An Objective Biography—Origins, the Building Business, the Brand, Two Presidencies, the Courts, and the Money

Donald J. Trump: The Documented Record, 1946 to 2026 — Special Report

Donald John Trump, born June 14, 1946, in Queens, New York, is the 45th and 47th President of the United States, the only president impeached twice, and the first former president convicted of a felony. This report files his documented record whole, from the record and not from either camp’s telling of it: the Queens real-estate family and the disputed size of the father’s money; the education and the Vietnam-era draft file; the building career, the $3.4 billion debt workout of 1990, and the six corporate Chapter 11 filings that stand beside the documented fact that he never filed for bankruptcy personally; the brand era of The Apprentice, licensing, Trump University, and the Trump Foundation; three marriages and the personal record; the 2016 election, the Mueller report in its own words, two impeachments and two acquittals, the 2020 election and January 6; the four criminal cases of 2023 and their four different ends—one conviction, argued on appeal on November 5, 2026, with no decision issued as this report files, and three dismissals; the two Carroll verdicts and the New York fraud judgment, whose $464 million penalty stands vacated on appeal while its liability finding stands affirmed, the whole case now before the state’s highest court undecided; the 2024 election and the second term’s orders, tariffs, wars, and shutdown, and the 2026 midterm elections, called for the Democratic Party in both chambers of Congress with two Senate races uncalled and no state certification yet issued; and the money, kept throughout in the three separate ledgers the record itself keeps it in—his own claims, the estimators’ published figures, and the courts’ findings. Allegations are attributed, denials are carried, adjudicated outcomes are stated as outcomes, and where the record disagrees with itself the disagreement is printed, not averaged.

By Eunice, the desk · Collected and analyzed at 1150 ET, Tuesday, November 10, 2026.

The File in Brief

The man first, because everything else in this file is downstream of him. Donald John Trump was born on June 14, 1946, in Jamaica Hospital, Queens, the fourth of five children of Fred Trump, a builder of middle-income housing in Brooklyn and Queens, and Mary Anne MacLeod Trump, a Scottish immigrant who arrived in New York in 1930 with a domestic worker’s visa. He was sent at thirteen to the New York Military Academy, attended Fordham University for two years, and took a bachelor’s degree in economics from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in 1968. He never served in the armed forces: the Selective Service record documents four student deferments, a medical classification of 1-Y in October 1968 attributed by Trump to bone spurs, a draft-lottery number, 356, too high to be called, and a permanent 4-F classification in 1972. The diagnosis behind the medical classification is not documented; the reporting on it is contested; both facts are printed in section 3. He took the presidency of his father’s company in 1971, moved its ambitions from the outer boroughs to Manhattan, and built the public identity—developer, casino operator, television host, licensor of his own name—on which, in 2015, he opened a campaign for the presidency. He has been married three times and has five children. He is, as this report files, the sitting President of the United States, twenty-two months into a second term that the midterm elections of November 3, 2026, have just answered with a Congress of the opposite party.

The father’s money is the first contested number in the file, and the contest is between a framing and a document review. Trump’s own account, given in 2015 and repeated since, is that his father gave him “a small loan of a million dollars,” repaid with interest. The New York Times’ investigation of October 2, 2018, built on more than 100,000 pages of Fred Trump’s tax returns and financial records, found transfers of at least $413 million in 2018 dollars across Donald Trump’s lifetime, loans of at least $60.7 million mostly never repaid, and a child who was a millionaire in inflation-adjusted terms by age eight. The family and the White House denied the investigation’s tax-scheme characterizations as “100 percent false”; the transfer figures themselves were never rebutted with documents, and no official disposition of the state tax review announced the same day has ever been published. The report prints the range, $1 million as the framing of one loan and $413 million as the documented-review total of all transfers, and does not split it.

The business record is a rise, a collapse that stopped one step short of personal ruin, and a reinvention as a licensor. The documented spine: the Grand Hyatt conversion of 1980 and Trump Tower in 1983 made him a Manhattan figure; the Atlantic City casinos and the Plaza Hotel made him, by 1990, a debtor of about $3.4 billion on the New Jersey regulators’ count, $832.5 million of it personally guaranteed, kept from personal bankruptcy by a bank workout that capped his personal spending and took mortgages on nearly everything he owned. Six Chapter 11 petitions by Trump-controlled entities followed between 1991 and 2009; in each, the property kept operating, creditors took less than face value, and his ownership fell. He has never filed a personal bankruptcy petition; that sentence and the six filings are both the record, and the report prints them together, as it prints his own statement—“I have never gone bankrupt”—beside them. The public casino company, DJT, lost money in every year of its existence, about $640 million cumulatively, while paying him more than $44 million on one review of its filings. The Apprentice, from 2004, rebuilt the fortune on fame: about $197 million in salary and fees on the tax records the Times examined, and about $230 million more in the licensing income the fame generated. Trump University ended in a $25 million settlement in November 2016, its fraud allegations never adjudicated; the Trump Foundation ended dissolved under court supervision, with a $2 million court-ordered payment and nineteen paragraphs of admissions in the settlement stipulations.

The legal record of the 2020s is the densest part of the file, and its state at filing is this. Of the four criminal cases brought in 2023, one produced a conviction: a Manhattan jury’s unanimous verdict on May 30, 2024, on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records, followed on January 10, 2025, by a sentence of unconditional discharge—the conviction final, the punishment none. His appeal was argued before a five-judge panel of the Appellate Division, First Department, on November 5, 2026; the desk’s pre-publication check of November 10 finds no decision issued, and none is claimed here. The two federal cases were dismissed after the 2024 election under the Justice Department’s policy against prosecuting a sitting president, the documents case on a judge’s ruling that the special counsel’s appointment was unconstitutional, its merits never reached; the Georgia case was dismissed in full on November 26, 2025, by the successor prosecutor after the elected district attorney’s disqualification. The civil record stands differently: two juries found against him for E. Jean Carroll—sexual abuse and defamation, $5 million in 2023; defamation, $83.3 million in 2024—and both judgments were affirmed on appeal; the $5 million judgment is final, the Supreme Court having denied review on June 29, 2026, while the $83.3 million judgment is before that Court now, its enforcement stayed. A New York judge’s finding of persistent fraud in his financial statements stands affirmed; the $464 million penalty that accompanied it was vacated in August 2025 as an excessive fine; both sides have carried the case to the New York Court of Appeals, where, the desk’s check finds, it stands briefed and undecided, seventeen state attorneys general having filed in support of the state on November 5, 2026. Beyond Carroll, accusations of sexual misconduct by other women are counted by their counters at between 16 and 28; all are alleged, all are denied, none has produced a criminal charge, and Carroll’s is the only one adjudicated. Section 10 files the whole docket, matter by matter.

The political record is two presidencies separated by a defeat he has never conceded. He won the presidency in 2016 while losing the popular vote by 2.87 million; lost it in 2020 by 7.06 million votes and 306 to 232 in the Electoral College; and won it back in 2024 with 312 electoral votes and a popular-vote plurality of 2.28 million, the first non-consecutive return since Grover Cleveland. Between the defeat and the return stand the documented events of January 6, 2021—a riot at the Capitol during the electoral count, five deaths in the medical examiner’s count for the two days, about 140 injured police officers, a second impeachment, and a Senate vote of 57 to 43 for conviction, ten short—and, in January 2025, his own proclamation pardoning nearly all of those convicted for that day. The Mueller investigation’s two operative sentences are printed verbatim in section 8: on coordination, the investigation “did not establish” it; on obstruction, the report “does not exonerate him.” His first-term Gallup average, 41 percent, is the lowest full-term average in that series, and he is the only president in the series never to reach 50 percent. The second term, through this filing, contains 274 executive orders by August 2026 on the Federal Register’s numbering, a reconciliation statute carrying a $5 trillion debt-limit increase, a tariff program the Supreme Court held unlawful under its stated authority on February 20, 2026, the longest government shutdown on record at 43 days, two wars against Iran in the record’s count, and immigration enforcement whose own administration counts more than 3 million departures against independent estimates near 1 million, the range printed with its holders. On November 3, 2026, the voters took both chambers of Congress from his party; the desk’s pre-publication check finds the Associated Press’s calls standing—Democrats at 54 Senate seats with two races uncalled, and past the 218-seat House majority with about twenty races uncalled—and no state’s certification yet issued, the first county certifications falling due November 13. The numbers in this paragraph that are projections are labeled as projections in section 11, and nothing in this report treats an uncalled race as decided.

The money, in sum, is three numbers that are not one number. His own claims run from $8,737,540,000 in his 2015 campaign release to “in excess of TEN BILLION DOLLARS” in his own announcement of it, and include his sworn deposition testimony of 2007 that his net worth goes up and down “with attitudes and with feelings, even my own feelings.” The estimators’ figures run from Forbes’s $200 million family-share entry in 1982, through removal from the Forbes 400 for 1990 to 1995, $4.5 billion from Forbes and about $3 billion from Bloomberg at the first campaign, a decline to about $2.1 to $2.5 billion across the first term, and a rise on the Trump Media listing and the crypto ventures to Forbes’s highest figure for him, $7.3 billion in September 2025, and $7.0 billion in September 2026, with Bloomberg’s latest cited reading at about $7.1 billion. The courts’ figure is of a different kind: an adjudicated finding that the statements of financial condition issued in his name overstated his assets and net worth, by $812 million to $2.2 billion in given years on the Attorney General’s figures, which the trial court substantially credited. No audited personal balance sheet exists in the public record to reconcile the three ledgers, and this report does not pretend one does. His 2025 financial disclosure, released in June 2026, reported more than $2.2 billion of income in a year, more than $1.4 billion of it crypto-related—an income figure, printed as one, and not a net worth.

