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From private island to private jet: What is 'billionaire' Jeffrey Epstein's net worth?Janna Herron and Kevin McCoyThis news story has been updated with information from a federal court filing disclosed on July 15, 2019Who is Jeffrey Epstein? It turns out that the descriptor most used to identify him over the past decades – billionaire – may not even apply.Epstein, who was charged with sex trafficking and sex trafficking conspiracy by federal prosecutors and has been linked to high-powered executives, politicians, and royalty, does have at least multimillions tied up in real property.Assessing his total wealth and how he acquired it is elusive, however.The most definitive view came late on Friday, when federal prosecutors in New York said records obtained from a financial institution they did not identify showed that Epstein is worth more than $500 million and makes an estimated $10 million a year.A document posted in Epstein's federal court case docket on Monday showed that the financier self-certified his total assets at $559,120,954 as of June 30. The total included $56.5 million in cash, $14.3 million in fixed income, $112.7 million in equities and nearly $195 million in hedge funds and private equities, plus his real estate holdings.Noting the lack of any independent verification, U.S. District Court Judge Richard Berman said "I don't think the financial report tells me anything, really."Even the Epstein-supplied total falls short of making the college drop-out and former math and physics teacher at an elite private school in New York, a billionaire.This July 25, 2013 image provided by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement shows financier Jeffrey Epstein. The wealthy financier pleaded not guilty in federal court in New York on Monday, July 8, 2019, to sex trafficking charges following his arrest over the weekend. Epstein will have to remain behind bars until his bail hearing on July 15.Messages to Epstein's lawyers were not immediately returned. However, they filed a motion in Manhattan federal court Thursday that successfully sought permission to file a financial disclosure under seal for bail purposes.Here's what we know about Epstein's wealth and what remains a mystery.One of the easier ways to gauge some of Epstein’s net worth is through his real estate holdings and other possessions, which were listed in a July 8 court filing by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York.A court filing from the government and a filing by Epstein’s defense team both stated he owns six properties, along with other personal property. He appears to own the holdings through several shell companies named after trees – Maple Inc., Laurel Inc. and Cypress Inc. – according to online records.Real estate9 East 71st Street, New York, New York: Epstein's Maple Inc. bought the 1930 luxury townhouse in 2011 for the nominal sum of $10, according to the deed filed with the Office of the City Register. The seller was a corporation linked to both Epstein and Leslie Wexner, the chairman and CEO of L Brands, the corporation with flagship brands Victoria's Secret and Bath & Body Works.Federal prosecutors estimated the value of the mansion in Manhattan’s Upper East Side neighborhood at $77 million. The New York City Department of Finance said the property’s estimated market value was $75 million in 2018-19, and then dropped it to $55.9 million for 2019-20.But the city's estimates are known to be "very haphazard," says Jonathan Miller, CEO of Miller Samuel Inc., a New York appraisal firm. For a better comparison, Miller pointed to a similar Upper East Side townhouse owned by financier Philip Falcone that sold for $77.1 million in June.Epstein's place is uniquely wide at 50 feet, Miller says. "That is unusually rare and a premium for street frontage," he says.358 El Brillo Way, Palm Beach, Florida: In 2018, the Palm Beach County property appraiser estimated the market value of the five-bedroom, seven-bathroom property on 0.77 acres at nearly $12.5 million.49 Zorro Ranch Road in Stanley, New Mexico: The property sits on 7,599 acres and includes several structures, including a main dwelling of 33,339 square feet, according to online records at the Santa Fe County Assessor’s office. The 2019 appraised value was $18.1 million, according to Gus Martinez, the county’s assessor.Little Saint James, U.S. Virgin Islands: Spanning about 72 acres, based on Google Earth’s measuring tool, the island is valued around $20 million, according to an estimate from Farhad Vladi, founder of the real estate brokerage Vladi Private Islands that specializes in listing private islands for sale worldwide. Vladi based his estimate on comparable sales in similar areas but has not been to the island itself.Paris, France: Federal prosecutors also named a property in Paris that Epstein owned, but didn’t provide any additional details such as an address or type of property. Other media outlets report the property is located on the famed Avenue Foch, where current properties are listed for sale between $1.6 million and $5.4 million, according to Sotheby’s International Realty.VehiclesEpstein owns at least 15 vehicles, according to the New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services, which provides information on registered sex offenders and their assets so that the public can track their whereabouts.Those include a Bentley, a Cadillac Escalade, seven Chevrolet Suburban SUVs, a Chevrolet Express cargo van, a Hummer, two GMCs and a Land Rover Range