Trump wrote about those and other issues in Crippled America: How to Make America Great Again (2015).
On the campaign trail, Trump quickly established himself as a political outsider, a stance that proved popular with many voters—especially those in the Tea Party movement—and he frequently topped opinion polls, besting established Republican politicians. However, his campaign was frequently mired in controversy, much of it of his own making. In speeches and via Twitter, a social medium he used frequently, Trump often made inflammatory remarks, some of which were deemed offensive, especially to Mexicans, Muslims, and women. Trump’s initial refusal to condemn the Ku Klux Klan after a former Klansman endorsed him also drew sharp criticism, as did his failure to repudiate racist elements among his supporters in the “alt-right” (a loose association of self-described white nationalists, far-right libertarians, and neo-Nazis). While Trump’s comments worried the Republican establishment, supporters seemed to be pleased by his combativeness, his provocative language, and his outsider status. After a loss in the Iowa caucuses to open up the primary season in February 2016, Trump rebounded by winning the next three contests, and he extended his lead with a strong showing on Super Tuesday—when primaries and caucuses were held in 11 states—in early March. After a landslide victory in the Indiana primary in May, Trump became the presumptive Republican nominee as his last two opponents, Ted Cruz and John Kasich, dropped out of the race.
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. There he and other speakers harshly criticized the presumptive Democratic nominee, former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, blaming her for the 2012 attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, and for allegedly having mishandled classified State Department e-mails (an FBI investigation determined earlier in July that her actions had been “extremely careless” but not criminal). Trump continued that theme in the ensuing weeks, routinely referring to Clinton as “crooked Hillary” and repeatedly vowing to put her in jail if he were elected.
Despite having pledged in 2015 that he would release his tax returns, as every presidential nominee of a major party had done since the 1970s, Trump later changed his mind, explaining that he was under routine audit by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS)—though there was no legal bar to releasing his returns under audit.
In late July, on the eve of the Democratic National Convention, thousands of internal e-mails of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) were publicly released by the Web site WikiLeaks in an apparent effort to damage the Clinton campaign. Reacting to widespread suspicions that the e-mails had been stolen by Russian hackers, Trump publicly encouraged the Russians to hack Clinton’s private e-mail server to find thousands of e-mails that he claimed had been illegally deleted.
Following the Democratic convention, Trump continued to make controversial and apparently impromptu comments via Twitter and in other forums that embarrassed the Republican establishment and seriously disrupted his campaign. He drew particular criticism for a series of negative comments about women, and in October 2016 a hot-mic video from 2005 surfaced in which he told an entertainment reporter that he had tried to seduce a married woman and that “when you’re a star…you can do anything,” including grabbing women by the genitals. Although Trump dismissed the conversation as “locker room talk,” a series of women subsequently claimed that Trump had sexually assaulted them in the past. He denied the allegations and noted that Bill Clinton had previously been accused of sexual assault and harassment. However, Trump’s support among women voters—already low—continued to wane, and some Republicans began to withdraw their endorsements.
Approximately one hour after the release of the Trump video, WikiLeaks published a trove of e-mails that had been stolen from the account of John Podesta, Clinton’s campaign manager. On the same day, the U.S. intelligence community publicly announced its assessment that the Russian government had directed efforts by hackers to steal and release sensitive Democratic Party e-mails and other information in order to bolster the Trump campaign and weaken public confidence in U.S. electoral institutions. In response, Trump questioned the competence and motives of U.S. intelligence agencies and insisted that no one really knew who might have been behind the hacking. A secret CIA report to Congress in December and a separate report ordered by Obama and released in January 2017 also concluded that the Russians had interfered in the election.
Despite his ongoing efforts to portray Clinton as “crooked” and an “insider,” Trump trailed her in almost all polls. As election day neared, he repeatedly claimed that the election was “rigged” and that the press was treating him unfairly by reporting “fake news.” He received no endorsements from major newspapers. During the third and final presidential debate, in October, he made headlines when he refused to say that he would accept the election results.
Eight days after that debate, the Trump campaign received a boost when FBI director James Comey notified Congress that the bureau was reviewing a trove of e-mails from an unrelated case that appeared to be relevant to its earlier investigation of Clinton. Trump seized on the announcement as vindication of his charge that Clinton was crooked. Six days later, Comey announced that the new e-mails contained no evidence of criminal activity. Notwithstanding the damage that Comey’s revelation had done to her campaign, Clinton retained a slim lead over Trump in the polls of battleground states on the eve of election day, and most pundits and political analysts remained confident that she would win. When voting proceeded on November 8, 2016, however, Trump bested Clinton in a chain of critical Rust Belt states, and he was elected president. 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 claimed without evidence that 3 to 5 million people had voted for Clinton illegally.) Trump took the oath of office on January 20, 2017.
Trump’s unexpected victory prompted much discussion in the press regarding the reliability of polls and the strategic mistakes of the Clinton campaign. Most analysts agreed that Clinton had taken for granted some of her core constituencies (such as women and minorities) and that Trump had effectively capitalized upon the economic anxieties and resentment of working-class whites, particularly men.
No comments:
Post a Comment