Donald Trump Encyclopedia

6/9/2019 Donald Trump -- Britannica Online Encyclopedia
Donald Trump
Donald Trump, in full
Donald John Trump,
TABLE OF CONTENTS
(born June 14, 1946,
Introduction
New York, New York,
Early life and business career
U.S.), 45th president of
the United States (2017– Politics
). Trump was a real- Presidency
estate developer and Cabinet of Pres. Donald J. Trump
businessman who
owned, managed, or
licensed his name to several hotels, casinos, golf courses,
resorts, and residential properties in the New York City area
and around the world. From the 1980s Trump also lent his
name to scores of retail ventures—including branded lines
of clothing, cologne, food, and furniture—and to Trump
Donald J. Trump, 2010.
University, which offered seminars in real-estate education
© Helga Esteb/Shutterstock.com
from 2005 to 2010. 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 ve 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 brie y for his 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 rowhouses 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
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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
Trump, Donald J.
committee in 1954, Fred admitted that he had built the
Donald Trump speaking in front of Trump
Beach Haven apartment complex in Brooklyn for $3.7
Tower, New York City, August 2008.
million less than the amount of his government-insured
© Paul Hakimata—
Phakimata/Dreamstime.com 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 pro t on a state-
insured construction loan to build a shopping centre 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.
Donald Trump attended New York Military Academy (1959–64), a private boarding school;
Fordham University in the Bronx (1964–66); and the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton
School of Finance and Commerce (1966–68), where he graduated with a bachelor’s degree in
economics. In 1968, during the Vietnam War, he secured a diagnosis of bone spurs, which
quali ed him for a medical exemption from the military draft (he had earlier received four
draft deferments for education). Upon his graduation Trump began working full-time for his
father’s business, helping to manage its holdings of rental housing, then estimated at
between 10,000 and 22,000 units. In 1974 he became became president of a conglomeration
of Trump-owned corporations and partnerships, which he later named the Trump
Organization.
During the 1960s and early 1970s, Trump-owned housing

developments in New York City, in Cincinnati, Ohio, and
in Norfolk, Virginia, were the target of several complaints
of racial discrimination against African Americans and
Trump, Donald other minority groups. In 1973 Fred and Donald Trump,
Key events in the life of U.S. Pres. Donald

along with their company, were sued by the U.S.
Trump. Department of Justice for allegedly violating the Fair
Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. Housing Act (1968) in the operation of 39 apartment
buildings in New York City. The Trumps initially
countersued the Justice Department for $100 million, alleging harm to their reputations. The
suit was settled two years later under an agreement that did not require the Trumps to admit
guilt.
Beginning in the late 1970s, Donald Trump transformed his father’s business by investing in
luxury hotels and residential properties and by shifting its geographic focus to Manhattan
and (in the 1980s) Atlantic City, New Jersey. In 1976 he purchased the decrepit Commodore
Hotel near Grand Central Station under a complex pro t-sharing agreement with the city
that included a 40-year property tax abatement, the rst such tax break granted to a
commercial property in New York City. Relying on a construction loan guaranteed by his
father and the Hyatt Corporation, which became a partner in the project, Trump refurbished
the building and reopened it in 1980 as the 1,400-room Grand Hyatt Hotel. In 1983 he opened
Trump Tower, an of ce, retail, and residential complex constructed in partnership with the
Equitable Life Assurance Company. The 58-story building on 56th Street and Fifth Avenue
eventually contained Trump’s Manhattan residence and the headquarters of the Trump
Organization. Other Manhattan properties developed by Trump during the 1980s included
the Trump Plaza residential cooperative (1984), the Trump Parc luxury condominium
complex (1986), and the 19-story Plaza Hotel (1988), a historic landmark for which Trump paid
more than $400 million.
In the 1980s Trump invested heavily in the casino business in Atlantic City, where his
properties eventually included Harrah’s at Trump Plaza (1984, later renamed Trump Plaza),
Trump’s Castle Casino Resort (1985), and the Trump Taj Mahal (1990), then the largest casino
in the world. During that period Trump also purchased the New Jersey Generals, a team in
the short-lived U.S. Football League; Mar-a-Lago, a 118-room mansion in Palm Beach, Florida,
built in the 1920s by the cereal heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post; a 282-foot yacht, then the
world’s second largest, which he named the Trump Princess; and an East Coast air-shuttle
service, which he called Trump Shuttle.
In 1977 Trump married Ivana Zelníčková Winklmayr, 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 son, Barron, was born the following year.
Melania Trump became rst lady of the United States upon Trump’s inauguration as
president in 2017.
When the U.S. economy fell into recession in 1990, many of Trump’s businesses suffered, and
he soon had trouble making payments on his approximately $5 billion debt, some $900
million of which he had personally guaranteed. Under a restructuring agreement with
several banks, Trump was forced to surrender his airline, which was taken over by US Airways
in 1992; to sell the Trump Princess; to take out second or third mortgages on nearly all of his
properties and to reduce his ownership stakes in them; and to commit himself to living on a
personal budget of $450,000 a year. Despite those measures, the Trump Taj Mahal declared
bankruptcy in 1991, and two other casinos owned by Trump, as well as his Plaza Hotel in New
York City, went bankrupt in 1992. Following those setbacks, most major banks refused to do
any further business with him. Estimates of Trump’s net worth during this period ranged
from $1.7 billion to minus $900 million.
Trump’s fortunes rebounded with the stronger economy of the later 1990s and with the