Rover.The 2017 Bentley Mulsanne is easily worth the most, with an estimated sticker price of about $224,827 in good condition from a used car dealer, according to Kelley Blue Book. The rest of the vehicles would have a collective trade-in value of more than $225,000, based on Kelley Blue Book values for used cars in good condition.Federal prosecutors also said Epstein owned two planes, with at least one capable of international travel. In a court filing, defense lawyers said this week that Epstein sold one of the private jets in June and would ground the other as part of a bail settlement.How did he earn his money?Early years: Epstein got a job in his early 20s teaching math and physics at The Dalton School, a college prep school on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. According to at 2003 Vanity Fair report, Epstein tutored the son of Alan “Ace” Greenberg, the legendary chairman of Bear Stearns, then a New York-based investment bank, securities trading and brokerage firm.Wall Street debut: That connected helped Epstein to join Bear Stearns, where he was mentored by both Greenberg and then-CEO James Cayne, according to the report. Epstein rose to the rank of limited partner, one step below full partner. But he left the company abruptly in 1981 under a cloud of controversy.Epstein at the time said he wanted to run his own business, Vanity Fair reported, but there were rumors of technical infringement that Cayne and Epstein denied. Greenberg says he can’t recall, according to the report.On his own: In August 1981, Epstein formed his own company, Intercontinental Assets Group Inc., listed at his apartment on Manhattan’s East 66th Street, New York incorporation records show.Six years later, he founded J. Epstein & Co., a money management firm based in New York, online financial records show. He later changed the company’s name to The Financial Trust Co. and shifted its headquarters to the U.S. Virgin Islands, chiefly for tax purposes, according to Fortune magazine and other published reports.And, in 1993, Epstein founded Financial Strategy Group Inc., a company based at his Palm Beach home, online financial records show.Friends in high placesAs his business career advanced, Epstein met two more men who would impact his financial fortunes.Leslie Wexner: The first was Wexner, his partner in the Manhattan townhouse and chairman and CEO of L Brands. Epstein and Wexner hit it off from the start, according to Vanity Fair.They teamed up on plans and construction of a model town in New Albany, Ohio. An online business record for The New Albany Company LLC showed Epstein at one point was the business’ president and Wexner was the chief executive officer. The New Albany Company LLC website doesn’t mention Epstein.Wexner also has been the only client of Epstein’s money management firm to be publicly identified, according to a 2010 Forbes report. No other public records have been found. Wexner representatives have said the L Brands executive severed ties with Epstein many years ago.Steven Jude Hoffenberg: During the 1980s, Epstein met Hoffenberg, who ran Towers Financial Corp., a company that the Vanity Fair report identified as a collection agency that was supposed to buy debts people owed to hospitals, banks, and phone companies.Making Epstein his protégé, Hoffenberg set him up an office at the Villard Houses, a historic landmark on Madison Avenue, with a $25,000 monthly payment as a consultant, the report said.The two men launched what proved to be unsuccessful efforts to take over Pan America World Airways in 1987 and Emery Air Freight in 1988, the report said.Hoffenberg in 1995 pleaded guilty to federal charges stemming from a $460 million Ponzi scheme. The scam involved selling fraudulent notes and bonds, using money from later investors to pay interest that was owed to earlier investors.Telling lawsuitsHoffenberg, who was sentenced to 20 years in prison, later accused Epstein and his firm The Financial Trust Co. of being "co-conspirators" in the Ponzi scheme Hoffenberg had pleaded guilty to. In the 2016 lawsuit, Hoffenberg alleged that Epstein's firm was a "fifty billion dollar hedge fund."Hoffenberg later withdrew the lawsuit. A similar lawsuit was filed last summer by Tower Financial note and bondholders but was dismissed.Charitable givingAnother indication of Epstein's wealth could be his charitable donations over the years. Harvard received a $6.5 million contribution from him in 2003. Other donations went to a building at the Ivy League school as well as research to a history professor and a Harvard psychologist.Press releases for the Jeffrey Epstein VI Foundation claim other contributions, but it's unclear how many of the charities actually received the advertised donations, according to an NBC News report.Another foundation linked to Epstein, U.S. Virgin Islands-based Gratitude America, Ltd. made a $150,000 donation to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a $375,000 contribution to the International Peace Institute in 2017, the organization's IRS tax return shows.His largest contribution may have come from a previous Epstein charity called the C.O.U.Q. Foundation and the financier's Financial Trust Co. The two organizations in 2008 gave a $46.7 million combined contribution of stock and other assets to a Wexner family nonprofit called the YLK Charitable Fund, the fund's tax return shows.The massive donation came as the relationship between the Epstein and Wexner was fraying, according to a report from CNBC.Why is Epstein called a billionaire?It seems the billionaire status may have come from a lawsuit filed by Epstein's alleged victims who were suing him for emotional pain he caused when they were teenage girls, according to a May 14, 2010 article in The Palm Beach Post. Epstein’s lawyers said he was worth "more than nine figures," but it appears they never provided any financial documentation backing the assertion up.There seems to be no good reason to characterize Epstein as a billionaire, according to Forbes magazine in 2010 when explaining his absence from its ranking of the country’s and world’s richest individuals.