Chapter 27
A Billionaire in the White House: Donald John Trump
IN THIS CHAPTER
Looking at Trump’s early years
Building his businesses
Getting involved in politics
Running for president
Shocking the country and the world
Governing under a cloud
Donald Trump shocked the country and the world in 2016, when he won the U.S. presidential election. Nobody had expected him to beat the favored Democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton. He ran an unconventional campaign full of insults and exaggerations. Soon after becoming president in January 2017, scandals broke out that still engulf his presidency. From the Russia scandal to the current Ukraine scandal, the president finds himself constantly facing adversity. He was even impeached by the House of Representatives on December 18, 2019, but the Senate acquitted him on February 5, 2020. Despite all of these scandals, the Trump administration has had some policy successes, especially when it comes to the economy.
The following quote best expresses what Donald Trump is all about. “My whole life is about winning. I don’t lose often. I almost never lose.”
According to Forbes Magazine’s 2019 billionaire rankings, Donald Trump is worth $3.1 billion, making him the wealthiest U.S. president ever and the only billionaire to hold the job.
Growing Up Wealthy
Donald J. Trump was born on June 14, 1946, in New York City. His grandfather Friedrich Drumpf had emigrated to the United States from Germany 60 years earlier. Upon arrival in the United States his last name was changed to Trumpf, and later Friedrich dropped the “f” to make the name sound more American. He started out in Seattle, supplying miners headed to Canada. Later he would move to New York City and became a small-time land developer.
After he died in 1918, his wife and oldest son, Fred, began to build and rent/sell houses and apartments in middle-class neighborhoods in the city. Their company, E. Trump & Son, became very successful, and Fred married Mary Ann MacLeod, a New York socialite born in Scotland, in 1936. Donald was born ten years later. Young Donald went to private school and enjoyed the leisurely life. Because he liked pranks more than hard work, his father sent him to military school. After graduating from the New York Military Academy, he started at Fordham University. After two years Donald transferred to the more prestigious Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania, from which he graduated with a B.S. degree in economics in 1968. He then joined the family business and in 1971 was given control of the business by his father. Right away he renamed the organization the “Trump Organization.”
Young Donald went to work with his father at a young age. He went to construction jobsites to learn the trade of the business. He was a hands-on man often getting his hands dirty helping out. In other words, he became his father’s apprentice at a young age, being groomed to take over the family business.
Donald Trump and his father Fred claimed to be of Swedish descent because of anti-German sentiment during and right after WWII. It was not until the 1990s that they admitted the truth.
Donald Trump does not drink alcohol or smoke cigarettes. He decided not to drink alcohol after his brother Fred Jr. became an alcoholic and died of the disease. However, he loves fast food, a habit he has brought to the White House.
Succeeding in Business
Unlike his father Fred, who had made millions developing middle-class real estate in Queens and the Bronx, Donald believed that more money could be made in Manhattan developing luxury real estate. After real estate prices fell in New York City, Donald saw his chance. He successfully developed two abandoned properties for Penn Central Railway in1974 and became a household name in New York real estate.
When New York City was facing tough financial times in the mid to late 1970s, Donald Trump saw an opportunity. More and more businesses were failing, and many buildings were abandoned. He purchased the Commodore Hotel with the Hyatt Hotel Corporation and renovated it. By 1980 it reopened as the Grand Hyatt. Donald Trump made millions. His early crowning achievement came in 1983 when he completed the Trump Tower, a 58-story building in Manhattan, which also became his home.
The Trump Tower was widely successful. It was the place to live in New York City with one of its apartments selling for $12 million.
Marrying a model
In 1976, Donald Trump met the Czech model and skier Ivana Zelnickova. He fell in love with her, and they married in 1977. Donald Trump had three children with Ivana: Donald, Jr., Ivanka, and Eric. By the late 1980s the marriage began to fall apart. Donald had met actress Marla Maples and begun dating her. After divorcing Ivana in 1992, Donald married Marla and his second daughter Tiffany was born. The marriage only lasted for six years, and then Trump was divorced again.
Donald Trump is the only U.S. President who has been divorced more than once.
Failing in Atlantic City
Not all of Donald Trump’s business ventures proved to be successful. In 1982, Donald Trump became interested in Atlantic City after gambling had been legalized. He first developed the Atlantic City Boardwalk and then acquired and built several casinos. To fund the casinos, Donald had to borrow money at high interest rates, and the casinos never proved to be profitable. Trump began to sell them off in the 1990s, and by 2016 the last Trump casino, the Taj Mahal, closed.