1. Origins: Fred Trump, Mary Anne MacLeod, and the Queens Upbringing

The paternal line begins in Kallstadt, in the Palatinate. Friedrich Trump emigrated to the United States in 1885, made money in the restaurant and hotel trade of the Pacific Northwest and the Klondike, returned to Germany to marry, and was ordered expelled by Bavaria in 1905 for having emigrated without completing military service; the family settled in Queens. His son Fred, born in 1905 in the Bronx, began building houses in Queens as a teenager in his mother’s company, Elizabeth Trump & Son, and became one of New York’s largest builders of middle-income housing—garden apartments in Brooklyn and Queens by the tens of thousands of units, financed substantially with federal housing money, and held, as a rule, rather than sold. Fred Trump’s method is documented in the assessments of his own era: low cost, tight management, political fluency, and rents kept at the level his tenants could pay. His own controversies are part of the record the son inherited: a 1954 Senate Banking Committee inquiry into windfall profits on FHA-insured projects, in which Fred Trump testified and was not charged; and, in 1927, his arrest at a Ku Klux Klan parade riot in Queens, a documented arrest in the police record of the event, the charge dismissed—filed here as an arrest record, which is all it is, with no finding attached to it in either direction.

Mary Anne MacLeod was born in 1912 in Tong, on the Isle of Lewis in Scotland, the youngest of ten children of a fisherman and crofter. She immigrated in May 1930, her visa numbered 26698, entered for domestic service, became a naturalized citizen in 1942, and married Fred Trump in 1936. The couple had five children: Maryanne, a federal judge; Fred Jr., an airline pilot who died in 1981 at 42 of alcoholism-related illness; Elizabeth; Donald, born June 14, 1946; and Robert, who died in 2020. The family lived in Jamaica Estates, Queens, in a brick house Fred Trump built. The household record, as the biographies assembled from family and school sources describe it, was prosperous, disciplined, and competitive; Donald Trump’s own accounts describe a father he admired and a childhood of energy that the family answered, in 1959, by sending the thirteen-year-old to military school. The reason for the enrollment is reported rather than documented—the biographical record, including family accounts, describes a boy whose behavior his parents, and principally his father, judged to need the structure—and it is printed as reported.

Kew-Forest School, in Forest Hills, was his school until 1959. The childhood behavior record rests on the recollections of classmates and teachers collected by biographers decades later; it is consistent in describing a forceful, disruptive, athletic child, and it is recollection, graded as such in the desk’s research file and carried here in one sentence because a biography prints what the record holds and labels what the record is.

2. The Father’s Money

No fact in this file is more argued over relative to its documentary mass than the size of Fred Trump’s support. The two public accounts are these. Donald Trump’s, first given in 2015: “I got a very small loan from my father of one million dollars,” repaid with interest—a framing he has repeated, with the borrowing described against his father’s opposition to the Manhattan move. The New York Times’ account, published October 2, 2018, after a year-long examination of more than 100,000 pages of Fred Trump’s tax returns, partnership documents, bank statements, and audits, confidential records provided to the paper: Fred Trump transferred to his children, and principally to Donald, at least $413 million in 2018 dollars across his lifetime. The components the Times printed include salary from the family company rising to millions a year in the 1980s; loans of at least $60.7 million, most never repaid; trust funds and gifts beginning in childhood—Donald Trump a millionaire, in inflation-adjusted terms, by age eight, drawing the equivalent of about $200,000 a year by then and more than $1 million a year at 22; and crisis support in 1990 and 1991, including a $3.35 million purchase of casino chips by Fred Trump’s lawyer at Trump Castle in December 1990, made without gambling, ahead of a bond payment the casino could not otherwise meet—a transaction New Jersey regulators determined functioned as an unapproved loan, for which the casino admitted a violation and paid a penalty whose components the sources print as $30,000 and $65,000. The Times described the transfer machinery as including discounted partnership interests, inflated invoices through a family purchasing company, and properties passed at understated values. Fred Trump’s estate at his death on June 25, 1999, was estimated by the family at $250 million to $300 million; its value for tax purposes, on the Times’ record analysis, was about $51.8 million. The outer-borough portfolio built by Fred Trump was sold in 2004 for $737.9 million, of which Donald Trump’s share was $177.3 million.

The responses are on the record. The family’s statement in 2018, through a Trump Organization lawyer, called the Times’ tax characterization “highly defamatory and utterly false”; the White House called the report “100 percent false” and a hit piece. Neither response produced documents rebutting the transfer totals. The official aftermath is a null result, printed as one: New York State’s tax department announced a review on the day of publication; no disposition of that review has ever been announced, and the criminal limitations periods applicable to the years in question have expired. The estate itself closed in litigation: Fred Trump’s 1991 will, which cut out the children of Fred Jr., who had died a decade earlier, was contested by Fred Jr.’s son and daughter; the confidential settlement of April 2001 ended the contest, its full terms sealed, the one figure public being more than $2.7 million disclosed by Mary Trump, Fred Jr.’s daughter, in her own later account. The desk’s finding, stated once: the $413 million figure is a reported figure resting on documents the Times examined and quoted; the $1 million figure is the subject’s framing of a single loan; both are printed wherever this report touches the inheritance, and no third figure exists in the record to arbitrate between them.

3. Military School, Fordham, Wharton, and the Draft File

The New York Military Academy, at Cornwall-on-Hudson, held him from 1959 to 1964. The school record documents enrollment, promotion to cadet captain, and participation in sports; the biographical record adds, as reported recollection, a forceful cadet career that included a demotion and a transfer of rooms after an incident with a roommate. He attended Fordham University in the Bronx from 1964 to 1966 and transferred to the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, from which he received a bachelor of science in economics on May 20, 1968. Two education claims require the label treatment. The first is Trump’s repeated statement that he graduated first in his class at Wharton. The 1968 commencement program, a document, lists the honors graduates of his class and his name is not among them; no class ranking placing him first exists in the record. The claim is printed as his statement, contradicted by the program. The second is the mechanism of the transfer itself, which biographers have reported rested in part on an interview arranged through a family friend of an admissions officer; it is reported, not documented, and is carried as such.

The draft file is a Selective Service record, and it is unusually complete. It documents four student deferments, classification 2-S, across 1964 to 1968, the standard deferment of the era for a full-time student. In October 1968, after graduation and two physical examinations, he was classified 1-Y—qualified for service only in time of war or national emergency—on medical grounds. His account, given at various times, is that the ground was bone spurs in his heels; his accounts have varied on the details, including which foot, and he said in 2016 that he could not recall precisely, and later that the spurs were in both feet, and that a doctor provided a letter. On December 1, 1969, the draft lottery assigned his birth date the number 356 of 366, a number never reached; the call that year stopped far below it. On February 1, 1972, his classification became 4-F, permanently unqualified. The diagnosis itself is not documented: Dr. Larry Braunstein, the Queens podiatrist named in the record as the signer of the letter, died in 2007; his daughters told the Times in December 2018 that the examination was, in their father’s telling to the family, a favor to Fred Trump, whose buildings Braunstein rented office space in—family recollection, reported, with no corroborating document, and the Times said so in its own account. Michael Cohen, Trump’s former lawyer, testified to Congress in 2019 that Trump instructed him to handle press inquiries about the draft and that Trump told him “you think I’m stupid” about the prospect of Vietnam—sworn testimony by a witness himself convicted of lying to Congress, printed as testimony, which is what it is. What is documented, and what this report states as the file’s bottom line, is the classifications and the lottery number; what is alleged is the favor; and the two do not occupy the same evidentiary ground, in either direction.

4. The Developer: The Outer Boroughs, the Hyatt, the Tower, Atlantic City

He joined the family company after Wharton and became its president in 1971, at 25; the company took the name the Trump Organization under his presidency, the legal instrument of the renaming not being in the public record. The company’s business was Fred Trump’s: thousands of apartments in Brooklyn and Queens. Its first appearance in the legal record of this biography came in October 1973, when the Department of Justice sued Trump Management for racial discrimination in rentals, alleging that applications from Black renters were marked and steered. The case ended on June 10, 1975, in a consent decree: the company agreed to furnish the Urban League with listings and to rent without regard to race, admitting no liability. Donald Trump’s account, then and since, is that the company settled to avoid an onerous decree and admitted nothing; the government’s complaint and the decree are documents, and the report prints the decree’s terms and the denial together. A 1978 enforcement action followed, the Justice Department alleging the decree was being violated; its formal caption and closure are not settled in the sources the desk could reach, and it is filed here as an open item rather than a finding.