“The guy … is NOT A BILLIONAIRE. We repeat: not a billionaire,” Forbes wrote then about its findings. “More likely he is worth a fraction of that. Because of so much uncertainty around his numbers, he’s never been included in the Forbes 400 list of the richest Americans.”USA TODAY reporter Nathan Bomey contributed to this report.

Slavery takes many forms. Our current slavery system is prison. We keep black men locked up, and we find a reason when there isn’t one. Racism is a sick thing—Take a look at what we do.Southern Poverty Law tells this story:Mississippi’s Broken Education Promise – A TimelineMay 23, 2017The promise of an education in Mississippi’s constitution is among the weakest in the nation.It hasn’t always been this way. When the state was readmitted to the Union after the Civil War, its constitution included a strong education clause that guaranteed a “uniform system of free public schools” for all children – regardless of race. Under the terms of readmission, that promise could not be diminished.Mississippi, however, has violated the provision by amending its education clause four times and providing inferior educational opportunities to its black students.The changes began at the start of the Jim Crow era as part of the broader white supremacist movement to dismantle the rights of former slaves and their descendants.As a result of the amendments, generations of Mississippi’s children – both black and white – have been short-changed. Today, the state’s public schools are poorly funded and anything but “uniform.”As was expressly intended by the first change in 1890, the harm has fallen most heavily on African-American children. All of the state’s “F”-rated school districts are majority-black. Conversely, the vast majority of “A”-rated schools are at least 70 percent white. Last year, the Mississippi Department of Education reported a 29 percent achievement gap between black and white students.The SPLC filed a federal lawsuit in May 2017 accusing the state of repeatedly violating the education promise enshrined in its post-Civil War constitution and in the 1870 congressional act that allowed it to rejoin the Union. The following timeline chronicles the history that has led to this moment.1800sDecember 10, 1817 – The state of Mississippi is admitted to the Union. Its economy is powered by slave labor, and cotton is king.1860 – There are 436,631 slaves in Mississippi – comprising about 55 percent of its population.January 9, 1861 – Following the election of Abraham Lincoln, Mississippi becomes the second state to secede from the Union. Its Declaration of the Immediate Causes which Induce and Justify the Secession of the State of Mississippi from the Federal Union states:Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery – the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization. That blow has been long aimed at the institution, and was at the point of reaching its consummation. There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin.February 4, 1861 – Mississippi and six other states form the Confederate States of America.February 18, 1861 – Jefferson Davis, a slave owner who operates a cotton plantation in Mississippi, is inaugurated as the president of the Confederacy.AP Images/Winslow Homer1861 to 1865 – American Civil War – Eighty thousand Mississippians fight to maintain slavery. Casualties are heavy.July 4, 1863 – The Army of Mississippi surrenders following the pivotal siege of Vicksburg.May 4, 1865 – The remnants of the Confederate army in the Western Theater surrender.May 9, 1865 – President Andrew Johnson declares that armed resistance and insurrection against the United States is “virtually at an end.”May 10, 1865 – Jefferson Davis is captured.1865 – Mississippi becomes the first state to enact Black Codes that restrict the rights and status of African Americans after the Civil War. Other former Confederate states soon follow.University of PittsburghMarch 2, 1867 – The Military Reconstruction Act divides the South into districts under federal military command. Former Confederate states wishing to end Reconstruction and rejoin the Union must ratify the 14thAmendment, hold a constitutional convention and adopt a constitution consistent with the U.S. Constitution. State constitutions must be approved by Congress.January 1868 – One hundred delegates, including 17 African Americans, gather for a constitutional convention, leading it to become known as the “Black and Tan Convention.” It is the first time that African Americans participate in the political process in Mississippi. The new constitution includes a strong clause requiring the state to provide an education for all children, regardless of race:As the stability of a republican form of government depends mainly upon the intelligence and virtue of the people, it shall be the duty of the Legislature to encourage, by all suitable means, the promotion of intellectual, scientific, moral, and agricultural improvements, by establishing a uniform