decision of the Frankfurt-based Deutsche Bank AG to establish a presence in the U.S.
commercial real estate market. Deutsche Bank extended hundreds of millions of dollars in
credit to Trump in the late 1990s and the 2000s for projects including Trump World Tower
(2001) in New York and Trump International Hotel and Tower (2009) in Chicago. In the early
1990s Trump had oated a plan to his creditors to convert his Mar-a-Lago estate into a luxury
housing development consisting of several smaller mansions, but local opposition led him
instead to turn it into a private club, which was opened in 1995. In 1996 Trump partnered with
the NBC television network to purchase the Miss Universe Organization, which produced the
Miss Universe, Miss USA, and Miss Teen USA beauty pageants. Trump’s casino businesses
continued to struggle, however: in 2004 his company Trump Hotels & Casino Resorts led for
bankruptcy after several of its properties accumulated unmanageable debt, and 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 red!” and helped him to promote his reputation as a shrewd 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 numerous 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 also 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
From the 1980s Trump periodically mused in public about running for president, but those
moments were widely dismissed 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 coauthored a book that year,
The America We Deserve, in which he set forth his socially liberal and economically
conservative political views. Trump later rejoined the Republican Party, and he maintained a
high public pro le during the 2012 presidential election. Although he did not run for of ce at
that time, he gained much attention for repeatedly and falsely implying that Democratic
Pres. Barack Obama was not 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 Obama’s signature
legislative achievement, the Affordable Care Act (ACA); to revive the U.S. coal industry; to
drastically reduce the in uence of lobbyists in Washington, D.C. (“drain the swamp”); to
withdraw the United States from the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change; to impose
tariffs on countries that allegedly engage in trade practices that are unfair to the United
States; 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 often mired in controversy,
much of it of his own making. In speeches and especially
Trump, Donald
via Twitter, a social medium he used frequently, Trump
Donald Trump at a campaign rally in regularly made in ammatory remarks, including some
Fountain Hills, Arizona, March 2016.
that were interpreted as racist or sexist. Other public
Gage Skidmore
comments by Trump, especially those directed at his
rivals or detractors in the Republican establishment,
were widely criticized for their unusual belligerence, their
bullying tone, and their indulgence in crude personal
insults. 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”
movement (a loose association of self-described white
nationalists, far-right libertarians, and neo-Nazis). While
Trump’s comments worried the Republican
Trump, Donald
establishment, his supporters were pleased by his
Donald Trump, 2016. combativeness and his apparent willingness to say
© Gino Santa Maria/Shutterstock.com
whatever came into his mind, a sign of honesty and
courage in their estimation. 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
of cially 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
classi ed State Department e-mails by using a private e-mail server. (Earlier in July, the FBI
announced that an investigation of Clinton’s use of e-mail as secretary of state had
determined that her actions had been “extremely careless” but not criminal.) Trump
continued his criticisms of Clinton in the ensuing weeks, routinely referring to her as
“Crooked Hillary” and repeatedly vowing to put her in jail if he were elected. Trump’s threat to
jail his political opponent was unprecedented in modern U.S. political history and was not
founded in any constitutional power that a U.S. president would have.
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, as Pres.
Richard Nixon had done in 1973. In January 2017, soon
Trump, Donald: 2016 U.S. presidential after Trump’s inauguration as president, a senior White
campaign
Donald Trump at a rally in Akron, Ohio, House of cial announced that Trump had no intention
August 2016.
of releasing his returns.
Amy Harris—Rex Features/Shutterstock/AP
Images
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 nd thousands of e-mails that he claimed had been
illegally deleted. A later investigation by the of ce of a special counsel appointed to examine
Russian interference in the 2016 election (see below Russia investigation) determined that
Russian hackers rst attempted to break into the personal e-mail servers of Clinton
campaign of cials on the same day, only hours after Trump issued his invitation.
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 in vulgar language 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 16 women subsequently claimed that they had been sexually
harrassed or assaulted by Trump in the past. Trump and his legal representatives denied the
allegations and asserted that all the women were lying; they also noted that Bill Clinton had
previously been accused of sexual harassment and assault. In part because of the video,
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 later investigations determined had been stolen by Russian hackers 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 to weaken public con dence
in U.S. democratic institutions, including the news media. In response, Trump attacked 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, including through the theft and publication of
Democratic Party e-mails and through a vast public in uence campaign that had used fake
social media accounts to spread disinformation and create discord among Americans.
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,” a term he used
frequently to disparage news reports that contained
negative information about him. He received no
United States presidential election of endorsements from major newspapers. During the third
2016
and nal presidential debate, in October, he made
Results of the U.S. presidential election, headlines when he refused to say that he would accept
2016.
the election results.
Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
Eight days after that debate, the Trump campaign