The Manhattan move is the documented break. In 1976 he took an option on the Commodore Hotel, a failing railroad hotel beside Grand Central Terminal, and assembled the financing for its conversion on the strength of a forty-year city tax abatement whose value across its term is estimated by the Times at about $360 million and in other accounts at about $400 million, nominal dollars. The building reopened in 1980 as the Grand Hyatt. Trump Tower followed: the Bonwit Teller site on Fifth Avenue, acquired in 1979, its Art Deco bas-reliefs destroyed in 1980 during demolition after a public dispute over their promised donation to the Metropolitan Museum of Art—Trump’s stated reason at the time was cost and delay, the museum’s position that it would have taken them, both on the record. The tower opened in 1983: 58 stories as counted by its floors’ numbering, which begins at 10, a discrepancy between numbering and structure that is documented and was the first instance of a pattern the record repeats in his building descriptions. His own triplex in it he would later describe, in the financial statements at issue in section 9, as 30,000 square feet; its documented size is 10,996 square feet.

The 1980s expansion ran on borrowed money: the Trump Shuttle airline, bought from Eastern Air Lines in 1989 and surrendered to its lenders in default in 1990; the Plaza Hotel, bought in 1988 for about $390 million, a price Trump himself described at the time as buying a Mona Lisa—“not a real estate investment”—and which the hotel’s cash flow never carried; Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, bought in 1985 and later converted in part to a private club; the Wollman Rink reconstruction of 1986, in which he took over a city project that had run six years and finished it in months under budget, an episode that is documented and that he has cited since as the model of his method; and the United States Football League, whose 1986 antitrust suit against the NFL, in which he was a central owner-advocate, won a verdict of one dollar, trebled to three, and ended the league. Atlantic City was the center of it: the Trump Plaza casino in 1984, the Castle in 1985, and the Taj Mahal, bought unfinished from Resorts International and opened in April 1990 as the largest casino in the world, financed with junk bonds at interest the property could not service from its first year. By the summer of 1990 the structure was insolvent on a cash-flow basis, and the file turns to the workout.

5. The Workout and the Six Filings

The New Jersey Casino Control Commission and the Division of Gaming Enforcement, which had regulatory access to the casino books, put the organization’s total debt in 1990 at about $3.4 billion; other contemporary tallies ran to about $5 billion counting entity and contingent obligations. Of the $3.4 billion, $832.5 million was personally guaranteed by Donald Trump on the Commission’s record, a figure later press summaries put at about $900 million. In June 1990 the organization could not make scheduled payments; nine banks lent a further $65 million in what the Commission called an eleventh-hour save, and in August more than seventy lenders agreed a workout: deferral of principal and reduced interest on about $1 billion of bank debt, second and third mortgages on nearly all his properties, a chief financial officer acceptable to the banks, bank approval over transfers among his companies, and a cap on his personal spending drawn from the businesses—$450,000 a month for the rest of 1990, falling on a schedule to $250,000 a month by 1992. The Trump Shuttle went to its lenders in 1990; the yacht Trump Princess was sold in 1991 to Prince Alwaleed bin Talal for a reported $20 million; the Plaza interest was reduced and sold by 1995. The workout, not any court filing, is what stood between the structure and a personal bankruptcy—a distinction that matters to the next paragraph’s count.

Chapter 11 is a reorganization, not a liquidation: the debtor keeps operating, collection halts, and creditors accept less, later, or in equity. The American Bankruptcy Institute, counting from the dockets, counts six petitions by Trump-controlled entities between 1991 and 2009. They are: Trump Taj Mahal Associates, July 16, 1991, prepackaged, its bondholders taking 50 percent of the casino’s equity for reduced interest and extended maturities; Trump Castle Associates, March 9, 1992, bondholders taking a 50 percent interest on parallel terms; the Trump Plaza casino, March 1992, on the same pattern; the Plaza Hotel’s operating entity, November 1992, carrying more than $550 million of debt, six lenders taking 49 percent, Trump retaining 51 percent on paper with no salary and no operating role; Trump Hotels & Casino Resorts, the public company, November 21, 2004, carrying about $1.8 billion of debt, his ownership falling from 47 percent to 27 percent while other common shareholders were reduced to about 0.05 percent; and Trump Entertainment Resorts, February 17, 2009, filed days after he resigned its chairmanship, from which he emerged in 2010 holding a 10 percent stake paid for the use of his name. A seventh filing, by the same company in 2014 after his control had ended and his stake was extinguished in it, is not counted in the six by the convention the desk follows, and the convention is stated so the count can be checked. Sources that say four group the 1992 filings by event; the docket count is six.

The personal question is answered by the same record. No personal bankruptcy petition by Donald J. Trump—Chapter 7, 11, or 13—appears in the federal court record, and the Institute states the point directly: he has never filed a personal bankruptcy, and his business interests have sought Chapter 11 protection six times. His own statements—“I have never gone bankrupt”; the filings described as the use of “the laws of the country”—are accurate in the narrow legal sense and incomplete as a description of proceedings in which creditors of entities he controlled, chaired, and partly owned accepted losses and equity in place of cash. Both halves are printed because both are in the record. The public company between those filings is its own ledger: Trump Hotels & Casino Resorts, taken public in June 1995 at $14 a share under the ticker DJT, bought the Taj Mahal and the Castle from Trump personally in 1996 for a reported $890 million and $485 million, transactions in which he stood on both sides, and then reported a net loss in every year of its existence—about $637 million to $647 million cumulatively on the filings’ reviews, the range a matter of which partial-year lines are counted—while paying him, on a Washington Post review of the same filings, more than $44 million in salary, bonuses, and other payments. A $100 investment in the 1995 offering was worth about $10 by April 2004 on that paper’s calculation. The company’s 2004 filing is the fifth of the six above.

6. The Brand Era: The Apprentice, Licensing, Trump University, the Foundation

The Apprentice premiered on NBC on January 8, 2004, created and co-produced by Mark Burnett, with Trump as host of a business-competition format ending in a boardroom elimination. He hosted fourteen seasons, seven under each title, through February 2015; NBC ended its business relationship with him on June 29, 2015, after the remarks about Mexican immigrants in his campaign announcement. The ratings record is Nielsen’s: the first season averaged 20.7 million viewers and ranked seventh, its finale 28.1 million; the decline ran season by season to his last, which averaged about 7.6 million and ranked 67th. His repeated description of the program, including in its later seasons, as “the No. 1 show on television” is contradicted by those rankings after the first season and is printed as his statement against the instrument. The money, on the two records that hold it: his 2015 Federal Election Commission disclosure reported about $213 million to $214 million of earnings from the show across eleven years; the tax records the Times examined put his direct Apprentice earnings at about $197 million and the licensing and endorsement income the fame generated at about $230 million more. The accounts do not conflict; they cover different periods and categories. The producers’ accounts of the construction are reported, named, and on the record: editors who described “reverse-engineering” episodes so that his boardroom decisions appeared reasoned, a boardroom built as a set on a vacant Trump Tower floor because his offices were judged unsuitable for the image, and, in October 2024, the apology of John D. Miller, the NBC marketing chief who wrote that the network had “created the narrative that Trump was a super-successful businessman who lived like royalty” and called it at best a substantial exaggeration. Burnett himself has given no comparable on-the-record account. The predicate fact for the word rehabilitation, where this report uses it as the producers’ frame and not the desk’s, is documented in the tax records: in the year before the premiere his core businesses had reported $89.9 million in net losses, and ten months after it his casino holding company entered Chapter 11.

The business model of the era was licensing: from the late 1980s, and dominantly after 2004, his entities sold the use of his name—an upfront fee, royalties on condominium sales or hotel revenue, and, in hotel deals, a separate management contract—contributing no land, no construction capital, and no equity, and bearing no construction debt, on the agreements that litigation has made public. The name on a building is therefore not, by itself, evidence of ownership, in either direction: Trump Tower and the golf portfolio were owned; many condominium and hotel projects carrying the name, in the United States and abroad, were licensed. Product licensing ran alongside: Trump Steaks, withdrawn within months in 2007 after, in the Sharper Image chief executive’s words, selling “almost no steaks”; Trump Vodka, Trump Mortgage, a magazine, a travel site, bottled water—the list is documented and most of its members are defunct. The Times’ tax-record analysis attributed about $230 million of licensing and endorsement income to the post-Apprentice years, including $8.8 million from ACN, a multi-level marketing company he endorsed in paid speeches.

Trump University was incorporated in New York in 2004, 93 percent his, and launched on May 23, 2005, selling real-estate seminars—a free session, a three-day seminar at about $1,495, mentoring packages to $34,995. It was not an accredited university and granted no degrees; the state Education Department told it in May 2005 that the word “university” and unlicensed operation violated state law, and it operated under the name until 2010. In 2014 a New York judge held him personally liable for operating without the required license. Three actions followed—two California class actions and the New York Attorney General’s suit, which alleged an elaborate bait-and-switch: instruction promised as handpicked by Trump, by the Attorney General’s account taught by instructors he had not chosen, one of whom had met him. Trump denied the allegations throughout and cited a 98 percent internal approval figure that the plaintiffs argued was solicited under pressure. On November 18, 2016, ten days after he won the presidency and ten days before trial, the parties settled all three cases for $25 million, with no admission of wrongdoing; the court estimated claiming students would recover roughly 80 to 90 percent of what they had paid. The settlement and its approval are documented and adjudicated as such; the fraud allegations were never adjudicated, settlement having ended the cases before any verdict, and this report files them as allegations resolved by payment, no more and no less.

