21 things you didn’t know about Donald Trump
NEW YORK, NY - JULY 06: Donald Trump attends the 2015 Hank's Yanks Golf Classic at Trump Golf Links Ferry Point on July 6, 2015 in New York City. (Photo by Andrew H. Walker/Getty Images)
1. Trump was a positive child, being both bright and energetic. He was born in 1946 in Queens, New York City. At 13 he was sent to the New York Military Academy where he did well both socially and academically. He became a champion athlete and a student leader.
2. He was the fourth child of five born to Frederick C and Mary MacLeod Trump. Frederick was a builder and real estate developer who built low-rent apartments around New York city, in Queens, Staten Island, and Brooklyn.
3. Donald first entered Fordham University and then went to the Wharton School of Finance at the University of Pennsylvania where he took an economics degree. He always worked for his father’s company in holidays, and eventually joined the company in 1971.
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4. His dazzling success as a New York developer hit a snag in 1990 when his own wealth declined from $1.7 billion to $500 million. At this difficult global economic time it was widely thought that the Trump Organisation might go bankrupt, but by 1997 Trump had emerged with a personal fortune of $2 billion.
5. He was once a member of “The Birther Issue”, a group which maintains that President Barack Obama was not born in the United States. He was also a member of the Democratic Party in 2001 before changing over to the Republican Party.
Trump’s second wife, actress Marla Maples. Photo: Getty
6. He has been married three times. In 1977 he married Ivana Zelnickova and they had three children, Donald, Ivanka and Eric. In 1993 he married Marla Maples and they had one child, Tiffany. In 2005, he married Melania Knauss and they have a son Barron William Trump.
7. His hair generates endless speculation. Is it a wig, a toupee, a transplant? Well, no one has yet proved it’s anything but real. In the latest Democrat attack on Trump for his anti-Muslim stance, White House spokesman Josh Earnest ended up resorting to a cheap hair attack. He called it fake. He’s probably wrong.
8. He is a teetotaller who has never smoked or taken drugs.
9. He is a germophobe and dislikes shaking hands.
10. He is, at the very least, self-confident. He was once quoted as saying: “All of the women on The Apprentice (his television show) flirted with me, consciously or unconsciously. That’s to be expected.”
11. Trump is also an actor, and a bad one. In 1990 he won the Razzie Award for the worst supporting actor in the movie Ghosts Can’t Do It. He played himself in the movie.
12. In second grade at school, Trump punched his music teacher and gave him a black eye. “I didn’t think he knew anything about music and I almost got expelled. I’m not proud of that, but it’s clear evidence that even early on I had a tendency to stand up and make my opinions known in a very forceful way. The difference now is that I use my brain instead of my fists.”
Ivanka Trump has supported – and defended – her father during his run for the Republican nomination for the US presidency. Photo: Getty
13. Trump describes his father Frederick as stern, aggressive, and practical. Frederick built low-rent apartments around New York City. “My father would start a building in, say, Flatbush [Queens], at the same time that two competitors began putting up their own buildings nearby. Invariably, my father would finish his building three or four months before his competitors did. His building would always be a little better-looking than the other two, with a nicer, more spacious lobby and larger rooms in the apartments themselves. He’d rent them out quickly, at a time when it wasn’t so easy to rent. Eventually, one or both of his competitors would go bankrupt before they’d finish their buildings, and my father would step in and buy them out.”
14. The Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II took place in 1953 when Donald was six. His mother, a Scottish immigrant, was enraptured by the pomp and tradition and ceremony. His father was impatient and dismissive. Trump took his mother’s view. “Looking back, I realise now that I got some of my sense of showmanship from my mother. She always had a flair for the dramatic and the grand. She was a very traditional housewife, but she also had a sense of the world beyond her.”
Trump’s hair is the subject of considerable speculation. Photo: Getty
15. 1946 was also the birth year of Sylvester Stallone, Dolly Parton, Liza Minelli, Diane Keaton, Cher, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barry Gibb and Steven Spielberg.
16. He is now identified with classy Fifth Avenue, Manhattan, but some say he is very obviously “a guy from Queens”. “He sounds like a guy from Queens,” says Gwenda Blair, author of Donald Trump: Master Apprentice. “He doesn’t have the sort of – certainly doesn’t present – the kind of polish and refinement and old money of Upper East Side New York.” The Trump home was an impressive 23-room colonial house in leafy Jamaica Estates, Queens. They had a cook and chauffeur, but neighbours say they were not showy.
17. Donald’s father Frederick was born in 1905. Frederick’s father started a struggling development business, but succumbed to pneumonia when Frederick was 13. Frederick started his own development company as a very young man in the Roaring Twenties and called it Elizabeth Trump and Son because he needed a partner old enough to sign the cheques.
Bill Maher was sued for making comments about Trump’s complexion. Photo: Getty
18. Young Donald treated their home like a fortress. If a ball from a neighbouring property bounced into their yard, Donald would seize it and say “I’m gonna tell my dad. I’m gonna tell the police”.
19. Estimates of Trump’s personal fortune have varied. One of the more recent is his own, which he prepared in 2011 when he was considering running for the Presidency in the 2012 election. This said that his net worth was in excess of $7 billion with more than $250 million of cash, and very little debt. Although Trump did not run as a candidate in the 2012 elections, his professionally prepared 2012 financial disclosure was published in his book stating a $7 billion net worth.
20. Trump has owned part or all the Miss Universe, Miss USA, and Miss Teen USA beauty pageants since 1996. Among the most recognised beauty pageants in the world, the Miss Universe was founded in 1952 by the California clothing company Pacific Mills.
21. In 2013 Trump sued comedian Bill Maher for $5 million, based on comments made on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. Maher offered $5 million payable to a charity if Trump produced his birth certificate to prove his mother had not mated with an orangutan.