received a boost when FBI director James Comey noti ed 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 con dent 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 repeatedly
claimed, without evidence, that three to ve million people had voted for Clinton illegally.)
Trump took the oath of of ce 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.
Presidency
Almost immediately upon taking of ce, Trump began

issuing a series of executive orders designed to ful ll
some of his campaign promises and to project an image

of swift, decisive action. His rst order, signed on his rst
day as president, directed that all “unwarranted
economic and regulatory burdens” imposed by the ACA
should be minimized pending the “prompt repeal” of
that law. Five days later he directed the secretary of the
Department of Homeland Security to begin planning for
the construction of a wall along the country’s southern
Trump, Donald; Obama, Barack
border. An executive order on ethics imposed a ve-year
Pres. Barack Obama (right) and President-
ban on “lobbying activities” by former executive branch
elect Donald Trump in the Oval Office of the
employees but weakened or removed some lobbying
White House, Washington, D.C., November
10, 2016. restrictions imposed by the Obama administration.
Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP Images
Immigration
One of Trump’s most controversial early executive orders,

issued on January 27, implemented his promised
“Muslim ban,” which temporarily suspended
immigration to the United States from seven Muslim-
majority countries in the interest of national security. The
travel ban, as it came to be known, was immediately
challenged in court on statutory and constitutional
grounds (i.e., for allegedly violating anti-discrimination
and other provisions of the U.S. Immigration and
Nationality Act and for being inconsistent with the due-
process and establishment-of-religion clauses of the
Constitution). It also provoked spontaneous
Trump, Donald: presidential portrait
demonstrations at major airports in the United States in
The official presidential portrait of Donald support of persons with valid visas who were prevented
Trump.
from boarding ights to the U.S. or who were detained
White House Photo
upon arrival and forced to return to their originating
countries. In February a district court in Washington
state issued a nationwide temporary restraining order enjoining enforcement of the travel
ban, which the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit declined to stay.
Foreseeing eventual defeat in the courts, Trump in March issued a second executive order,
designed to avoid the constitutional pitfalls of the rst, which it superseded. The second
order also dropped Iraq from the list of targeted countries and narrowed the categories of
persons whose travel would be affected. Nevertheless, district courts in Hawaii and Maryland
issued preliminary injunctions blocking enforcement of the revised travel ban, which were
largely upheld in May and June by the Fourth and Ninth Circuit Courts of Appeal,
respectively. After agreeing in June to hear the consolidated cases during its October 2017
term, the U.S. Supreme Court signi cantly narrowed the injunctions, allowing the travel ban
to be enforced against “foreign nationals who lack any bona de relationship with a person
or entity in the United States.”
In September Trump issued a third version of the ban, which continued to apply to
immigrants from six Muslim-majority countries but now included immigrants from North
Korea and certain government of cials of Venezuela. The Supreme Court then vacated as
moot the cases it had been scheduled to hear regarding the second travel ban. The third
ban, like the previous two, was immediately challenged and enjoined, but the Supreme Court
stayed the injunctions in December pending review by the Fourth and Ninth Circuits (which
upheld them). The Ninth Circuit’s decision in Trump v. Hawaii was eventually reversed by the
Supreme Court in June 2018. In its ruling, the Court held, among other things, that the ban
was not obviously motivated by unconstitutional religious bias, notwithstanding many public
statements by Trump that had indicated otherwise to lower courts.
In April 2018 the Trump administration adopted what it called a “zero-tolerance” immigration
policy that entailed forcibly and inde nitely separating minor children from their parents in
families that had illegally crossed the U.S.-Mexico border together. From at least the early
2010s, most illegal crossings from Mexico had been undertaken by people seeking asylum
from violence and persecution in their home countries, especially in Central America and
Africa. (Under U.S. immigration law, foreign persons who are physically present in the United
States are entitled to asylum as refugees provided that they can establish a credible fear of
persecution in their home countries based on their race, religion, nationality, political opinion,
or membership in certain social groups.) In practice, the policy involved removing minor
children of all ages, including infants and toddlers, from their parents’ custody and sending
them to improvised shelters throughout the country run by the Department of Health and
Human Services (DHHS), while their parents were held in jails or detention centres to await
prosecution for illegal entry. Parents were often not informed of their children’s whereabouts
(which in many cases were unknown to authorities because little preparation had been
made to keep track of them), nor were they usually told when they would see their children
again. By mid-June more than 2,500 children had been separated from as many parents, and
some 500 parents had been deported without their children.
The Trump administration had conceived of and initially defended the policy as a necessary
deterrent to illegal economic immigration by people falsely claiming fear of persecution.
Trump himself asserted incorrectly that the separations were required by existing
immigration law and blamed Democrats for not changing it, notwithstanding his own
party’s control of both houses of Congress. Soon, however, widely circulated photographs of
visibly terri ed children being taken from their parents, and of others con ned within fenced
enclosures resembling cages, prompted international condemnation of the separation
policy, as did news reports of the abuse of some children in shelters. Facing pressure to act
from Congressional Republicans, in late June Trump signed an executive order ending the
separations. One week later a federal judge in California ordered the Trump administration to
reunite all minor children with their parents within 30 days.
As another facet of its campaign to reduce illegal immigration, the Trump administration
also greatly increased arrests of undocumented immigrants by Immigration and Customs
Enforcement (ICE), an agency of the Department of Homeland Security established in 2003.
During the Obama administration ICE had concentrated on undocumented immigrants
who had serious criminal records, but in January 2017 Trump directed the department to
nd, arrest, and deport all persons without documentation, regardless of how long they had
lived in the country or whether they had committed any crimes. ICE of cers thereafter
regularly conducted raids—at private homes, churches, schools, courthouses, and job sites—
in select locations throughout the country. Both criminal and noncriminal arrests increased
nationwide as compared with 2016, but noncriminal arrests constituted a much greater
percentage of the total. The raids were condemned by prominent Democrats and civil rights
organizations as draconian and wasteful, while some progressive groups proclaimed an
“abolish ICE” movement. At the same time, dozens of cities and towns declared themselves
“sanctuaries,” vowing not to cooperate with ICE and other federal authorities seeking to
remove undocumented immigrants from their jurisdictions.
Emoluments clause
During the presidential election campaign, some of Trump’s critics had warned that his
presidency could create a unique and immediate constitutional crisis because of his possible
violation of the foreign emoluments clause of the U.S. Constitution, which generally prohibits
federal of ceholders from accepting gifts, payments, or other items of value from foreign
states or rulers without congressional permission. (A related constitutional provision, known
as the domestic emoluments clause, speci cally prohibits the president from receiving any
emolument from the federal government or the states beyond his of cial compensation.)
Trump’s vast, complex, and largely secret international business interests, it was argued,
could create exactly the kind of con ict of interest that the foreign emoluments clause was
intended to prevent—unless Trump were to sell his assets or place them in a blind trust.
Although federal con ict-of-interest laws do not apply to the president and vice president,
several of Trump’s immediate predecessors in of ce had used blind trusts or other means to