Getting into golf and loving Florida
In 1985, Donald Trump purchased the Mar-a-Lago estate in South Florida. He rebuilt it into a private club and even lived in a wing of the club. Initiation fees are $200,000. On September 27, 2019, Trump declared Mar-a-Lago to be his primary residence, moving from the Trump Tower in New York City to Florida.
Donald Trump began to purchase and redesign golf courses in 1999. Today Trump owns 18 golf courses all over the world, which generated almost $382 million in revenue in 2015.
Entering Politics
In the late 1990s Donald Trump ventured into politics. At first he was not sure which party to support and run for. In 1999, he announced that he was forming a presidential exploration committee to run for president as a candidate for the Reform Party (see Chapter 24). He even wrote a book to support his run, entitled The America We Deserve, in which he outlined his policy goals including universal healthcare and allowing gays to openly serve in the military. By 2001, however, he decided to leave politics for the time being.
Donald Trump met Melania Knauss, a model from Slovenia, in 1998 after he had separated from his second wife Marla Maples. He was 52, and she was 28. They fell in love and got married in 2005. Trump’s son Barron was born one year later.
Bill and Hillary Clinton attended Trump’s wedding in 2005 as honored guests.
Going on TV and receiving national exposure
In 2004, Donald Trump’s television show The Apprentice premiered. Two hundred thousand Americans applied to work for Trump, and 16 were chosen for the series. They were assigned tasks by Trump and then evaluated on their performance. After reviewing their performances, Trump would decide who would get booted from the show and who got to stay. The lone survivor of the show at the end of the season would get a job with the Trump organization. The show became a big hit for the next 14 years and made Donald Trump a household name in the United States.
In 2007, Donald Trump received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. He is one of two presidents to receive this honor. The other is Ronald Reagan.
With his newfound success on television, Trump moved away from developing real estate, now focusing on licensing his name for new construction. In other words he would not build most of the Trump projects globally, but his name would be licensed to them. Today there are Trump Towers in Chicago, Las Vegas, and even Turkey, Dubai, and India.
Turning on democrats
In March 2011, Donald Trump, the former Democratic and Reform Party supporter, turned on his previous party, the Democratic Party. In an interview in March of 2011, he started the birther debate. Trump claimed that President Obama was not born in the United States, because he never produced his birth certificate. Trump went on many television and radio shows to further this conspiracy theory and became a household name in conservative circles. President Obama did produce his birth certificate in April 2011, ending the controversy, but Trump’s name had become a household name in the Republican Party.
Donald Trump published another book in 2011, entitled Time to Get Tough: Make America Great Again. The second part of the title “Make America Great Again” would become his campaign slogan in the 2016 election.
Running for the presidency
On June 16, 2015, Donald Trump announced that he would run for president in 2016 as a Republican. His two major campaign promises were to repeal Obamacare and to build a wall between Mexico and the United States to cut down on illegal immigration and crime.
When announcing his candidacy, Trump said the following: “When Mexico sends its people, they are not sending their best… . They are bringing in drugs. They are bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.” Trump was right away denounced as racist, and most Americans assumed that he would have no chance of winning the Republican presidential nomination.
Winning the nomination
Seventeen candidates ran for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016. They included well-known politicians such as the former governor of Florida Jeb Bush, whose father and brother had been president; Texas Senator Ted Cruz; and Florida Senator Marco Rubio. All ran traditional campaigns with the exception of Donald Trump. His campaign and debating style included personal insults and wild exaggerations. However, the public was dissatisfied with politics as usual in 2016, and Trump’s outsider status and unorthodox campaign style appealed to them. After Trump won the New Hampshire primary, he proved to be unstoppable. By May of 2016, Donald Trump had wrapped up the Republican nomination and became the Republican presidential nominee in August 2016. He picked Indiana Governor Mike Pence, a staunch conservative, as his running mate to shore up conservative support.
Winning in 2016
The presidential race in 2016 came down to an interesting choice. On the one hand you had a career politician, Hillary Clinton, who had been First Lady, a U.S. senator from New York, and secretary of state in the Obama administration. On the other hand, there was a successful but very controversial businessman with no political experience who only recently had become a Republican. Every pundit around the globe believed that Hillary Clinton would be the next president of the United States.
Clinton’s campaign faced problems early on. First, it was discovered that she had used her private email server while secretary of state. When her server was turned over to the FBI, thousands of emails had been deleted and the server had been scrubbed. Even though FBI Director James Comey refused to file charges, he stated that she and her staff had been very careless. Next, WikiLeaks released emails showing that the Clinton campaign had colluded with the Democratic National Committee to make sure that she would defeat her primary opponent Bernie Sanders. Sanders’s supporters were incensed, and many would stay home on election day or — more detrimental to Democrats — vote for Donald Trump.