The Donald J. Trump Foundation, formed in 1988, closed on two records: the Washington Post’s 2016 examination of its tax filings—$20,000 in 2007 for a six-foot portrait of Trump at a charity auction, $10,000 in 2014 for a second, $12,000 in 2012 for a signed football helmet and jersey, $258,000 applied to settle legal obligations of his businesses, and a $25,000 contribution in 2013 to a political group supporting Florida’s attorney general, whose office was then weighing whether to join the Trump University investigation, for which the foundation’s own tax form answered yes to a question about prohibited self-dealing and paid a $2,500 excise tax—and the Attorney General’s suit of June 2018. The foundation stipulated in December 2018 to dissolve under court supervision. On November 7, 2019, Justice Saliann Scarpulla ordered Trump to pay $2 million in damages, finding he had breached his fiduciary duty by allowing a January 2016 veterans fundraiser to be run by his campaign for political purposes; the settlement stipulations carried nineteen paragraphs of factual admissions, including that the board had not met since 1999 and that the foundation had engaged in the related-party transactions described. He paid the $2 million to eight named charities in December 2019, and the foundation’s remaining $1.8 million was distributed with it. It was a civil charity-enforcement action; no criminal charges were brought in the matter. The court characterized the $2 million as damages, not a fine, and the report follows the court.

7. The Personal Life Record

He has been married three times. Ivana Zelníčková, a Czech model, married him in 1977; their children are Donald Jr., Ivanka, and Eric. The marriage ended in a divorce decree of December 12, 1990, granted on grounds of cruel and inhuman treatment. One allegation from that proceeding requires its label stated exactly: in a divorce deposition, Ivana Trump described a 1989 incident using the word “rape”; in a statement issued in 1993 she said she had not meant the word “in a literal or criminal sense,” and she did not repeat the claim. The deposition remains sealed; its only public text is the reported excerpts and her clarification, and the matter stands in the record as withdrawn and clarified, which is how this report files it. Marla Maples, whom he married in 1993, is the mother of Tiffany; they divorced in 1999. Melania Knauss, a Slovenian model who immigrated in 1996, married him in January 2005; their son Barron was born in 2006. She is the sitting First Lady. His stated habits are documented by his own repeated statements and by the White House physicians’ reports of his terms: he does not drink alcohol and has said he never has, a position he attributes to his brother Fred Jr.’s death; he does not smoke; his physicians’ summaries of record are public documents of each term. Descriptions of his personality by associates, friendly and hostile, are attributed opinion and are excluded from this report by its method, which admits the record and not the portraiture.

8. The First Presidency: 2016, the Mueller Report, Two Impeachments, the Pandemic

He announced his candidacy on June 16, 2015, at Trump Tower. The campaign’s documented milestones include the publication on October 7, 2016, of the Access Hollywood recording of 2005, in which he described kissing and groping women without consent in terms the record quotes and this report summarizes; he apologized for the words in a video statement the same night and dismissed them as locker-room talk, both statements documented. On November 8, 2016, he was elected with 304 electoral votes after faithless electors, against 227, and lost the national popular vote by 2,868,686 votes. He was inaugurated on January 20, 2017.

The first term’s major documented acts, in brief: the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of December 2017, cutting the corporate rate permanently from 35 percent to 21 percent, with a Congressional Budget Office estimate of about $1.5 trillion added to ten-year deficits before feedback; three Supreme Court appointments—Gorsuch, confirmed 54 to 45; Kavanaugh, 50 to 48, after hearings at which Christine Blasey Ford testified alleging a sexual assault in the early 1980s, which Kavanaugh denied categorically under oath and which was not adjudicated; Barrett, 52 to 48, confirmed eight days before the 2020 election—producing a 6-to-3 majority of Republican-appointed justices, with 234 Article III judges confirmed in the term; an entry-restriction program enjoined twice and upheld in its third form by the Supreme Court, 5 to 4, in Trump v. Hawaii in June 2018; a family-separation practice under the April 2018 zero-tolerance prosecution policy, ended by his own executive order of June 20, 2018, and enjoined by a federal judge six days later, with the separated children counted at 2,342 in the administration’s spring-2018 window and at 5,300 to 5,500 across 2017 to 2020 on the Congressional Research Service’s reconciliation—the range is the period definitions, and it is printed with them; the Abraham Accords of September 2020, the first Israel–Arab normalizations since 1994; three meetings with Kim Jong Un, the first between a sitting president and a North Korean leader, producing a joint statement with no timetable, inventory, or verification mechanism and no denuclearization agreement; and the pandemic, whose United States death toll on the Johns Hopkins tally passed 400,000 on the term’s last full day, the milestones of which—the emergency declarations, the CARES Act’s $2.2 trillion, Operation Warp Speed, his hospitalization at Walter Reed in October 2020, the first vaccine authorizations that December—are documented chronology, and whose quality of response is contested along partisan lines and adjudicated nowhere, and is therefore filed as milestones only.

The Mueller investigation ran from May 17, 2017, to March 22, 2019, and produced charges against 34 individuals and three companies, eight guilty pleas, and a trial conviction. Its report’s two volumes hold the sentences by which this report quotes it. Volume I’s opening finding: “The Russian government interfered in the 2016 presidential election in sweeping and systematic fashion.” On coordination, verbatim: “[T]he investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.” The report stated that the campaign expected to benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts, and that deleted communications, encrypted messaging, and false statements limited some lines of inquiry; “did not establish” is the report’s formulation, and it did not state that coordination affirmatively did not occur. Volume II, declining a traditional prosecutorial judgment on obstruction, states verbatim: “while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.” Attorney General Barr’s four-page letter of March 24, 2019, quoted the first sentence and added his own and his deputy’s conclusion that the evidence was insufficient to establish obstruction; Mueller wrote to Barr on March 27 that the letter “did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance of this Office’s work and conclusions” and that public confusion had resulted. Trump’s characterization of the report as a “complete and total exoneration” is his statement, printed against the report’s own no-exoneration sentence, which stands two paragraphs above this one.

The first impeachment arose from the July 25, 2019, call with President Zelensky of Ukraine, the administration’s hold on $391 million of appropriated security assistance—which the Government Accountability Office later ruled violated the Impoundment Control Act—and the request in the call, after Zelensky raised buying Javelin missiles, that Zelensky “do us a favor though” and look into the CrowdStrike matter and “the other thing,” the Bidens. Trump denied any quid pro quo and called the call perfect; Zelensky said at the time that he felt no pressure; Ambassador Sondland testified that a White House meeting was conditioned on announced investigations and, in revised testimony, that aid was as well. The House adopted two articles on December 18, 2019—abuse of power, 230 to 197; obstruction of Congress, 229 to 198. The Senate, which voted 51 to 49 against calling witnesses, acquitted on February 5, 2020: 48 to 52 and 47 to 53, conviction requiring 67. Senator Romney’s guilty vote on the first article was the first by a senator against a president of his own party. Gallup’s first-term record closes the section: a term average of 41 percent, a high of 49 percent reached in early 2020, a final reading of 34 percent in January 2021, and no reading at 50 percent at any point in the term, the only such record in the series; Pew’s final reading, 29 percent, is the low end among major pollsters for that month.

9. The 2020 Election, January 6, and the Second Impeachment

The 2020 result is certified record: Biden 306 electoral votes, Trump 232; Biden 81,283,501 popular votes, Trump 74,223,975, a margin of about 7.06 million; every state certified, and Congress completed the count in the early hours of January 7, 2021. Trump did not concede, then or afterward; his consistent position, that the election was stolen, is recorded here as his position, against the findings below. Attorney General Barr stated on December 1, 2020, that the Justice Department had “not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome.” The joint statement of federal and state election officials of November 12, 2020, called the election “the most secure in American history” and stated there was no evidence any voting system deleted, lost, or changed votes; Trump fired the official who issued it, Christopher Krebs, five days later.

The litigation record prints its own counts with their counting rules, because the counters disagree about the universe and not about the outcomes. USA Today’s post-certification accounting, the tally most widely carried: 62 cases, 61 lost or withdrawn, one won—a Pennsylvania ballot-curing ruling excluding a small number of ballots and changing no result. The Democratic election lawyer Marc Elias’s tracker, on a broader inclusion rule: 69 cases. The Brookings Institution’s review, narrowing to 42 substantive cases and counting judicial votes: of 194 votes, 28 favorable to Trump and 166 against, and in federal court 1 of 44, with none of 12 votes by Trump-appointed federal judges favorable. The conservative-authored report Lost, Not Stolen of July 2022 examined the narrow-loss states and concluded there was no evidence of fraud sufficient to change any state’s outcome. Trump’s counter-position, that the cases were dismissed on standing and procedure rather than the merits, is accurate as to a substantial share of the dismissals and incomplete as to others: Judge Brann in Pennsylvania dismissed the campaign’s central case with prejudice on November 21, 2020, as “strained legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations…unsupported by evidence,” and a unanimous Third Circuit panel, in an opinion by a Trump appointee, affirmed: “Calling an election unfair does not make it so. Charges require specific allegations and then proof. We have neither here.” No court ordered any state’s result overturned, decertified, or redone; the Supreme Court declined every post-election case brought to it. In the same weeks, Rudy Giuliani told Judge Brann in open court, “This is not a fraud case,” while asserting fraud as fact at press conferences; he was later ordered by a District of Columbia jury to pay $148 million to two Georgia election workers he had defamed, and was disbarred in New York and the District of Columbia over false election statements. Sidney Powell’s four “Kraken” suits were dismissed in December 2020, and their Michigan filing drew Rule 11 sanctions in August 2021 for what the judge called “a historic and profound abuse of the judicial process”; Dominion’s defamation suit against Fox News over similar machine claims settled for $787.5 million. Between the litigation and the count stood the alternate-elector plan described in the later federal indictment: slates in seven states Biden had won meeting on December 14, 2020, to sign certificates stating Trump had won them, for use at the January 6 count under a theory Vice President Pence declined to act on, stating his oath did not permit it. Those certificates are documents; the scheme’s characterization is the indictment’s, which was never tried, and is labeled as allegation wherever this report touches it.