avoid the appearance of con ict of interest.
To address such concerns, in January 2017 Trump announced that he would surrender
control—but not ownership—of his company, the Trump Organization, to two of his sons;
that the company would undertake no new business deals with foreign states or the U.S.
government; and that the company would donate to the U.S. Treasury any pro ts derived
from patronage of Trump properties by foreign governments—an arrangement that failed to
satisfy some specialists in government ethics. In late January a public interest group, Citizens
for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), later joined by other plaintiffs, led suit
in federal district court in Manhattan, alleging that Trump was in violation of the foreign
emoluments clause. In June the attorneys general of Maryland and the District of Columbia
sued Trump for allegedly having violated both the foreign and domestic emoluments
clauses, and soon afterward nearly 200 Democratic members of Congress led a separate
suit alleging that, by continuing to accept emoluments from foreign states without
consulting Congress, Trump had denied them the opportunity to give or withhold their
“Consent” as required under the foreign emoluments clause. After the CREW suit was
dismissed (for lack of standing) in December, the plaintiffs appealed the case to the Court of
Appeals for the Second Circuit in February 2018. In March and July 2018 a federal court
denied motions by the Trump administration to dismiss the suit by Maryland and the District
of Columbia, allowing the case to proceed to trial.
Supreme Court
In January 2017 Trump made good on his promise to place conservative justices on the
Supreme Court by nominating Neil Gorsuch, a judge of the Court of Appeals for the Tenth
Circuit, to ll the seat that had become vacant with the death in February 2016 of Antonin
Scalia. Although Obama had put forward Merrick Garland, a judicial moderate, as Scalia’s
replacement, the Republican-controlled Senate refused to schedule a vote or even to hold
hearings on Garland’s nomination, preferring to gamble that a Republican would win the
election and nominate a more conservative justice. Gorsuch was con rmed by the Senate in
April after Senate Republicans overcame a Democratic libuster by removing the traditional
60-vote minimum needed to end debate and proceed to a vote.
In July 2018 Trump nominated another appellate court judge, Brett Kavanaugh of the District
of Columbia Circuit, to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy. In hearings
before the Senate Judiciary Committee in September, a childhood acquaintance of
Kavanaugh’s, Christine Blasey Ford, testi ed that he had sexually molested her when they
were underage teens in Maryland and that he was “stumbling drunk” during the assault.
Kavanaugh was also accused of a separate act of sexual assault by a former classmate at Yale
University, Deborah Ramirez; and a third accuser, Julie Swetnick, declared in a sworn
statement that Kavanaugh had attended parties at which gang rapes took place. In his own
testimony, Kavanaugh angrily denied the allegations, insisting that they were the product of
a conspiracy by Democrats to exact revenge on behalf of “the Clintons” for Kavanaugh’s role
as a member of the legal team of independent counsel Kenneth Starr during the latter’s
investigation in the 1990s of U.S. Pres. Bill Clinton’s affair with White House intern Monica
Lewinsky. A subsequent supplemental investigation by the FBI, ordered by Trump, was
limited in duration and scope: Kavanaugh, Ford, and Swetnick were not interviewed; dozens
of witnesses recommended to the FBI by Ford and Ramirez were not contacted; and offers of
corroborating evidence by numerous other persons were not acted upon. After the
Republican chairman of the Judiciary Committee declared that the FBI’s con dential report
had found “no corroboration” of the allegations, Kavanaugh was narrowly con rmed by the
Senate in October. Ford’s emotionally compelling testimony—and the belief among many
women of both political parties that she had been treated unfairly—galvanized the #MeToo
movement of survivors of sexual assault and reinforced perceptions of the Republican Party
and the Trump administration as being insensitive to women’s concerns. Meanwhile, Trump
defended Kavanaugh as a victim of persecution and contended that the #MeToo movement
had created a dangerous climate for men.
Trump also successfully appointed a record number of appellate court judges, lling several
seats that had been left vacant by the refusal of Senate Republicans to con rm almost all of
Obama’s appellate court nominees during the last two years of Obama’s presidency. By July
2018 about one-seventh of the country’s appellate court seats were occupied by Trump
appointees.
Cabinet appointments
Trump took an unusually long time to assemble his cabinet, in part because many of his
nominations to positions requiring Senate con rmation were libustered by Democrats. His
cabinet was also unusual in that it was the least diverse in decades and by far the richest in
U.S. history. Some of Trump’s cabinet-level appointments were closely associated with the
rms or industries that their agencies were charged with overseeing or were well known for
having opposed their agencies’ basic missions in the past. Particularly controversial were
Trump’s choice for head of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Scott Pruitt, who as
Oklahoma attorney general had spent much of his career suing the EPA on behalf of the oil
and gas industry, and Trump’s choice for secretary of education, Betsy DeVos, who had
frequently expressed contempt for public education while promoting and nancially
supporting school voucher legislation and charter and private schools. Steve Bannon, the
former head of Breitbart News, an alt-right publishing platform, was appointed chief
strategist but left the administration after seven months in August 2017. Trump also gave his
son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and his daughter Ivanka Trump prominent (though unpaid) roles
as senior adviser to the president and assistant to the president, respectively.
During the rst 18 months of his administration, several of Trump’s cabinet members were
accused of ethics violations, including breaches of travel regulations or anti-lobbying laws
and inappropriate use of their agencies’ resources. In September 2017 Tom Price resigned as
secretary of health and human services after news reports revealed that he had spent some
$400,000 on luxury chartered aircraft for trips to Europe and in the United States. Treasury
Secretary Steven Mnuchin, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, and Veterans Affairs Secretary
David Shulkin were also criticized for inappropriate use of chartered or military aircraft. In
early 2018 Ben Carson, the secretary of housing and urban development, was investigated by
a House oversight committee for having spent an inordinate sum on furniture for his
government of ce. Later that year, Pruitt was forced to resign as EPA administrator after a
long series of scandals concerning questionable spending, the use of EPA employees as
personal assistants, inappropriate gifts from lobbyists, and the use of undisclosed e-mail
addresses for EPA business.
Russia investigation
In February 2017 Trump’s new national security adviser, Michael Flynn, was forced to resign
after press reports disclosed that Flynn had continued to serve in the White House despite a
warning from the Justice Department that he was vulnerable to Russian blackmail for
having lied to Vice President Pence about the substance of a telephone conversation
between Flynn and the Russian ambassador to the United States in December 2016. Flynn’s
contacts with the ambassador, both before and after the election, had been monitored by
the FBI as part of its routine surveillance of the ambassador’s communications and in
connection with a then secret investigation since July 2016 of possible collusion between
Russian of cials and prominent members of the Trump campaign. That investigation had
been triggered by information provided to the FBI by Australian authorities, who reported in
May that George Papadopoulos, a foreign-policy adviser in the Trump campaign, had
informed an Australian diplomat in London that Russia had “dirt” on Clinton, an apparent
reference to the stolen e-mails that were eventually released by Wikileaks in July. Speculation
in the press regarding the existence of the investigation had been repeatedly dismissed by
Trump as “fake news” but was con rmed by Comey in testimony before Congress in March,
during which he also contradicted Trump’s claim that Obama had spied on the Trump
campaign by tapping Trump’s telephones. Democratic members of Congress, meanwhile,
expressed dismay that Comey had chosen to report the discovery of additional Clinton e-
mails in October but had waited until after the election to reveal the Russia investigation.
After Comey testi ed again in May about Russian

