Who is Donald Trump, one step away from victory in the 2024 US elections

The penultimate and now almost certainly next president of the United States, Donald Trumphe is a man of a thousand lives. Three wives, five children, entrepreneur and TV personality before being a politician capable of winning twice in the US elections. Divisive is an almost obvious term when talking about the tycoon.

From January 20, 2017 to January 20, 2021 he was the 45th President of the United States of America and is preparing to become the 47th after an electoral campaign that saw him go beyond already exceeded limits of verbal incorrectness and fake news.

His opponents have always highlighted his vulgarity and lies. They consider him questionable from an ethical and moral point of view: he was certainly the first former President in US history to have been indicted. On the other hand, however, their pragmatism and opposition to the system are praised. If on the one hand he appears like a criminal, on the other he is a politically persecuted person.

The story of Donald Trump

The Donald was born on June 14, 1946 in New York. Following in his father’s footsteps, his career began in the real estate sector after studying at the New York Military Academy and graduating in 1968 in Economics and Finance from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

The entire first part of his working life was in construction, starting from the economic base of his father, one of the richest people in the USA in the seventies. Donald expands to the world by building resorts, hotels and golf courses. The symbol of this construction empire is Trump Tower in New York.

He was the owner of the Miss Universe, Miss America and Miss Teen USA beauty pageants. Above all on TV he hosted The Apprentice, where he spent his strength as an entrepreneur in choosing competitors’ businesses that would work.

He had never been involved in politics publicly, but had been close to the Democratic Party for years. His run like Donald Trump in 2016, after Obama’s double mandate and against Hillary Clinton, was a triumph: he reached the presidency without ever having held a political office in the past and with part of the Republican Party, with which he was running, against. In 2020, the defeat against Joe Biden, contested to the end, until the assault on the Capitol which he struggled to condemn on January 6, 2021.

His political position was then the one he presented again in this electoral campaign: Make America Great Againmake America great again. The means are the closure of borders, with walls for people, with duties for goods. No to agreements to limit climate change.

Trouble with the law

Over the years, Donald Trump has had no shortage of problems with the law. Twice he was impeached and tried without being convicted by Congress. In his life, he remembers the Corriere della Serahad 4000 prosecutions. In 92% of cases he emerged victorious. These include those of defaulting tenants and players who did not pay off debts in his casino in Atlantic City, but also the missed payments to companies that worked for him.

Two civil lawsuits have come to light in the last two years. The tycoon was sentenced to pay $464 million for accounting irregularities in the Trump Organization and especially the case of Jean Carroll who accused him of sexual assault in an episode that dates back to the mid-1990s.

There are four criminal cases against him which did not prevent him from running for office. The best known case, the one for which a sentence was issued, is that of the porn star Stormy Daniels. Trump was found guilty of various crimes linked to the payment of 130 thousand dollars to the porn star. The money would have been paid, during the 2016 campaign, in exchange for silence about their sexual relations when he was already married to his third wife Melania. To recover the money he falsified his campaign accounts. The payment, denied by Trump, was confirmed in court by Michael Cohen, then his lawyer. The decision on the penalty, which should only be monetary, is expected on November 25th.

Prosecutor Jack Smith indicted Trump for the January 6, 2021, assault on Congressbut the process was postponed after the elections. The same goes for the one about the top secret documents that Trump took from the White House and brought to his Mar-a-Lago residence. In Georgia there is a trial over the attempt to change the state’s vote 4 years ago. As president-elect, this is the only process that could remain because it is not federal.

The Trump family

Donald Trump has been married three times and has five children. The first three were born from the marriage, which lasted from 1977 to 1992, with the Czechoslovakian model Ivana Marie Zelnikova, known as Ivana Trump who died in 2022. They are Donald John Trump jr, Ivanka Marie Trump and Eric Frederic Trump. The latter was for years the favorite advisor together with her husband Jared Kushner, but their positions have drifted apart in recent years. His second wife, from 1993 to 1999, is Marla Maples with whom he has his daughter Tiffany. The third wife is the Slovenian model Melania Knauss. The relationship has been going on since 1998, the marriage dates back to 2005. The couple has a son Barron, born in 2006, who took to the stage in 2024, while he was little more than a child at the time of the first election and the mother had decided to stay to New York for him to finish school.

Source: Vanity Fair

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