Washington, Oct. 31, (dpa/GNA) – Donald Trump’s rise to the US presidency, which he held from 2017-2021, upset many assumptions and taboos, but perhaps just as surprising is that he has brushed off two impeachments, a criminal conviction and several other threats to contend again for the White House.
His come-from-behind win against Hillary Clinton in 2016, by claiming outsider status and promising to bring a businessman’s acumen for dealmaking to the White House, shocked the US political system and fundamentally changed the Republican party.
In 2024, four years after losing to Joe Biden, he still casts himself as the man to shake up US politics by taking on the corrupt elites.
All the while he has kept his brash campaign style, prone to riffing on theories well outside the mainstream, and rarely shying away from an opportunity to personally insult or belittle his opponents.
If Trump wins, the 78-year-old would be the oldest person in US history elected president.
Born June 14, 1946, he was the fourth of five children of Frederick Trump, a real estate magnate who bequeathed a small New York empire to his family.
At age 13, Trump’s parents sent him to a military academy. The future president went on to study at Fordham University and then the University of Pennsylvania’s prestigious Wharton School of Business.
After graduating from Wharton, he joined his father’s business and in 1974 became its president and renamed it the Trump Organization.
Investments in hotels, casinos, golf courses, luxury apartments and beauty pageants followed.
As the star of the TV reality show “The Apprentice” he relished delivering bad news to failed contenders, telling them curtly: “You’re fired.”
Trump dipped into politics from time to time, but seemed galvanized under the administration of Barack Obama and morphed into a right-wing populist. He loudly peddled the lie that Obama was not born in the United States.
Trump’s critics, which include several high-profile members of his first administration, have cast him as chaotic, divisive and a threat to democracy. General John Kelly, his former chief of staff, recently likened him to a “fascist.”
His rhetoric has been crude and dark at rallies, veering from crass insults to false claims and menacing warnings, like his suggestion this month he could use the military to handle what he called “the enemy from within.”
Like in 2016, his 2024 campaign has put an anti-immigration stance front and centre.
In 2016 he said some Mexican immigrants were rapists and murderers; this year he baselessly accused Haitian immigrants of eating pets in the town of Springfield, Ohio – a line repeated by his vice presidential pick, Ohio Senator JD Vance.
GNA