interference in the election, Trump abruptly red him,
ostensibly on the recommendation of the Justice
Department, which in memos solicited by Trump
criticized Comey for his public disclosures regarding
Clinton’s e-mails. One day later Trump told Russian
of cials in a meeting at the White House that his ring
Trump, Donald of Comey had relieved “great pressure” on him and that
Donald Trump speaking at a rally in Comey was “a real nut job.” Trump soon acknowledged
Hershey, Pennsylvania, a month after
that he had intended to re Comey regardless of the
winning the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
Justice Department’s recommendation and that “this
Evan Vucci/AP Images
Russia thing” was a factor in his decision. Later that
month the press obtained a copy of a memo written by Comey that summarized a
conversation between Comey and Trump at a dinner at the White House in January. The
memo stated that Trump had asked Comey to pledge “loyalty” to him and that Trump had
indirectly requested that Comey drop the FBI’s investigation of Flynn. The memo
immediately raised concerns, even among some Republicans, that Trump’s actions may have
constituted obstruction of justice. The Justice Department then announced the
appointment of former FBI director Robert Mueller as special counsel to oversee the FBI’s
investigation of Russian interference in the election and possible collusion between Russian
of cials and the Trump campaign. Mueller was also authorized to investigate and prosecute
any federal crimes arising directly from or committed in the course of the investigation,
including obstruction of justice and perjury.
Comey’s testimony in June before the Senate Intelligence Committee, which, like the House
Intelligence Committee, was conducting its own investigation, was broadcast live on
television, radio, and the Internet. Many Americans watched from bars and restaurants,
which opened early in some parts of the country to provide venues for viewing the much-
anticipated event. Comey accused Trump and other administration of cials of lying about
Comey’s effectiveness as director of the FBI, and he attributed his being red to Trump’s
alleged desire to shut down the Russia investigation. Comey also revealed that, after being
red, he indirectly leaked the memo that recounted his dinner conversation with Trump in
the hope of triggering the appointment of a special counsel who would continue the Russia
investigation.
Early in July 2017 the press reported that in June 2016 senior members of the Trump
campaign, including its chairperson, Paul Manafort, as well as Jared Kushner and Trump’s
son Donald, Jr., had met secretly in Trump Tower with a lawyer associated with the Russian
government. In response, Donald, Jr., issued a statement in which he claimed that the
meeting had primarily concerned adoptions of Russian children by Americans and that he
had not known in advance who on the Russian side would be attending. Three days later the
press reported the existence of e-mails predating the meeting in which the British publicist
Rob Goldstone (who had helped Donald Trump, Sr., stage the 2013 Miss Universe contest in
Moscow) noti ed Donald, Jr., that the Russian government possessed incriminating
“documents and information” on Clinton and offered to set up a meeting to convey them
through a “Russian government attorney.” Attendance at such a meeting was potentially a
crime under U.S. campaign nance law, which generally prohibits accepting or soliciting
foreign assistance in connection with a U.S. election. Anticipating publication of the e-mails,
Donald, Jr., released his correspondence with Goldstone on Twitter but maintained that no
incriminating information on Clinton had been provided. During subsequent months,
con icting accounts of the meeting were issued by Trump administration of cials, by
Trump’s attorneys, and by Trump and his son as additional details periodically came to light
in the press. In September 2017 Donald, Jr., asserted in testimony before the Senate Judiciary
Committee that he “did not collude with any foreign government.”
In January 2018 President Trump’s legal team acknowledged in a memo to the Mueller
investigation that Trump himself had dictated the initial false account of the meeting,
contradicting earlier statements by his attorneys and by White House press secretaries. In
August 2018 Trump admitted via Twitter that the purpose of the meeting was “to get
information on an opponent” but insisted that the encounter was perfectly legal, that no
information was forthcoming, and that he did not know about the meeting in advance.
Repeating accusations, threats, and personal insults that he had made frequently on Twitter
and in speeches since the start of the Russia investigation, he again insisted that there had
been no collusion between his campaign and Russia, that the Mueller investigation was a
politically biased “witch hunt,” and that FBI and Justice Department of cials who had been
involved in the investigation were corrupt and dishonest. He also, for the rst time, publicly
(on Twitter) called upon Attorney General Jeff Sessions to put an end to the investigation by
ring Mueller—a power, however, that Sessions did not possess, having recused himself in
March 2017 after revelations of his previously undisclosed contacts with the Russian
ambassador as a member of the Trump campaign in September 2016.
In October 2017 the Mueller investigation announced a plea agreement with Papadopoulos
in which he admitted to lying to the FBI and pledged to cooperate with the investigation in
exchange for its promise not to prosecute him on more serious charges. Later that month
the Mueller team also unveiled a 12-count indictment against Manafort and his associate Rick
Gates (who himself had been an adviser to the Trump campaign), charging them with
money laundering, tax evasion, and bank fraud in connection with Manafort’s consulting and
lobbying efforts on behalf of Ukrainian political parties and leaders between 2006 and 2015.
In November Michael Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI, and in February 2018 additional
charges were led against Manafort and Gates in a superseding indictment, leading Gates to
reach a plea agreement. Gates’s testimony at Manafort’s trial in July–August was
instrumental in securing the latter’s conviction on eight criminal counts. Facing a second
trial on additional felony charges in September, Manafort reached his own plea agreement
with the Mueller investigation that month.
Also in February 2018 the Mueller investigation indicted 13 Russian nationals and three
Russian organizations on charges of conspiring to defraud the United States by interfering in
its political and electoral processes, including the 2016 election. The indictment charged that
the individual defendants, working in part through facilities provided by the Internet
Research Agency (IRA) in St. Petersburg, created hundreds of ctitious and stolen social
media identities to spread “derogatory information” about Clinton and to support Trump.
According to the indictment, they also engaged in efforts to discourage minorities from
voting, promoted allegations of voter fraud by the Democratic Party, purchased political
advertisements on social media, and used false U.S. identities to organize on-the-ground
political rallies in several states. Trump responded to the indictment on Twitter,
acknowledging Russian interference in the election but falsely asserting that the indictment
had established that there was no collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign and
that the outcome of the election had not been affected, a claim repeated by his legal team
and by White House of cials.
Acting on a referral by the Mueller investigation, in April the FBI raided the home and of ce
of Michael Cohen, Trump’s personal attorney, seizing business records and recordings of
telephone conversations between Cohen and his clients, including Trump. According to press
reports, Cohen was being investigated on charges of tax evasion, bank fraud, and violations
of campaign nance law in connection with his role in making or arranging payments in
2016 to Stephanie Clifford, an adult- lm actress, and Karen McDougal, a model, in ful llment
of nondisclosure agreements concerning their alleged affairs with Trump in 2006–07. In
March both women led lawsuits seeking to have their agreements declared invalid. Cohen
eventually pleaded guilty to eight criminal counts in August 2018 in a hearing at which he
stated under oath that Trump had directed him to arrange payments to Clifford and
McDougal.
In July 2018 Mueller indicted 12 Russian intelligence of cers for conspiring to interfere in the
2016 election by stealing thousands of e-mails and other documents from computer servers
of the Democratic Party and the Clinton campaign and publicly releasing them through
ctitious social media identities and Wikileaks. The indictment also charged the of cers with
breaking into the computer network of at least one state board of elections and stealing data
on approximately 500,000 voters. The announcement of the indictment prompted Trump to