system of free public schools, by taxation, or otherwise, for all children between the ages of five and twenty-one years, and shall, as soon as practicable, establish schools of higher grade.April 10, 1869 – Congress approves the new Mississippi Constitution.January 17, 1870 – Mississippi ratifies the 14th and 15th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution.Feb. 23, 1870 – Mississippi is readmitted to the Union. Congress returns Mississippi to full statehood by passing the “Readmission Act.” In an attempt to protect the rights of freed slaves, the Act provides that “the [1869] state constitution may not be amended or changed to deprive any U.S. citizen, or class of citizens, the school rights and privileges secured under the constitution, or to deny the right to vote to any eligible U.S. citizen or class of citizens.” It also bars Mississippi from enacting any law to deprive any citizen of the right to hold office based on race, color, or previous condition of servitude, or any other qualifications for office not required of all other citizens.Getty Images/MPI1869 to 1875 – Empowered by the protections of the Readmission Act, African Americans register to vote and leverage their new political status to craft more favorable public policy to help them achieve equity in terms of community services, the courts, police protection, and freedom of expression and movement. By 1875, one-third of the Mississippi Senate and 59 members of the House of Representatives are African-American. Black men also serve as superintendent of education, lieutenant governor, secretary of state and speaker of the House. African Americans play a leading role in pushing for the development of a uniform system of public schools, which serves as an incubator for a new generation of black men and women equipped with the rights to vote, negotiate labor agreements, own land and participate in the political process.1875 – Upset by the gains of former slaves, white supremacists launch a campaign of violence, fraud and intimidation during the 1875 election. It is part of the so-called “Redemption” movement that sweeps the South and eventually leads to the adoption of Jim Crow laws that reinstitute racial segregation across the region. Goaded by local newspapers and political leaders, young white men form armed militias to intimidate black voters. A congressional report later describes it as an attempt to “inaugurate an era of terror” to prevent African Americans from “the free exercise of the right to vote.” White Democrats easily gain control of both houses of the Legislature. By 1890, only four African Americans still serve in the Legislature. Whites also regain control of other political offices. A new, white education superintendent declares that the creation of public schools was “an unmitigated outrage upon the rights and liberties of the white people of the state.” Lawmakers drastically reduce taxes and state expenditures in all areas, including public education.1878 – Though school segregation is already a fact of life in Mississippi, lawmakers write it into state law by requiring “that the schools in each county shall be so arranged as to offer ample free school facilities to all educable youths in that county but white and colored children shall not be taught in the same school-house, but in separate school-houses.”WikipediaAugust 1890 – A constitutional convention meets to further disenfranchise the state’s black residents. Judge S.S. Calhoon, the convention president, proclaims, “We came here to exclude the negro. Nothing short of this will answer.” Throughout the convention, the Jackson Clarion-Ledger reports the sentiment is shared by nearly the entire delegation. W.S. Eskridge, a Tallahatchie County delegate, declares: “The white people of the state want to feel and know that they are protected not only against the probability but the possibility of negro rule and negro domination. … The remedy is in our hands, we can if we will afford a safe, certain and permanent white supremacy in our state.” A decade later, future Gov. James Vardaman describes the intent in the most honest terms: “There is no use to equivocate or lie about the matter. Mississippi’s constitutional convention of 1890 was held for no other purpose than to eliminate the nigger from politics; not the ‘ignorant and vicious,’ as some of those apologists would have you believe, but the nigger. … Let the world know it just as it is.”Nov. 1, 1890 – Mississippi adopts new a constitution that greatly diminishes the political power of African Americans by restricting their voting rights. It also creates racially segregated schools and a new school funding mechanism that allows wealthy, white school districts to levy taxes for education revenue far in excess of the taxes generated in poor, largely African-American districts.1899 – The state school superintendent says, “It will be readily admitted by every white man in Mississippi that our public school system is designed primarily for the welfare of the white children of the state, and incidentally, for the negro children.”1900s1934 – Mississippi violates the Readmission Act by raising the minimum age for public school from 5 to 6. The Depression-era measure, according to the Jackson Clarion-Ledger, “was urged by school officials as a means of saving the state many thousands of dollars.”Getty Images/Smith Collection/Gado1944 to 1954 – A decade before the U.S. Supreme Court declares segregated schools unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of Education, white Mississippians