MEET THE U.S PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE- DONALD TRUMP

Donald John Trump was born on June 14, 1946 in the New York City borough of Queens, the youngest of five children.

His mother, Mary Anne, was born on the Isle of Lewis, off the west coast of Scotland, later immigrating to the United States. His father, Fred Trump, was the son of a Klondike Gold Rush restaurateur and home builder.

At the time of Donald’s birth, his father was developing large housing complexes in New York City, especially Brooklyn, catering to middle-income soldiers returning from World War II, and their families. By the time Donald was born, Fred Trump had been a successful New York real-estate developer for almost 20 years.

When Donald was a child, his father’s business ventures were a constant presence. But it was Donald’s mother who instilled in him something that would distinguish him from equally successful real-estate moguls—an appreciation for the power of spectacle. As a six-year-old, he watched as his mother was swept away by the pageantry of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. It made a big impression on the boy.

"I realize now that I got some of my sense of showmanship from my mother," he writes. "She always had a flair for the dramatic and the grand.”

His parents raised their large family in a two-story mock-Tudor home in Jamaica Estates, Queens. As a child, Donald went to Kew-Forest School in Forest Hills, Queens, a private school at which Fred was on the Board of Trustees. At an early age, Donald sometimes played a little too rough.

"In the second grade I actually gave a teacher a black eye—I punched my music teacher because I didn't think he knew anything about music and I almost got expelled," Trump would later recall.

Worried about his son’s apparent lack of discipline, Fred moved Donald to the New York Military Academy in upstate Cornwall, New York at the start of the eighth grade. Donald would remain there throughout high school. He graduated with the rank of captain of cadets, and later credited the school as the place where he learned to channel "aggression into achievement."

On holidays and summers as a teenager, Donald followed Fred around to building sites in Brooklyn, where his father would routinely outbuild and buyout his rivals.

"My father would start a building in, say, Flatbush, at the same time that two competitors began putting up their own buildings nearby. Invariably, my father would finish his building three or four months before his competitors did. His building would always be a little better-looking than the other two, with a nicer, more spacious lobby and larger rooms in the apartments themselves,”

Trump would say of a common scenario. “Eventually, one or both of his competitors would go bankrupt before they'd finish their buildings, and my father would step in and buy them out." (For more, see: Donald Trump Success Story: Net Worth, Education & Top Quotes.)

Following high school, Trump attended Fordham University in the Bronx. After two years, he transferred to the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, which offered, at the time, one of the only real-estate studies departments in the country. He graduated with a B.S. in economics in 1968.

While in school, Donald worked for his father part-time, coming on officially once he’d graduated. Those years were an education for the young man. One of the primary lessons he learned concerned the psychology of the real-estate business. His father’s building projects were keyed into the aspirational mind-set of the American people, catering to working-class people who wanted to be middle class. He offered a sense of elevation and refinement through large lobbies, sophisticated-looking facades and English names for his apartment buildings, such as Wexford Hall, Sussex Hall and Edgerton.

The early heir-apparent seemed to be firstborn son Freddy Jr., but he took little interest in the business, developed a drinking problem, and died young. Donald, however, took to the business with relish, working with his father on deals in Starrett City, Brooklyn and Forest Hills, Queens. Then the young man was ready to try his hand in Manhattan.

credit: wikipedia