again express doubt that Russia was responsible for the interference, as he had done on
several occasions since the beginning of the Russia investigation, and to again assert that the
FBI was corrupt and dishonest for not pursuing a criminal investigation of Clinton.
The announcement of the indictment preceded by only three days a summit meeting in
Helsinki between Trump and Russian Pres. Vladimir Putin, whom U.S. intelligence agencies
had previously identi ed as having ordered the Russian operation to interfere in the 2016
election. Following their meeting, Trump was asked at their joint press conference whether
he believed the assessment of U.S. intelligence agencies that Russia had interfered in the
election or instead accepted Putin’s denial of Russian involvement. In his response, Trump
criticized the FBI for failing to nd Clinton’s allegedly illegally deleted e-mails, stated that he
knew of no reason why Russia “would be” responsible for the interference, and credited Putin
with an “extremely strong and powerful” denial. In those and other remarks, Trump was
widely perceived, even by many Republicans, as having capitulated to Putin and acquiesced
in an attack on the United States by a hostile foreign power. Reacting to the storm of
criticism, Trump stated to the press the next day that he had meant to say that he knew of
no reason why Russia “wouldn’t be” responsible.
Health care
An early goal of the Trump administration, as re ected in Trump’s rst executive order, was
the repeal of Obamacare (the Affordable Care Act, or ACA), which Trump had long derided—
even before announcing his presidential bid—as an expensive failure. Trump pledged during
his campaign that he would replace the ACA with a bill that would provide better coverage at
lower premiums, and he promised that no one would lose health insurance under his plan.
However, the details of the bill, called in the House of Representatives the American Health
Care Act (AHCA), proved contentious even within his own party. Because Trump had not
worked out a speci c plan of his own, he was forced to rely on Republicans in the House to
draft a substantive bill that would reduce government involvement in the health insurance
market without depriving millions of Americans of the coverage they had acquired under the
ACA. The Republicans did not have a detailed alternative in hand, however, resulting in a
delay in Trump’s promised repeal of the law.
In early March 2017 House Republicans introduced their plan, which featured elimination of
the ACA’s “individual mandate” (the requirement that most Americans obtain health
insurance or pay a penalty), a reduction in individual tax credits for the purchase of insurance,
cuts in federal Medicaid funding, and nearly $1 trillion in tax cuts over a 10-year period,
including $274 billion in cuts for persons earning at least $200,000 a year. The Congressional
Budget Of ce (CBO) initially estimated that the plan would reduce the federal de cit by $337
billion over 10 years as compared with current law but would also increase the number of
uninsured people by 24 million over the same period. The bill immediately faced objections
from both moderate and conservative Republicans. The former worried that too many
people would lose affordable coverage, while the latter complained that the plan left too
many burdensome provisions of the ACA in place. The anxieties of moderates in particular
were ampli ed by the angry feedback they received at town hall meetings throughout the
country from constituents who feared the loss of their health insurance. Unable to bridge the
differences between the two factions, in late March the House leadership withdrew the bill
without a vote—a major defeat for Trump, who had made repeal and replacement of the ACA
a centrepiece of his campaign.
Six weeks later the House narrowly passed a revised version of the AHCA over the unanimous
opposition of Democrats. A subsequent CBO analysis projected that the new version would
reduce the de cit by $119 billion over 10 years as compared with current law but increase the
number of uninsured by 23 million.
Soon after the AHCA was passed, Republicans in the Senate, working largely in secret and
without input from Democrats, began crafting their own replacement for the ACA, initially
called the Better Care Reconciliation Act (BCRA). Like the AHCA, the BCRA, in numerous
versions under various names, would have decreased the de cit but signi cantly increased
the number of uninsured, and it would have increased insurance premiums in the rst year
after its passage, according to analyses released by the CBO in late June. The BCRA thus
faced the same criticisms that had beset the House measure, revealing deep divisions
between Senate Republicans who wished to limit the loss of health insurance in their states
and those who aimed to dismantle as much of the current law as possible. Eventually, within
a single week in late July, the Senate voted on three bills: a repeal of major provisions of the
ACA without immediate replacement; a relatively comprehensive repeal and replacement of
the ACA; and a more modest “skinny” repeal and replacement. Despite considerable political
pressure on Senate Republicans from the Trump administration, all three measures failed.
Having been unsuccessful in their attempts to repeal and replace the ACA, Republicans in
Congress and the Trump administration pursued a series of measures intended to
cumulatively undermine the law by making the health insurance it provided less accessible,
less affordable, and less effective (through reductions in coverage and other measures), a
strategy that Trump described as allowing Obamacare to “explode.” Those changes, some of
which predated the failure of Republican alternatives to the ACA in the Senate, included
cutting funding for advertising and for assistance with enrollment in Obamacare; drastically
reducing open enrollment periods; ending cost-sharing subsidies that enabled insurance
companies to reduce out-of-pocket expenses for low- and middle-income Americans; and
repealing (effective in 2019) the ACA’s “individual mandate,” which had required all
Americans to obtain health insurance or pay a penalty. (The last measure was part of
Republican tax legislation drafted in secret and passed without Democratic support in
December 2017; Trump signed the measure later that month. A subsequent analysis by the
CBO determined that the legislation, which among other things reduced the corporate tax
rate from 35 to 21 percent, would increase the federal de cit by approximately $1.8 trillion
over a 10-year period.) In November 2017 a study by the CBO had estimated that repealing
the individual mandate and making no other changes to the ACA would increase the
number of uninsured people by 13 million after 10 years and raise premiums by 10 percent in
most years through 2027. Other changes included allowing states to impose work
requirements on people receiving Medicaid; allowing the creation of “association health
plans” that would offer fewer essential health bene ts than plans under the ACA and charge
higher premiums to certain enrollees based on factors such as gender, occupation, and age;
and permitting the sale of short-term plans that would provide minimal bene ts and would
not cover medical services for preexisting conditions.
Environmental policy
One of the areas in which the Trump administration was able to move quickly to implement
its policies was the environment, in part because many of the changes it sought could be
accomplished through executive action by Trump or his appointees. Other changes were
undertaken through legislation adopted by Congress, whose Republican majority generally
shared Trump’s environmental views. In January, for example, Trump signed memoranda to
hasten approval and completion of the Dakota Access and Keystone XL oil pipelines, both of
which had been blocked by the Obama administration on environmental grounds. In
February Trump signed legislation to block an Interior Department rule that would have
restricted the dumping of toxic mining waste into streams and other waterways. In March
Trump signed an executive order that rescinded various Obama-era policies and programs
related to climate change, including a 2016 freeze on new coal leases on federal lands. In the
same month, EPA administrator Pruitt withdrew an EPA request that oil and natural gas
companies report methane emissions from their facilities and rejected a total ban on the
pesticide chlorpyrifos, against the advice of the EPA’s own scientists. Other signi cant
decisions included drastically reducing the size of national monuments created by Obama
and Pres. Bill Clinton; rescinding the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan, a set of EPA
regulations that had mandated a 32 percent reduction in carbon emissions by the U.S. power
sector between 2005 and 2030; revoking fuel-ef ciency standards for cars and light trucks
developed by the EPA during the Obama administration; and proposing numerous changes
to the Endangered Species Act (ESA) that would weaken legal protections for endangered
and threatened animals and make listing species as threatened more dif cult.
Undoubtedly the most momentous environmental decision of the new Trump