January 6, 2021, is filed from the timeline. Trump spoke at the Ellipse from about noon to about 1:10 p.m. The lines most cited on each side are printed in their order: early in the speech, “I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard”; also early, “you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength, and you have to be strong”; at the close, “And we fight. We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” He said he would march with them and returned to the White House. Rioters overran the west perimeter at 12:53 p.m., while he was still speaking, and entered the building at about 2:12 p.m. At 2:24 p.m., with the Senate evacuated, he tweeted that Pence “didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done”; the January 6 Committee reported that rioters inside the Capitol read the tweet aloud. At 2:38 p.m. he tweeted “Stay peaceful!”; at 2:44 p.m. a Capitol Police lieutenant shot Ashli Babbitt as she climbed through a broken window at the barricaded Speaker’s Lobby door, a shooting the Justice Department declined to charge and an internal review found lawful and within policy; at 4:17 p.m., 187 minutes after his speech ended on the committee’s count, he posted a recorded video telling the rioters, “We love you. You’re very special,” and, for the first time, to go home. The Capitol was declared secure at about 8:00 p.m.; Pence announced the certified result at 3:41 a.m.

The toll is printed in the medical examiner’s categories, with the counting dispute attached rather than merged. Five people died on January 6 or 7 in connection with the events: Babbitt, of a gunshot wound, the only death ruled a homicide; Rosanne Boyland, ruled accidental, acute amphetamine intoxication; Kevin Greeson and Benjamin Philips, natural causes, cardiovascular disease, on the grounds; and Officer Brian Sicknick, who collapsed after the attack and died January 7 of strokes ruled natural causes, the medical examiner stating that “all that transpired played a role in his condition.” Four officers who responded died by suicide in the following months; some official commemorations count them in the attack’s toll and the medical examiner’s two-day count does not, and the report prints both counts rather than choosing. About 140 police officers were injured on the Government Accountability Office’s and the department’s counts. Property damage to the Capitol is estimated at about $2.73 million. The committee’s final report of December 22, 2022, a congressional document, opened with its conclusion verbatim: “The central cause of January 6th was one man, former President Donald Trump, whom many others followed.” It is a finding of a House committee, not a court adjudication, and is labeled as one. The prosecutions of participants are adjudicated record: more than 1,500 people charged; about 1,270 convicted, most by plea; fourteen leaders and members of the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys convicted of seditious conspiracy; the longest sentence 22 years. On January 20, 2025, Proclamation 10887 pardoned nearly all of them and commuted the fourteen longest sentences to time served. Both facts—the convictions as rendered and the clemency as issued—are the record, and neither erases the other.

The second impeachment followed in a week: one article, incitement of insurrection, adopted January 13, 2021, by 232 to 197, with ten Republican votes, the most cross-party support for a presidential impeachment article in the House to that date. The Senate tried a former president, having voted 56 to 44 that it constitutionally could, and on February 13, 2021, voted 57 guilty to 43 not guilty—a majority for conviction, ten votes short of the two-thirds required, and the largest bipartisan conviction vote in a presidential impeachment trial. Senator McConnell, voting not guilty on jurisdictional grounds, stated on the floor immediately after: “There is no question—none—that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day,” and that Trump remained liable for everything he did in office in the criminal and civil courts as an ordinary citizen. Trump’s statement called the proceedings “yet another phase of the greatest witch hunt in the history of our Country.” The legal record of the next three years is the answer the system gave to McConnell’s sentence, and it is filed next.

10. The Legal Record, 2021 to 2026

Four criminal cases were brought against Donald Trump in 2023. One ended in conviction. Two federal cases were dismissed after the 2024 election under the Justice Department’s policy against prosecuting a sitting president. One state case was dismissed in November 2025 by a successor prosecutor. He pleaded not guilty in every criminal case, has denied wrongdoing in every matter in this section, and has described the prosecutions collectively as politically motivated; his denials are recorded at each matter’s head by this sentence and apply to all of them.

The Manhattan case. On March 30, 2023, a Manhattan grand jury indicted him on 34 counts of falsifying business records in the first degree. The prosecution’s theory rested on 34 records—11 invoices, 12 ledger entries, 11 checks—documenting $420,000 paid in 2017 to his former lawyer Michael Cohen, recorded as legal expenses, which reimbursed Cohen for a $130,000 payment Cohen made to the performer Stormy Daniels in late October 2016 under a nondisclosure agreement. Cohen had pleaded guilty in federal court in 2018 to campaign-finance violations for that payment and said he acted at Trump’s direction; Trump denied directing it and denied the affair. On May 30, 2024, after a six-week trial, a jury of twelve convicted on all 34 counts; he became the first former or sitting president convicted of a felony. On January 10, 2025, Justice Merchan imposed an unconditional discharge: no prison, no probation, no fine—the conviction final, the punishment none. The appeal, briefed by Sullivan & Cromwell, argues evidentiary error, reliance on official-act evidence after the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling, and a legal theory elevating time-barred misdemeanors into felonies through an uncharged federal election-law predicate. Recheck, November 10, 2026: the appeal was argued before a five-judge panel of the Appellate Division, First Department, on November 5, 2026, Robert Giuffra Jr. for Trump and Steven Wu for the District Attorney; the panel did not rule from the bench, announced no timetable, and no decision appears in the record as this report files. The conviction stands while the appeal pends. A parallel federal-removal track, seeking to move the case into federal court on immunity grounds, carries argument scheduled for November 16, 2026, in the compiled accounts the desk could reach; that detail rests on lower-grade sources and is filed as reported, not verified against the Second Circuit docket.

The New York civil fraud case. Attorney General Letitia James sued in September 2022 under Executive Law §63(12), alleging a decade of misstatements in the annual statements of financial condition used with lenders and insurers—values inflated to obtain favorable terms and deflated for taxes. The trial record’s named examples: the Trump Tower triplex, represented as 30,000 square feet against a documented 10,996, and Mar-a-Lago, valued as though developable for residences despite deed restrictions. After a bench trial, Justice Engoron ruled on February 16, 2024, that the defendants had engaged in persistent fraud, and ordered disgorgement of $354.9 million plus prejudgment interest—the obligation printed in coverage between about $454 million and about $465 million depending on the date the interest is struck, the Appellate Division’s own opinion using about $464 million—with a three-year bar on Trump serving as an officer or director of a New York company, a three-year borrowing bar on the entities, and a monitor. On August 21, 2025, a five-judge panel of the Appellate Division, First Department, ruled: the disgorgement was vacated in its entirety, unanimously, as an excessive fine violating the Eighth Amendment; the liability finding was affirmed by a fractured construction—two judges would have ordered a new trial on liability, two joined the affirmance for the sole purpose of ensuring finality so the case could reach the Court of Appeals, one would have dismissed outright; the non-monetary relief was left in place, its operation on hold during the further appeal. Trump called the ruling a great win; the Attorney General’s office said the fraud finding stood. Both statements are accurate descriptions of different halves of the same order, and the report prints the order. Recheck, November 10, 2026: both sides are before the New York Court of Appeals—the state to reinstate a monetary penalty, Trump, in a 119-page brief filed in April 2026, to reverse the liability finding and lift the remaining restrictions; on November 5, 2026, seventeen state attorneys general filed an amicus brief urging the court to reject Trump’s appeal. No decision has issued. The state of the case at filing: liability affirmed, penalty vacated, undecided above.

The Carroll cases. In June 2019 the writer E. Jean Carroll wrote that Trump had raped her in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room in 1995 or 1996. Trump denied it—“she’s not my type,” and that he had never met her; a 1987 photograph of the two together was published in response and is a document. She sued twice. In Carroll II, on May 9, 2023, a nine-person federal jury found, by a preponderance of the evidence, that Trump sexually abused Carroll and defamed her in an October 2022 statement; on the verdict form’s question whether she had proved “rape” as the New York Penal Law defines it, requiring penile penetration specifically, the jury answered no, its affirmative finding being sexual abuse, the category covering the forcible sexual contact including digital penetration that she described. Judge Kaplan, in a later ruling, wrote that the negative answer “does not mean that she failed to prove that Mr. Trump ‘raped’ her as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape’” and that the findings established rape “in the ordinary sense of the word.” The award was $5 million. In Carroll I, on January 26, 2024, a second jury awarded $83.3 million for the 2019 statements—$18.3 million compensatory, $65 million punitive. Total: $88.3 million plus interest. The Second Circuit affirmed the $5 million judgment in December 2024 and the $83.3 million judgment on September 8, 2025. The Supreme Court denied review of the $5 million judgment on June 29, 2026, and rehearing on August 17, 2026; that judgment is final, and compiled reporting states it was satisfied at about $5.6 million with interest. The $83.3 million judgment is before the Supreme Court on petitions filed July 28, 2026, undecided at filing, its enforcement stayed since May 2026 and its bond raised to near $100 million. Separately, in December 2024 ABC News settled Trump’s defamation suit over an anchor’s statement that he had been found liable for “rape” for $15 million paid to his presidential library foundation with an apology note; the terminology dispute that produced that settlement is the same one this paragraph has taken care to state exactly.