begin to recognize that ensuring black schools are equal to white schools may be the best way to fend off lawsuits that could end segregation. A 1952 state report, however, finds vast disparities between black and white schools; a Delta district, for example, spends $464.49 per white student but only $13.71 per black student.May 17, 1954 – The U.S. Supreme Court declares segregated schools unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of Education. The unanimous decision finds that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.”1960 – The Mississippi Legislature declares the Brown decision unconstitutional and enacts a statute allowing school boards to close schools and transfer students out of districts in order to maintain “public peace, order or tranquility.”1960 – Mississippi violates the Readmission Act again by amending its constitution to further dilute the education clause. To avoid desegregation mandates flowing from Brown v. Board of Education, the state amends its constitution to make free public schools a discretionary function of the Legislature. The modified clause states:The Legislature may, in its discretion, provide for the maintenance and establishment of free public schools for all children between the ages of six and twenty-one years, by taxation or otherwise, and with such grades, as the legislature may prescribe.1987 – Mississippi amends its education clause again in violation of the Readmission Act. The revision, presented as an attempt to remedy what has been described as the “historical embarrassment” of the 1960 measure, also strikes language establishing a minimum and maximum age for school attendance and other provisions – further eviscerating the original education clause. The clause still stands in this form today:The Legislature shall, by general law, provide for the establishment, maintenance and support of free public schools upon such conditions and limitations as the Legislature may prescribe.Aug. 22, 1997 – Lawmakers pass the Mississippi Adequate Education Program (MAEP) to fund education. Designed to address low student achievement and inequality between school districts, MAEP establishes a school funding formula that calculates the amount of money purportedly needed each year to provide an adequate education. Each district is required to provide a portion of the base cost, leaving the state to cover the rest.2000s2005 – Racial disparities persist in the classroom. In 1992, 63 percent of white fourth-graders scored at least a basic level in reading, compared to only 25 percent of black fourth-graders. By 2005, the gap closes by only 2 percentage points.2010s2014 – Mississippi voters gather nearly 200,000 signatures to place Initiative 42 on the 2015 ballot. Almost 20 years after the passage of the Mississippi Adequate Education Program, it has been fully funded only twice, leaving schools in poor districts to suffer. Initiative 42 is a proposed constitutional amendment requiring the Legislature to fully fund the program. Opponents warn that it would open the state up to lawsuits. In a speech to the Tishomingo County Midway Republican Rally shortly before the vote, state Rep. Bubba Carpenter, who is white, puts the argument in explicitly racial terms: “If 42 passes in its form, a judge in Hinds County, Mississippi, predominantly black – it’s going to be a black judge – they’re going to tell us where the state education money goes.”Nov. 3, 2015 – Initiative 42 fails. Certified vote totals show 51.6 percent of voters cast a ballot not to amend the state constitution, killing the initiative.October 2016 – State data shows that Mississippi’s failing school districts are overwhelmingly black. The Mississippi Departmentof Education’s school district evaluation shows that 13 of the state’s 19 “F”-rated districts are more than 95 percent black. The remaining six range from 80.5 percent to 91 percent black. The state’s top five highest performing school districts are predominantly white.November 2016 – The state reports a vast racial achievement gap. Data from the Mississippi Department of Education show a 28.6 percent achievement gap between black and white students in English language arts and a 27.8 percent gap in math.2017 – Mississippi’s schools are among the least effective in the country and continue to fail children because of the erosion of the education clause. The most vulnerable children are deprived of the same educational opportunities available to others. Despite the Mississippi Adequate Education Program, public schools have been underfunded by nearly $2 billion over the previous nine years. The five states that rank highest in academic achievement spend a total of between $14,150 and $17,300 per student. Mississippi spends just $9,394. The state’s black students continue to face a racial achievement gap.AP Images/Rogelio V. SoliMay 23, 2017 – The SPLC files a federal lawsuit accusing Mississippi of breaking the education guarantee contained in its first constitution. The complaint describes how four amendments to the 1868 education clause have diminished the education rights of Mississippi citizens in violation of the Readmission Act that allowed the state to rejoin the Union.FacebookTwitterThe Southern Poverty Law Center400 Washington AvenueMontgomery, AL 36104The Civil Rights Memorial CenterLearn MoreAbout UsOur History Senior Program Staff Careers Privacy & Terms Contact UsState OfficesAlabama Florida Louisiana MississippiSupport UsFriends of the Center Planned Giving Employer Matching Gifts of Stock and Securities Other Ways of Giving Donor Resources StoreResourcesNews Case Docket Extremist Files Hatewatch Intelligence Report Publications Law Enforcement Selma: The Bridge to the Ballot

