In 1973, The US Department of Justice (under Richard Nixon’s administration) sued the Trump Management Corporation after federal officials found evidence that Trump had refused to rent to Black tenants and lied to them about apartments’ availability. In 1989, Trump took out an ad in local papers against the Central Park Five, four Black teenagers and one Latino teenager who were accused of attacking and raping a jogger in New York City (DNA evidence has since exonerated them), demanding to “BRING BACK THE DEATH PENALTY. BRING BACK OUR POLICE!”.
Shifting his family's business from residential units in Brooklyn and Queens to glitzy Manhattan projects, Trump erected the 58-story Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue in 1983. Other properties bearing his name followed: Trump Place, Trump World Tower, Trump International Hotel and Trump Towers in Mumbai, Istanbul and Manila. He also developed hotels and casinos, a venture that has led to four business bankruptcy filings.
Trump is better known, however, for his presence in the entertainment industry, specifically as a reality television star. From 1996 until 2015, he was the owner of the Miss Universe Organisation which included the Miss Universe, Miss USA, and Miss Teen USA beauty pageants. In 2003, he debuted an NBC reality television show called The Apprentice, in which contestants competed for a shot at a management job within Trump's organization. He hosted the show for 14 seasons and revealed in a financial disclosure form that he had been paid a total of $213 million by the network during the show's run.
Trump expressed interest in running for president as early as 1987, and entered the 2000 race as a Reform Party candidate, receiving around 15,000 votes in the party’s California primary. After 2008, he became an outspoken member of the "birther" movement, which questioned whether former president Barack Obama had been born in the US. Trump launched his campaign in 2015 by calling Mexican immigrants “rapists” who are “bringing crime” and “bringing drugs” to the US. His campaign was largely built on building a wall to keep these immigrants out of the US. When asked at a 2016 Republican debate whether all 1.6 billion Muslims hate the US, Trump said, “I mean a lot of them. I mean a lot of them.”
The Trump administration implemented brutal immigration policies. In January 2017, he signed an executive order, his first, banning travel from seven countries with Muslim-majority populations; the Supreme Court upheld the xenophobic travel ban. Narendra Modi of India partnered with the Trump administration on their anti-immigrant sentiments; the two leaders released a joint statement in which they vowed to “destroy radical Islamic terrorism.” Another of Trump’s allies from the Reactionary International was Benjamin Netanyahu, who said that the American president was “the greatest friend that Israel has ever had in the White House.” During his term, Trump became the first sitting president to pray at the Western Wall, recognized Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights and announced a one-sided peace proposal opening the door for Israel to annex 30% of the West Bank.
Trump eventually faced impeachment charges for allegedly pressuring the Russian government to find dirt on his then-rival, Democrat Joseph Biden. Trump was, however, acquitted in 2020. But when he lost the election, his refusal to accept his loss — and his, and his allies’, use of conspiracy networks to create the illusion of an illegitimate election — resulted in an attempted coup on January 6, 2021. The traditionalist Chinese group Falun Gong also echoed Trump’s conspiracy theories through their international outlet Epoch Times, as they found an ally in him and his hardline anti-Chinese Communist Party stance. The so-called “insurrection” invited Trump’s second impeachment, though he was, again, acquitted. Currently, CPAC polls regarding the 2024 presidential election find Trump poised to yet again be the Republican party’s candidate.