administration was Trump’s announcement in June that the United States would withdraw
from the Paris Agreement on climate change, under which the United States and 194 other
countries had agreed to a broad range of measures intended to limit potentially catastrophic
increases in global average temperatures during the 21st century and to mitigate the
economic consequences of global warming. Trump contended that the agreement would
harm the American economy (through government-mandated reductions in the country’s
greenhouse gas emissions) and was in other respects unfair and even demeaning to the
United States—historically the largest emitter of greenhouse gases and in the early 21st
century the second largest emitter after China. Trump’s decision was condemned by
government and political leaders, scientists, business executives, and activists throughout
the world but praised by Republicans in Congress, who viewed it as a reassertion of American
independence in world affairs and a repudiation of the environmental policies of the Obama
administration. Like Trump, many Republican lawmakers doubted that climate change was
real, while others questioned the human origins of global warming.
Foreign relations
A major theme of Trump’s presidential campaign was his view that the United States had
long been treated unfairly or taken advantage of by other countries, including by some
traditional U.S. allies, and that under Obama’s leadership the United States had ceased to be
respected in world affairs. In numerous speeches, tweets, and interviews, he threatened to
impose tariffs on countries that engaged in what he deemed unfair trade practices; harshly
criticized the World Trade Organization (WTO); and promised to renegotiate NAFTA (the
North American Free Trade Agreement), which he called “the worst trade deal” the United
States had ever signed. He also criticized NATO (the North Atlantic Treaty Organization),
dismissing the alliance as “obsolete” but also insisting that other NATO countries devote
more of their budgets to defense spending. In January 2017 he withdrew the United States
from the Trans-Paci c Partnership, a regional trade agreement between 12 Paci c Rim
countries that had been a major foreign policy achievement of the Obama administration.
(Trump’s action was largely symbolic, however, because Congress had never rati ed the
treaty.)
In January and March 2018 the Trump administration announced steep tariffs on imports of
solar panels (worth $8.5 billion per year) and washing machines (worth $1 billion), aimed
particularly at China and South Korea, and on imports of aluminum and steel (worth $48
billion) made in several countries, most of them U.S. allies (initial exemptions from the
aluminum and steel duties granted to Canada, the European Union [EU], and Mexico were
lifted in June). Dismissing warnings and criticisms from economists and business leaders
that the tariffs could ignite a trade war, Trump insisted in a tweet that “trade wars are good,
and easy to win.” In April China imposed retaliatory tariffs on a variety of U.S. goods worth
$2.4 billion annually, approximately the dollar amount of Chinese aluminum and steel
imports affected by the Trump tariffs. The EU followed suit in June with tariffs on U.S. imports
valued at $3.2 billion, as did Canada in July with tariffs on $12.8 billion of U.S. goods. Following
its of cial nding that the Chinese had engaged in unfair trade practices, in June the Trump
administration announced plans for tariffs on an additional $50 billion of dollars worth of
Chinese products, prompting China to announce comparable duties. Threats and
counterthreats of additional tariffs soon followed, and by July the two countries were
engaged in a full-blown trade war.
Trump’s tariffs and his antipathy to the WTO overshadowed the meeting in early June of the
Group of 7 in Quebec, Canada, which was marked by tense disagreement between Trump
and other G7 leaders over language regarding free trade in the meeting’s nal communiqué,
usually a bland formality. Following Trump’s early departure from the meeting, Canadian
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau reiterated his country’s reluctant determination to respond in
kind to Trump’s tariffs on aluminum and steel. Reacting to Trudeau’s remarks from a ight to
Singapore aboard Air Force One, Trump withdrew his endorsement of the communiqué and
called Trudeau “dishonest & weak.” In Singapore Trump held a historic meeting with North
Korean leader Kim Jong-Un, the rst face-to-face encounter between sitting leaders of the
two countries. Although Trump declared after the meeting that “there is no longer a Nuclear
Threat from North Korea,” it was unclear what concrete commitments North Korea had
made to nuclear disarmament. In July Trump attended the annual summit meeting of NATO
in Brussels, where in a speech he called other NATO countries “deliquent” and insisted that
they increase their defense spending “immediately.” The meeting ended with a joint
communiqué in which member countries agreed to continue their efforts to devote 2
percent of their GDP to defense spending by 2024, a goal they had agreed to in 2014.
Style and rhetoric
Trump’s personal style was unusual, if not unique, among national political gures in modern
U.S. history. In part re ecting his experiences as a prominent gure in the New York real
estate industry, Trump was ercely competitive as well as intensely concerned with
demonstrating his success and accomplishments to others. Indeed, from the very beginning
of his career, he cultivated and cherished his reputation as a shrewd businessman, an image
that often aided him in his real estate dealings and which he eventually exploited as a brand
beginning in the 1990s. That concern, however, was accompanied by an unusual sensitivity to
criticism and a tendency to retaliate harshly against those who he believed had betrayed him
or had treated him unfairly. His longtime mentor, friend, and legal adviser Roy Cohn (who
had assisted Joseph McCarthy’s investigations of alleged communist subversion in the U.S.
government in the 1950s) had encouraged him in the latter regard, counseling him on
numerous occasions never to apologize (because it is a sign of weakness) and always to hit
back harder than you are hit, as Trump put the lesson in The Art of the Deal. As he declared
in a tweet in 2012, “When someone attacks me, I always attack back…except 100x more. This
has nothing to do with a tirade but rather, a way of life!”
In keeping with his bellicose and confrontational style, Trump in his business career
characteristically used blunt language as a weapon against his rivals and adversaries,
pointedly insulting or belittling them in the press in retaliation for their real or perceived
slights. Perhaps surprisingly, Trump did not signi cantly alter his style or temper his rhetoric
upon his entry into politics, notwithstanding the conventional view that success in politics is
necessarily a matter of persuasion and compromise rather than “hitting back harder.” The
advent of Twitter in 2006 eventually gave Trump (who joined the service in 2009) a larger
platform for his un ltered political comments, once he began regularly tweeting about
politics in about 2011. During the presidential primaries and in the 2015–16 election campaign,
Trump frequently used his Twitter account, which had more than 40 million followers, to
angrily attack Democrats, his Republican rivals and critics, the news media, job-exporting
corporations, and anyone else who had provoked his ire in comments that were widely
perceived as aggressive, boastful, petty, and vulgar. Trump similarly declined to lter himself
in speeches, once even mocking the disability of a reporter he disliked. Another unique
feature of Trump’s rhetoric was the large number of his public statements that were shown
to be false or misleading by the press or by independent fact-checking organizations.
Although critics, including some in the Republican Party, occasionally admonished him for
what they considered undigni ed behaviour, their condemnation only provoked him to fresh
attacks. Despite some speculation after his election that the weight of the presidential of ce
and his eventual need for tangible political and diplomatic successes would lead him to
adopt a more conventional demeanour, his confrontational style and rhetoric continued
unchanged through the rst year of his presidency, and indeed the targets of his attacks only
expanded—notably to include his perceived enemies in the FBI and the Justice Department
and professional football (NFL) players who had protested police brutality by kneeling during
the playing of the national anthem. In any event, Trump certainly distinguished himself from
previous U.S. presidents by his heavy use of social media. He was the rst president to rely on
Twitter as a primary means of communication with his political supporters and the press,
using it even as a venue for semi-of cial presidential statements.
Beyond its novelty and perceived unseemliness, Trump’s rhetoric also raised serious concerns
among members of both parties about its potential damage to Americans’ respect for
democratic institutions, particularly freedom of the press and the rule of law. From early in
his presidential campaign, Trump attacked unfavourable press reports about him as “fake
news,” implying that the news organizations in question knowingly published falsehoods.
After his election Trump frequently condemned most major news organizations as “the
enemy of the American people,” a phrase reminiscent of totalitarian societies. The effect of
his accusations was to engender among his supporters a distrust of and hostility toward
major media outlets other than Fox News, which generally supported Trump in its reporting
and which he regularly watched. Many political scientists and media scholars also pointed to
more general problems, claiming that Trump’s efforts to portray the press as untrustworthy
had created broad confusion and uncertainty among the electorate about what was true—or
even a passive and resigned attitude about the possibility of nding out what was true. They
also worried that Trump’s rhetoric would so diminish public con dence in the press that it
would cease to serve effectively as a check on governmental power, the role that the
founders of the country had envisioned for it. Analogous concerns were raised about Trump’s
attacks on individual judges who had issued rulings he disliked and on FBI and Justice
Department of cials who had participated in the Russia investigation. Such rhetoric, it was
alleged, encouraged a distorted perception of the judiciary and law-enforcement agencies as
inherently biased. Some independent observers, however, regarded those criticisms as
overblown, while Trump and his supporters dismissed them as motivated by political bias or
by the resentment of Democrats at having lost the presidential election.
Brian Duignan
Cabinet of Pres. Donald J. Trump