Finally, in the last weeks of the campaign, Clinton would refer to Trump supporters as a “Basket of Deplorables,” motivating them to turn out and vote on election day. More important, she skipped several crucial states in the Midwest while campaigning because she believed she would easily win them. Ignoring her husband’s advice, she instead campaigned in Republican states such as Georgia and Arizona, which her campaign believed they could win.
Donald Trump had his own problems during the fall campaign. Several women alleged that he had sexually assaulted them, and a tape from 2005 was released in which he crudely claimed that you could force yourself onto women when you were a star. This almost cost him the election.
Shocking the world
On election night Donald Trump defied every public opinion poll. Analysts and experts on television were shocked when he was able to win states that were considered solidly Democratic, such as Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. By the end of the night it became clear that Donald Trump had won the presidency (see Figure 27-1) by winning the electoral college vote but had lost the popular vote. Half the country was in shock and right away claimed that he was “Not My President.”
Donald Trump is a germaphobe. He uses a straw to drink and hates shaking hands with people.
Source: The Library of Congress
FIGURE 27-1: Donald J. Trump: The 45th president of the United States.
Being Controversial at Home
Controlling both houses of Congress, Trump tried to move quickly to have his agendas secured. However, he became frustrated with how slowly Congress operates and has relied heavily on executive orders to implement or change policies (see Chapter 1 for a discussion of the presidential power of executive order).
Implementing domestic policies
Some of his most important domestic policies include:
- The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017: This act was the largest tax cut since 1986. It cut the corporate tax rate permanently from 35 percent to 21 percent and reduced individual income taxes until 2027 for all tax brackets. The act further increased the standard deduction and increased tax credits for families.
- Cutting back Obamacare: The Trump administration eliminated the individual mandate from Obamacare that required everybody under 65 years of age to get health insurance or pay a fine. It further cut Obamacare’s advertising budget and cut the enrollment period in half. According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), this will increase the number of uninsured by about seven million by 2026.
- Reshaping the federal courts: Up until November 2019, President Trump had appointed two Supreme Court justices and a record 183 federal justices (district court and appeals court). This amounts to 25 percent of all federal justices. Most of his appointees are young and conservative and will move the federal courts to the right for the foreseeable future.
- The Muslim travel ban: President Trump imposed a travel ban on travelers from mostly Muslim countries (it also included North Korea and government officials and their families from Venezuela) that experienced terrorist activities. On June 26, 2018, the United States Supreme Court upheld the ban, which now excludes legal permanent residents, dual citizens, and the country of Iraq.
Succeeding economically
Since President Trump assumed office in January 2017, the U.S. economy has been booming. The economy grew by 3.1 percent in 2018, and 2.2 percent in 2019. The stock market (Dow Jones Industrial Average) has seen an increase of over 9,000 points. The unemployment rate is at the lowest level in 50 years, and unemployment for African-Americans and Hispanics is at a historic low.
Being Controversial Abroad
While President Trump has been successful dealing with the United States economy, foreign policy has been a mixed bag. There have been successes in the Middle East and in the fight against terrorism, but at the same time President Trump’s emphasis on an “America First” policy has alienated many U.S. allies. His major foreign policy include the following:
- Withdrawing from the Paris Climate Accord: By 2019, 195 nations had signed on to the Paris Treaty, known as the Paris Climate Accord. The treaty stipulates that all signees have to initiate policies to limit global warming and then report on their efforts. The objective of the treaty is to mitigate global warming and to limit the increase of global temperatures to below 1.5 degrees Celsius. The Trump administration declared its intentions to withdraw from the treaty in June 2017, but the United States cannot fully withdraw from the treaty until November 2020. So far none of the signees have adhered to the treaty, and the treaty contains no mechanism to enforce its goals.
- Getting tough with Allies: Beginning in 2017, President Trump demanded that NATO allies pay more for their military defense. In 2014, NATO members had agreed to spend at least 2 percent of GDP on their militaries, but most just ignored the obligation. Out of 28 NATO members, only 5 countries had met the mark by 2017. The United States, on the other hand, spent close to 4 percent of GDP on its military. Overall, the U.S. outspent the other 27 NATO members two to one. Germany, for example, actually cut military spending to 1.1 percent while running big budget surpluses. After Trump’s complaints and even threats of being unwilling to continue to protect NATO members if they refused to protect themselves, NATO, including Germany, begrudgingly agreed to increase defense spending and meet the 2 percent obligation by 2024.