Donald Trump, in full Donald John Trump, (born June 14, 1946, New York, New York, U.S.), 45th president of the United States (2017–21). Trump was a real-estate developer and 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 toTrump University, which offered seminars in real-estate education from 2005 to 2010. In the early 21st century his private conglomerate, theTrump Organization, comprised some 500 companies involved in a wide range of businesses, including hotels and resorts, residential properties, merchandise, and entertainment and television. Trump was the third president in U.S. history (after Andrew Johnson in 1868 and Bill Clinton in 1998) to be impeached by the U.S. House of Representatives and the only president to be impeached twice—once (in 2019) for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress in connection with the Ukraine scandal (he was acquitted of those charges by the U.S. Senate in 2020) and once (in 2021) for “incitement of insurrection” in connection with the storming of the United States Capitol by a violent mob of Trump supporters as Congress met in joint session to ceremonially count electoral college votes from the 2020 presidential election. Trump lost that election to former vice president Joe Biden by 306 electoral votes to 232; he lost the popular vote by more than seven million votes.Trump was the fourth of five children ofFrederick (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 briefly 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 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 committee in 1954, Fred admitted that he had built the Beach Haven apartment complex in Brooklyn for $3.7 million less than the amount of his government-insured 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 profit 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 qualified 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 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, Cincinnati, Ohio, and Norfolk, Virginia, were the target of several complaints of racial discrimination against African Americans and other minority groups. In 1973 Fred and Donald Trump, along with their company, were sued by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) for allegedly violating the Fair 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.In the late 1970s and the 1980s, Donald Trump greatly expanded his father’s business by investing in luxury hotels and residential properties and by shifting its geographic focus to Manhattan and later to Atlantic City, New Jersey. In doing so, he relied heavily on loans, gifts, and other financial assistance from his father, as well as on his father’s political connections in New York City. In 1976 he purchased the decrepit Commodore Hotel near Grand Central Station under a complex profit-sharing agreement with the city that included a 40-year property tax abatement, the first 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 openedTrump Tower, an office, 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 Donald 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 only the second foreign-born first 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-basedDeutsche 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 andTrump International Hotel and Tower (2009) in Chicago. In the early 1990s Trump had floated 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 filed 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 in which he starred,The Apprentice, which featured teams of contestants competing in various business-related projects, with a single contestant ultimately winning a lucrative one-year contract as a Trump employee (“apprentice”). The Emmy-nominated show, in which Trump “fired” one or more contestants on a weekly basis, helped him to further enhance his reputation as a shrewd businessman and self-made billionaire. In 2008 the show was revamped asThe Celebrity Apprentice, with newsmakers and entertainers as contestants.Trump marketed his name as a brand in numerous other 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 firm, which ceased operating in 2011, was the target of class-action lawsuits by former students and a separate action by the attorney general of New York state, alleging fraud. After initially denying the allegations, Trump settled the lawsuits for $25 million in November 2016. In 2019, more than two years into his presidency, Trump agreed to pay $2 million in damages and to admit guilt to settle another lawsuit by the attorney general of New York that had accused him of illegally using assets from his charity, the Trump Foundation, to fund his 2016 presidential campaign. As part of the settlement, the Trump Foundation was dissolved.In 2018 The New York Times published a lengthy investigative report that documented how Fred Trump had regularly transferred vast sums of money, ultimately amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars, to his children by means of strategies that involved tax, securities, and real-estate fraud, as well as by legal means. According to the report, Donald was the main beneficiary of the transfers, having received the equivalent (in 2018 dollars) of $413 million by the early 2000s.Trump was credited as coauthor of 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)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 theReform Party and established a presidential exploratory committee. Though he ultimately declined to run in 2000, he published 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 profile during the 2012 presidential election. Although he did not run for office at that time, he gained much attention for repeatedly and falsely claiming 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 theU.