Cabinet of cials in the administration of Donald J. Trump are provided in the table.
Cabinet of President Donald Trump

January 20, 2017–
Rex W. Tillerson
Secretary of State
Mike Pompeo (from April 26, 2018)
Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin
Secretary of Defense James Mattis (to December 31, 2018)
Jeff Sessions
Attorney General
William Barr (from February 14, 2019)
Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke (to January 2, 2019)
Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue
Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross
Secretary of Labor R. Alexander Acosta
January 20, 2017–

Tom Price
Secretary of Health and Human Services
Alex M. Azar II (from January 29, 2018)
Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson
Secretary of Transportation Elaine Chao
Secretary of Energy Rick Perry
Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos
David J. Shulkin
Secretary of Veterans Affairs
Robert Wilkie (from July 30, 2018)
John F. Kelly
Secretary of Homeland Security
Kirstjen Nielsen (to April 7, 2019)
CITATION INFORMATION
ARTICLE TITLE: Donald Trump
WEBSITE NAME: Encyclopaedia Britannica
PUBLISHER: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.
DATE PUBLISHED: 08 April 2019
URL: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Donald-Trump
ACCESS DATE: June 08, 2019

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6/9/2019 Donald Trump -- Britannica Online Encyclopedia

Early life and business career

Beginning in the late 1920s, Fred Trump built hundreds

naval personnel and shipyard workers in Virginia and

During the 1960s and early 1970s, Trump-owned housing

Key events in the life of U.S. Pres. Donald

On the campaign trail, Trump quickly established

insults. Trump’s initial refusal to condemn the Ku Klux

Despite having pledged in 2015 that he would release his

Following the Democratic convention, Trump continued to make controversial and

Despite his ongoing efforts to portray Clinton as

Eight days after that debate, the Trump campaign

Almost immediately upon taking of ce, Trump began

some of his campaign promises and to project an image

One of Trump’s most controversial early executive orders,

After Comey testi ed again in May about Russian

on approximately 500,000 voters. The announcement of the indictment prompted Trump to

Undoubtedly the most momentous environmental decision of the new Trump

Style and rhetoric

Cabinet of Pres. Donald J. Trump

Cabinet of President Donald Trump

January 20, 2017–

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