- Declaring Jerusalem the capital of Israel: The Trump administration declared Jerusalem the capital of Israel despite objections from the United Nations and most European allies. The American embassy was moved in May 2018 from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
- Withdrawing from the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP): The Trump administration withdrew the United States from the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), a free trade agreement negotiated by the Obama administration. Trump prefers bilateral agreements, namely trade agreements between two countries.
Implementing tariffs against China: Claiming that China was using unfair trade practices against the United States and was further illegally obtaining U.S. technology, President Trump imposed tariffs on Chinese goods. China retaliated, but on January 15, 2020, a Phase I deal was reached. China agreed to buy more American farm goods and allow the United States to bring criminal charges against Chinese companies for stealing U.S. technology. The U.S. in turn agreed to not impose further tariffs. Negotiations on a Phase II deal started right away.
Renegotiating NAFTA: President Trump successfully renegotiated NAFTA (see Chapter 24). The treaty is now called The United States Mexico Canada Agreement (USMCA). It includes new labor and environmental standards as well as intellectual property protections. It is estimated to create 176,000 new jobs in the United States.
- Cutting troops in Afghanistan: President Trump announced that he will withdraw most U.S. troops from Afghanistan but keep a small contingent of about 8,600 in the country.
- Destroying ISIL (Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham): By 2019, ISIL had been defeated on the battlefield, and its leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi had been killed in a U.S. raid.
Scandals: Defining Trump’s Presidency
From the beginning, the Trump administration was mired in scandals that have undermined his presidency. The constant wave of scandals has resulted in negative coverage of his presidency, overshadowing his economic and foreign policy successes.
Instead of being able to focus on domestic and foreign policy, President Trump has constantly dealt with putting out fires often caused by his own actions. The two biggest scandals were the Russia and the Ukraine scandals.
The Russia scandal
Almost as soon as Donald Trump had assumed the presidency, the Russia scandal broke out. It involved some of the president’s closest aides, including his national security advisor.
During the 2016 presidential election, Russian operatives hacked Hillary Clinton’s server and later also the server for the Democratic National Committee. U.S. intelligence would later find out that the Russian government was actively trying to interfere in the U.S. presidential election by creating dissent among the U.S. public and trying to undermine Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton.
In May 2017, Trump fired FBI Director James Comey, who had been leading an investigation into links between the Russian government and Trump associates. Comey later testified that he was fired after he refused to drop the investigation of President Trump’s National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, who had resigned after only 24 days in office after it was discovered that he had lied to Congress about meetings with the Russian Ambassador to the United States.
Former FBI Director Robert Mueller was appointed in May 2017 to investigate whether there was any collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government and whether the Trump campaign had attempted to obstruct justice.
The findings of the investigation were released in April 2019 and stated that while there was clear interference by the Russian government in the 2016 presidential elections, there was no clear evidence that the Trump campaign had conspired with the Russian government. The report does note that while there was no evidence the Trump campaign coordinated with the Russian government, it clearly did benefit from Russian interference.
The findings on obstruction of justice were less clear. Mueller concluded that he could not charge a sitting president with a crime because a sitting president cannot stand trial. Only Congress can charge and then impeach and even remove a president. According to the report: “The investigation does not conclude that the president committed a crime; however, it does also not exonerate him.” In other words Mueller took the easy way out and left it up to Congress to take the next or no steps.
The Ukraine scandal
After having weathered the Russia scandal, it looked like President Trump’s presidency was safe until the 2020 election. However, in September 2019, the Ukraine scandal broke out. The scandal involves President Trump’s alleged attempts to coerce Ukraine into providing information on his possible democratic challenger Joe Biden and his son Hunter. According to the charges, President Trump threatened to withhold $400 million in military aid from Ukraine, unless it reopened an investigation into Hunter Biden’s activities in Ukraine. An anonymous whistle blower brought this to the attention of Congress and the media, and in September 2019, the House of Representatives began hearings on whether President Trump solicited foreign intervention in the 2020 campaign. This would be an impeachable offense. Full impeachment hearings were started on October 31, 2019. These were open to the public and were nationally televised. On December 18, 2019, the House of Representatives voted 230 to 197 to impeach President Trump for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.
President Trump was the third president to be impeached by the House of Representatives. Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton were the other two. (For an explanation of the impeachment process, turn to the “How to get impeached” sidebar in Chapter 11.)
After he was impeached by the House of Representatives, the Senate started on January 16, 2020, to debate whether to remove President Trump from office. On February 5, 2020, the Senate acquitted President Trump by a 52 to 48 vote. It is now up to the U.S. electorate to decide whether he deserves a second term.