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 influence 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 engaged in trade practices that were unfair to the United States; to construct a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border to preventillegal immigration from Latin America; and to ban immigration by Muslims. Trump mused about those and other issues inCrippled America: How to Make America Great Again (2015).On the campaign trail, Trump quickly established himself as a political outsider, a common strategy among nonincumbent candidates at all levels. In Trump’s case the stance proved popular with conservative voters—especially those in theTea 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 via Twitter, a social medium he had used frequently since 2009, Trump regularly made inflammatory remarks, including racist and sexist slurs and insults. Other public comments by Trump, especially those directed at his rivals or detractors in the Republican establishment, were widely criticized for their belligerence, their bullying tone, and their indulgence in juvenile name-calling. 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, including white supremacists, white nationalists, and neo-Nazis. While Trump’s comments worried the Republican establishment, his supporters were pleased by his combativeness and his apparent willingness to say 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 officially named the party’s nominee. There he and other speakers harshly criticized the presumptive Democratic nominee, former secretary of stateHillary Clinton, blaming her for the 2012 attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, and for allegedly having mishandled classified 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. (A 2019 report by the U.S. State Department, concluding a yearslong investigation, found “no persuasive evidence of systemic, deliberate mishandling of classified information” by Clinton.) 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 refused to do so, 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 after Trump’s inauguration as president, a senior White House official announced that Trump had no intention of releasing his returns. Trump’s tax returns and other financial information later became a focus of investigations by the House of Representatives, the district attorney for Manhattan, and the attorney general of New York into alleged criminal activity by Trump and his associates (see below Russia investigation).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 siteWikiLeaks in an apparent effort to damage the Clinton campaign. Reacting to widespread suspicion that the e-mails had been stolen by Russian hackers, Trump publicly encouraged the Russians to hack Clinton’s private e-mail server to find thousands of e-mails that he claimed had been illegally deleted. A later investigation by the office of Robert Mueller, the special counsel appointed in 2017 to investigate Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election (see below Russia investigation), determined that Russian hackers first attempted to break into the personal e-mail servers of Clinton campaign officials 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. 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,” eventually more than two dozen women claimed that they had been sexually harassed or assaulted by Trump in the past (some of the allegations were made after Trump became president). During the campaign Trump and his legal representatives generally 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 ofJohn 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 confidence 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 influence 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 containing negative information about him. He received no endorsements from major newspapers. During the third and final presidential debate, in October, he made headlines when he refused to say that he would accept the election results.Eight days after that debate, the Trump campaign received a boost when FBI directorJames Comey notified 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 polls of battleground states on the eve of election day, and most pundits and political analysts remained confident 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 five million people had voted for Clinton illegally.) Trump took the oath of office 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 racial prejudices of some working-class whites, particularly men.PresidencyAlmost immediately upon taking office, Trump began issuing a series of executive orders designed to fulfill some of his campaign promises and to project an image of swift, decisive action. His first order, signed on his first 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 border. An executive order on ethics imposed a five-year ban on “lobbying activities” by former executive branch employees but weakened or removed some lobbying restrictions imposed by the Obama administration.Pres. Barack Obama (right) and President-elect Donald Trump in the Oval Office of the White House, Washington, D.C., November 10, 2016.