The documents case. After the FBI’s search of Mar-a-Lago on August 8, 2022, a federal grand jury indicted him in June 2023, a superseding indictment bringing 40 counts including 32 of willful retention of national-defense information. He pleaded not guilty and argued the Presidential Records Act entitled him to the records and that he had declassified them; the declassification claim was never established in court. On July 15, 2024, Judge Cannon dismissed the indictment in full, holding the special counsel’s appointment and funding unconstitutional; the ruling did not reach the merits. After the election the Justice Department abandoned its appeal as to Trump under the sitting-president policy and withdrew it as to his co-defendants in January 2025, ending the case with no conviction and no acquittal—a procedural dismissal, filed as one. Volume II of the special counsel’s final report, the documents volume, was never released; on February 23, 2026, Judge Cannon permanently barred its release, calling it a “manifest injustice” to defendants who retain the presumption of innocence, and a transparency challenge to that bar carries argument scheduled in the Eleventh Circuit in the week of November 16, 2026, on the compiled accounts.

The federal election case. On August 1, 2023, a federal grand jury indicted him on four counts—conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, obstruction, and conspiracy against rights—alleging a scheme to overturn the 2020 result culminating in January 6. On July 1, 2024, the Supreme Court held 6 to 3 in Trump v. United States that a former president holds absolute immunity for core constitutional acts, presumptive immunity for other official acts, and none for unofficial acts, and the indictment was narrowed on remand. On November 25, 2024, after the election, the special counsel moved to dismiss without prejudice under the sitting-president policy; Judge Chutkan granted it the same day, noting that presidential immunity “is temporary, expiring when they leave office.” The special counsel’s final report, Volume I, released January 14, 2025, states its author’s assessment that “the admissible evidence was sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction at trial”—a prosecutor’s assessment, labeled as one, in a case never tried.

The Georgia case. On August 14, 2023, District Attorney Fani Willis obtained a 41-count indictment of Trump and eighteen co-defendants under Georgia’s RICO statute, alleging an enterprise to overturn Georgia’s 2020 result, including the false-elector certificates and the January 2, 2021, call in which Trump asked Secretary of State Raffensperger to “find 11,780 votes”—the recording is a document. Trump was indicted on 13 counts; Judge McAfee quashed six counts of the indictment in March 2024 for lack of specificity, three of them Trump’s, and the desk prints the count as indicted and quashed rather than as a single settled total, the operative tally after all quash orders not being established in the sources reached. Four co-defendants pleaded guilty in the fall of 2023; their pleas stand. In December 2024 the Georgia Court of Appeals disqualified Willis and her office over an appearance of impropriety arising from her relationship with the special prosecutor she had appointed; the state supreme court declined review in September 2025. The Prosecuting Attorneys’ Council assigned the case to its executive director, Peter Skandalakis, who on November 26, 2025, moved to dismiss all remaining charges, stating the case should have been federal and that pursuing it was not in Georgia’s interest; the court dismissed the case in its entirety the same day. That ended the last outstanding criminal prosecution. A motion by Trump under a 2025 Georgia statute to recover $6,261,613.08 in fees followed in January 2026; its outcome is not established in the sources the desk could reach and is filed as open.

The remaining record, briefly. Two Trump Organization companies were convicted by a Manhattan jury on December 6, 2022, on all 17 counts of a tax-fraud scheme and fined $1.6 million; Trump was not a defendant in that case, and the report states the distinction because the case is routinely merged with his own. Beyond Carroll, the accusations of sexual assault and misconduct by other women are counted by PBS at 16 on an assault-only rule, by ABC News at at least 18, by Business Insider at 26, by Axios at about 27 after an October 2024 allegation, and by a Wikipedia aggregation at at least 28; the differences are definitional, all of the accusations are alleged, Trump has denied every one categorically and repeatedly, no criminal charge of sexual assault has ever been filed against him, and Carroll’s is the only adjudicated claim. Unverified tips in the 2025–26 Epstein-file releases, which the Justice Department’s own release materials caution contain unverified and sensational claims, are excluded from every count in this paragraph and are not evidence in this report. As plaintiff, beyond the ABC settlement above, Paramount settled his suit over the editing of a 60 Minutes interview in July 2025 for $16 million to the library foundation while denying wrongdoing in the edit; his 2022 RICO suit against Hillary Clinton and others was dismissed with sanctions in 2023. The docket, whole, is the section; its summary is that the only criminal conviction of Donald Trump ever entered stands under appeal undecided, the only fraud finding against him stands affirmed with its penalty vacated and undecided above, the only sexual-abuse finding against him is final, and the remainder of the 2023–24 prosecutions ended without verdicts.

11. The Return: 2024 and the Second Term

He announced the candidacy on November 15, 2022, and won the primaries by March 2024. On June 27, 2024, he debated President Biden in Atlanta; Biden’s performance was followed by public calls from Democratic officials and donors for his withdrawal, and on July 21 Biden withdrew and endorsed Vice President Harris, who was nominated in August. Between those events, on July 13, 2024, at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, Thomas Matthew Crooks, 20, fired eight rounds from a roof outside the inner security perimeter. The documented casualty record: Trump wounded in the right ear—the FBI stated on July 26, 2024, that he was struck by a bullet, whole or fragmented—taken to hospital and released the same evening; Corey Comperatore, 50, a former volunteer fire chief attending with his family, killed; two other attendees seriously wounded; Crooks killed by a counter-sniper. His motive was not established; the FBI found searches relating to both candidates’ events and no manifesto or co-conspirators. Four official reviews found the security failures in planning, communications, and perimeter definition, including that no one was specifically tasked with securing the roof; the Secret Service director resigned on July 23; and the Department of Homeland Security’s Inspector General reported in July 2026 that personnel had missed 102 radio transmissions about the suspicious person. On September 15, 2024, at his West Palm Beach golf club, a Secret Service agent fired on a rifle protruding from the fence line; Ryan Wesley Routh fled without firing and was arrested the same day. A federal jury convicted Routh on all five counts in September 2025, and on February 4, 2026, he was sentenced to life in prison without parole plus a consecutive seven years.

The 2024 result is certified record: Trump 312 electoral votes, Harris 226; Trump 77,303,568 popular votes, 49.81 percent, Harris 75,019,230, 48.34 percent, a margin of about 2.28 million; all seven battleground states to Trump; the Senate to the Republicans, 53 to 47, and a narrow House majority with them. He is the first president since Cleveland to win non-consecutive terms and the first Republican to win the national popular vote since 2004. His characterization of the result as a “mandate” is his account, recorded as such, beside the numbers, which are a plurality below 50 percent and a 1.5-point margin. He was inaugurated as the 47th President on January 20, 2025, indoors in the Rotunda, and signed the January 6 clemency proclamation the same day.

The second term’s instruments, by the record’s own counts: 225 executive orders in calendar 2025 and 49 more by August 24, 2026, 274 in the term on the Federal Register’s numbering, the 2025 total the highest single-year figure since Franklin Roosevelt. The Department of Government Efficiency, created by renaming the U.S. Digital Service on the first day, was reported by the Office of Personnel Management’s director in November 2025 to no longer exist as a centralized entity; a Government Accountability Office review of August 2026 counted 206 of its personnel in Executive Office positions across the first year; no audited total of its claimed savings exists, and none is printed. The term’s central statute, Public Law 119-21, signed July 4, 2025—passed the House 215 to 214, the Senate 51 to 50 on the Vice President’s tiebreak, the House again 218 to 214—made the 2017 individual rates permanent, added temporary deductions for tips, overtime, and auto-loan interest, raised the child tax credit to $2,200, imposed new work requirements on Medicaid and food assistance, raised the debt limit by $5 trillion, and appropriated about $170 billion for immigration and border enforcement; the Congressional Budget Office estimated a deficit increase of $2.8 trillion through 2034 and about 10 to 10.9 million more uninsured in 2034, and the White House’s own council published higher growth estimates, which are the administration’s account and are labeled as such wherever cited. The clemency record beyond January 6 includes, on the Pardon Attorney’s lists, the former Illinois governor Blagojevich, the Nikola founder Milton, the Binance founder Zhao—who had pleaded guilty in 2023 to failing to maintain an effective anti-money-laundering program—and, on December 1, 2025, Juan Orlando Hernández, the former president of Honduras, convicted in New York in 2024 of cocaine-importation conspiracy and sentenced to 45 years. A House committee minority report in 2026 alleged that some clemency decisions followed donations or payments to intermediaries; the allegation is unadjudicated and is filed as alleged.

The tariff program was imposed in waves from February 2025, reaching its stated peak on April 2, 2025, when Executive Order 14257 set a 10 percent baseline on imports from virtually all countries and higher country-specific rates—China 34 percent on top of earlier rates, Vietnam 46, the European Union 20, Japan 24—derived, on the Cato Institute’s calculation, principally from bilateral trade deficits rather than from foreign tariff schedules. The higher rates were suspended for ninety days for most countries on April 9; China and the United States escalated against each other to a 145 percent accumulated American rate at the peak before a May arrangement reduced it; framework agreements through 2025 commonly set 15 percent; and effective average American tariff rates rose to their highest since the 1930s on the trackers’ counts. The litigation ended the stated authority: the Court of International Trade held the emergency tariffs unlawful in May 2025, the Federal Circuit substantially agreed in August, and on February 20, 2026, the Supreme Court held 6 to 3, in Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump, that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act does not authorize the President to impose tariffs. The administration terminated those tariffs and rebuilt the program under other statutes—a temporary Section 122 surcharge, itself held unlawful in May 2026 on the trade press’s account and expired by its own 150-day limit in July, replaced by Section 301 tariffs of 10 and 12.5 percent on more than sixty economies—the sequence resting in part on trade-press compilations and flagged as such in the desk’s file. Customs collections under the emergency tariffs stood at about $166 billion on the August 2026 court filings, with about $100 billion refunded by August. The steel, aluminum, and automobile tariffs under Section 232 were not touched by the ruling and remain in force.

Immigration enforcement is filed in the ranges its sources support. Border Patrol encounters at the southwest border fell sharply in 2025, documented. For the interior, the administration’s August 2026 statement claims more than 3 million departures since January 2025—roughly 605,000 to 675,000 formal removals and an estimated 2.2 million self-departures, the second component an estimate and the total the administration’s own account; independent demographers’ estimates are lower and differently constructed, and the range this report prints is formal removals in the high hundreds of thousands by mid-2026 on both sides’ counts, and total departures between about 1 million and the administration’s 3 million. The Alien Enemies Act invocation of March 2025, and the removals to El Salvador’s CECOT prison under it, produced litigation over notice and due process that continued into 2026 without a final merits ruling on the invocation in the sources consulted. Two fatal shootings during the Minneapolis operation of January 2026 are documented national record: Renée Good, 37, shot by an immigration officer on January 7, 2026, as her vehicle moved forward, the justification disputed between the federal account and frame-by-frame analyses by five news organizations; Alex Pretti, 37, an intensive-care nurse, shot by two Border Patrol officers on January 24, his death ruled a homicide by the county medical examiner, bystander-video analyses reporting that a handgun had been removed from his waistband before the shooting and that he was holding a phone. No charge had been filed in either case as of early November 2026; Minnesota’s suit over access to the evidence stands in the filings with sharing begun in July and reported paused in October. The birthright-citizenship order of January 20, 2025, was blocked by lower courts; the Supreme Court’s June 2025 decision in Trump v. CASA limited universal injunctions without deciding the order’s merits; a further 2026 decision attributed to Trump v. Barbara in secondary reporting was not read in primary form by the desk and is filed as reported only.

The foreign-policy record of the term, in its documented heads: at The Hague in June 2025 the NATO allies pledged 5 percent of GDP on defense and defense-related investment by 2035 and reaffirmed Article 5; the Anchorage summit with President Putin of August 15, 2025, and the Washington meeting with President Zelensky and European leaders three days later produced no settlement, and no comprehensive Ukraine settlement appears in the record through November 2026, the most concrete later item a reported three-day pause in May 2026. In June 2025 Israel attacked Iran on June 13 and the United States struck the Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan nuclear sites on June 22 with fourteen bunker-penetrating bombs and submarine-launched missiles; a ceasefire took effect June 24. The damage assessments diverge and are printed as a range: the President’s word, “obliterated,” is his account; a leaked preliminary Defense Intelligence Agency assessment reported a setback of months; a July Pentagon assessment, about two years; Iran’s foreign minister said the sites sustained severe damage. In Gaza, the ceasefire on his twenty-point plan took effect October 10, 2025; all twenty living Israeli hostages were released within three days and the last deceased hostage’s body was recovered on January 26, 2026, against about 1,950 Palestinian prisoners released; the Security Council endorsed the plan in Resolution 2803; the second phase—disarmament, withdrawal, a technocratic administration—had not been implemented at the plan’s first anniversary, with Gaza’s health ministry reporting more than 1,400 Palestinians killed during the ceasefire period, a ministry figure Israel disputes in method, filed with the dispute attached. In the early hours of January 3, 2026, American forces seized President Maduro of Venezuela and his wife in Caracas and brought them to New York on a narco-terrorism indictment; reported deaths were about 75 to 80 Venezuelans and Cubans and six American service members injured; the American Society of International Law stated the operation violated the Charter’s prohibition on force, and the administration characterized it as a law-enforcement apprehension—both positions printed; Maduro remained in custody in late 2026 with a trial date reported for 2027 on a single compiled source, filed as reported. On February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel opened a second, larger campaign against Iran, in which the Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, was killed and succeeded by his son; a Congressional Research Service compilation cited at least 3,636 killed in Iran by April 7, 2026, including 1,701 civilians; at least 23 American service members had died in connected operations by November 2026; the Pentagon’s cost estimate stood at more than $47 billion on October 16, 2026. An interim agreement brokered by Pakistan in June 2026 was declared “over” by the President on July 8 and the naval blockade resumed; on November 9 and 10, 2026, the President said escalation would not be necessary and the Secretary of State was reported saying the operation had concluded and its objectives achieved, while the President simultaneously posted that it would end if Iran agreed to terms. No signed final settlement is in the record, and the report prints the two official descriptions side by side because the record does.

The domestic close of the term’s second year: the appropriations lapse of October 1, 2025, over the extension of enhanced health-insurance premium credits, ended November 12—43 calendar days on the press count, 42 full days on the Congressional Research Service’s method, the longest government-wide shutdown on record on either count—with about 900,000 employees furloughed, nearly 2 million working without pay, food benefits not issued on November 1 for the first time in the program’s history, and a Budget Office estimate of about $11 billion of output permanently lost. Approval is filed on its instruments: Gallup, which measured 47 percent in January 2025 and 36 percent in November and December 2025, discontinued its presidential-approval series on February 11, 2026, ending the longest such series in the field; the October 2026 cluster of the surviving series—Reuters/Ipsos 31 percent, the lowest in that series across either of his terms; CNN/SSRS 32; the New York Times/Siena 34; NBC 34 among adults—is printed with pollster and date attached to every number, as the house rule for this file requires.

The midterms, and the desk’s certification check of November 10, 2026. The elections of November 3, 2026, were held with Republicans holding the Senate 53 to 47 and the House 218 to 214. The outcome, on the Associated Press’s calls: Democrats won majorities in both chambers—the Senate called on election night, the House early the next morning. In the Senate, 35 seats were contested; Democrats won 20 of the called races and Republicans 13, flipping seven Republican-held seats and losing none, for at least 54 seats counting two independents who caucus with them, against at least 44. Two races stand uncalled at filing: Alaska, where Mary Peltola led Senator Dan Sullivan by about 600 votes with a count update scheduled for November 10 and a ranked-choice tabulation for November 18 if no candidate clears 50 percent; and Mississippi, where Scott Colom led Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith by 2,574 votes as of November 6, with mail ballots due to arrive by November 10 and county certification due by November 13. In the House, called races stood at 252 Democratic seats to 161 Republican on November 8, with 22 uncalled and later counts moving at the margins; either snapshot is past the 218 majority. Louisiana’s Fifth and Sixth Districts go to runoffs on December 12. Of 36 governorships, Democrats won 22 of the 34 called and flipped five, with Alaska and Kansas uncalled. The reactions on the record: Vice President Vance attributed the losses to the Iran war; the President acknowledged the war had cost his party both houses and said on November 9 that escalation would not be necessary; Speaker Johnson said he would not seek the Republican leadership of the next Congress. Democratic leaders announced investigations for the new Congress covering the war, the tariffs, immigration enforcement including the Minneapolis shootings, and the Venezuela operation; and Representative Massie, a Republican, has introduced eight articles of impeachment against the Secretary of Defense—not against the President, a distinction the early coverage blurred and this report does not. Certification state: every figure in this paragraph is a news organization’s call or count, and results are unofficial until the states certify them. As of this filing, November 10, 2026, no state certification of the 2026 results has issued in the record the desk could reach; the calendar ahead is Mississippi’s county certifications by November 13, Alaska’s tabulation on November 18, Kansas’s state certification by December 1, Mississippi’s declaration on December 3, the Louisiana runoffs on December 12, and the convening of the 120th Congress on January 3, 2027, which will seat a Democratic Congress for the final two years of the term. The biography’s last political fact is therefore a projection with its instrument named, and the report leaves it labeled.

12. Wealth: Three Ledgers, No Audited Figure

No audited personal balance sheet of Donald Trump exists in the public record. His tax returns, in the years obtained by the Times and released by the House Ways and Means Committee, show income and losses, not net worth. Every figure in this section is therefore one of three kinds, and the kinds are not merged: his own claims; named estimators’ published figures, Forbes building an asset-by-asset balance sheet and Bloomberg marking listed assets to market with its own discounts, the two differing by billions in the same season; and the courts’ findings on the statements issued in his name. The section files each kind under its own head.

His claims. Announcing his candidacy on June 16, 2015, he released a one-page summary stating a net worth of $8,737,540,000; after filing his election disclosure in July 2015 he announced “in excess of TEN BILLION DOLLARS.” The disclosure itself reports ranges with an open-ended top category and yielded at least $1.4 billion of assets and $265 million of liabilities; it cannot produce a precise net worth, and the gap between the claim and the estimators was attributed by both to brand value, which his figures capitalized in the billions and Forbes valued far lower and Bloomberg not on the same basis. In the libel suit he brought against the author Timothy O’Brien—who had printed an estimate of $150 million to $250 million from three confidential sources—he was deposed in December 2007 and testified, verbatim: “My net worth fluctuates, and it goes up and down with markets and with attitudes and with feelings, even my own feelings, but I try.” The suit was dismissed in July 2009 for failure to show actual malice and the dismissal affirmed in 2011; the judgment decided the malice question, and no court found the printed estimate accurate or false. Afterward he told a reporter: “I spent a couple of bucks on legal fees, and they spent a whole lot more. I did it to make his life miserable, which I’m happy about.” No new first-person net-worth claim for 2025 or 2026 was found in the sources consulted; absence in this search is not proof none was made, and it is filed as an absence.

The estimators. Forbes placed him on its first list in 1982 at $200 million, described as his share of the family fortune; its former list editor, publishing his 1984 reporting tape in 2018, documented a caller identifying himself as “John Barron,” a Trump Organization spokesman, whom the editor identified as Trump, lobbying for a higher valuation on the false premise that Fred Trump’s assets had been consolidated to the son—Greenberg’s retrospective estimate put the true 1982 figure near $5 million. Forbes’s line then runs: about $1.7 billion at the 1989 peak; off the list entirely from 1990 through 1995, the trough figure printed in Forbes-derived summaries at negative net worth; back in 1996 at about $450 million; $4.5 billion at the first campaign against his $10 billion claim; a decline across the first term to $2.1 billion on the March 2021 list; $2.5 billion in 2023, below the Forbes 400 cutoff; and then the two events that rebuilt the series—the Trump Media listing of March 2024, in which his stake, 114.8 million shares after the earn-out, was worth roughly $4.5 billion to $6 billion on paper at the first day’s prices against a company reporting $4.1 million of revenue and a $58.2 million loss for 2023, the shares transferred to a revocable trust in his eldest son’s name in December 2024—and the crypto ventures. Forbes’s highest figure for him is $7.3 billion, September 2025; its September 2026 figure is $7.0 billion, 245th on its list, its breakdown crediting about $1.9 billion of cash and liquid assets, about $1.8 billion of golf and club properties, a Trump Media stake of about $1.0 billion after a share-price fall of half in a year, $185 million for the memecoin, and $80 million for the World Liberty tokens. Bloomberg’s latest cited reading is about $7.1 billion. The late-2026 range across the two estimators is therefore about $6.5 billion to $7.1 billion, and the report states the range and its holders and no single figure.

The crypto ledger, as disclosed. World Liberty Financial, launched September 2024 with Trump as its “Chief Crypto Advocate,” sold its token from October 2024 under a disclosed structure entitling a Trump-family entity to 75 percent of net protocol revenues; the Tron founder Justin Sun bought $45 million of the tokens across two purchases and sued the venture in April 2026 alleging his tokens had been frozen, an unproven complaint; an investment vehicle associated with the United Arab Emirates’ national security adviser agreed, on the Wall Street Journal’s reporting, to pay $500 million for 49 percent of the venture in a deal signed four days before the second inauguration; its stablecoin was the vehicle of a $2 billion investment into the Binance exchange. The $TRUMP memecoin launched on January 17, 2025, three days before the inauguration, with 80 percent of supply held by two Trump-affiliated companies; it peaked near $75 on January 19 and traded near $2.18 in October 2026, about 97 percent below the peak, with retail losses estimated at $4.3 billion to $4.5 billion on two forensic counts using different windows. His sworn financial disclosure for 2025, released June 30, 2026, reported more than $2.2 billion of income for the year, more than $1.4 billion of it crypto-related—about $635 million of memecoin licensing royalties, about $526 million of token sales, and the balance of the crypto share in equity sales—gross receipts to the reporting entities as disclosed, not audited profit. Forbes’s accounting of the rise from $4.3 billion in September 2024 to its $7.3 billion peak a year later assigns about $1.8 billion to crypto, about $400 million to licensing and other business gains, and about $500 million to the removal of the New York judgment as a liability after its vacatur, partly offset by a decline of about $1.3 billion in the Trump Media stake. Forbes’s characterization of the second term in that coverage as “the most lucrative presidency in American history” is printed as Forbes’s characterization.

The courts’ ledger. It is short, and it is the only one of the three that is adjudicated. A New York court found, on partial summary judgment in 2023 and after trial in February 2024, that the statements of financial condition issued in his name across 2011 to 2021 overstated his assets and net worth—by $812 million to $2.2 billion in given years on the Attorney General’s figures, which the court substantially credited on the specific properties it examined, the triplex among them. That liability finding was affirmed on appeal in August 2025; the monetary penalty that accompanied it was vacated the same day; the case stands undecided in the state’s highest court as section 10 files it. The three ledgers do not reconcile, no audited figure exists to reconcile them, and the biography closes its money section where the record closes it: with a claim, two estimates, and a finding, printed under their own names.

13. The Contradictions Ledger: Where the Record Does Not Agree with Itself

The desk closes the file the way the record leaves it: with its disagreements printed, not resolved. First, the inheritance: $1 million as the subject’s framing of one loan against at least $413 million as a document review’s lifetime total; the two numbers answer different questions, and quotation of either as the amount his father gave him is the error this ledger exists to prevent. Second, the draft: classifications and a lottery number of 356 documented, the diagnosis undocumented, a podiatrist’s daughters’ recollection of a favor on one side and the subject’s varying accounts on the other, and no surviving letter in the public record to settle it. Third, the bankruptcy count: six petitions on the dockets, four on the grouping convention his defenders use, one personal filing count of zero agreed by every counter including his critics—the rare number in this file on which the record is unanimous, and it is the narrow one. Fourth, the fraud money: disgorgement of $354.9 million as ordered, an obligation of about $454 million to about $465 million as interest accrued, $464 million as the appellate opinion states it, and zero as it stands today, the award vacated in full; every figure is correct at its own date with its own status attached, and any one of them printed without its status is a misstatement. Fifth, the Carroll word: a jury’s no on rape as the Penal Law defines it and its yes on sexual abuse, a trial judge’s statement that the findings establish rape in the ordinary sense, and an $18 million settlement’s worth of litigation over the distance between the two—$15 million from ABC and $16 million from Paramount, paid to a library foundation by networks that disputed the word and the edit respectively. Sixth, the Mueller sentences, which have now carried seven years of argument: “did not establish” on coordination, and “does not exonerate” on obstruction, printed verbatim in section 8 because no paraphrase in either direction has survived contact with them. Seventh, the 2020 litigation counts: 62, 69, and 42 cases on three counting rules, all three counters agreeing that no result changed. Eighth, the immigration totals: formal removals in the high hundreds of thousands on both sides’ arithmetic against a headline of 3 million that is two-thirds an estimate of self-departure; the bridge between the administration’s count and the demographers’ is a methodology, not a fact, and it is printed as unknown. Ninth, the second Iran war’s status: concluded with objectives achieved on the Secretary of State’s reported account of November 10, 2026, and conditional on Iran’s agreement on the President’s post of the same cycle, with no signed settlement in the record. Tenth, the midterms: called in both chambers on the wire counts, uncalled in two Senate races, uncertified in every state, with the final House margin standing somewhere between the wire’s snapshot and the trackers’ projections. Eleventh and last, the method, stated once: where this file’s instruments conflict, the desk has printed both readings and named the bridge unknown rather than building one, because a bridge the record does not contain is a claim, and claims in this paper are labeled.

Donald John Trump, born in Queens on June 14, 1946, the son of a Scottish immigrant and the builder Fred Trump, is the 45th and 47th President of the United States: a developer whose companies filed six Chapter 11 petitions while he filed none, whose fortune the estimators now place between about $6.5 billion and $7.1 billion against his own historical claim of ten, whose financial statements a court found fraudulent with the penalty for that finding vacated and the finding itself affirmed and undecided above, the only president impeached twice and acquitted twice, the first former president convicted of a felony—the conviction standing, the appeal argued on November 5, 2026, and undecided as this report files—the defendant in the only sexual-abuse judgment ever entered against a president, now final in one case and before the Supreme Court in the other, the winner of the elections of 2016 and 2024 and the loser of 2020, the president who pardoned the rioters of January 6 and who now, in the last two years of his second term, faces a Congress his party has just lost in elections called but not yet certified. That is the record as the desk found it on November 10, 2026, with its allegations attributed, its denials carried, its verdicts stated as verdicts, and its disagreements printed rather than resolved. It is the whole of this report, and the report is now closed.