There is almost no one left in America who is neutral about Donald Trump. Eight years of his dominance over American political life have sorted virtually everyone into a camp — the people who see him as a transformative leader who finally said what others were afraid to, and the people who see him as an existential threat to the institutions they value. Both camps have developed elaborate internal mythologies that, in different ways, prevent them from seeing the man clearly.
This is an attempt to set those mythologies aside and describe, as accurately as available evidence allows, who Donald Trump actually is.
The Origin Story
Donald John Trump was born on June 14, 1946, in Queens, New York, the fourth of five children of Fred Trump and Mary Anne MacLeod Trump. Fred Trump was a successful real estate developer who built middle-income housing in Brooklyn and Queens — not the Manhattan luxury market, but a solid, profitable business that made the family wealthy by any ordinary standard. Donald grew up rich, went to private schools, was sent to the New York Military Academy at thirteen after behavioral problems, and eventually graduated from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania with a degree in economics in 1968.
The biography he has presented publicly — of a self-made man who built an empire from nothing — has always been more myth than reality. He inherited significant wealth from his father, received at least $413 million from his father's estate according to New York Times reporting, and began his career with access to financing and connections that are unavailable to genuinely self-made entrepreneurs. This does not mean his accomplishments are fake. It means they are different from what he claims — the accomplishments of a man who started on third base and hit a long single, rather than a home run from nothing.
The Business Career: Genuine Successes and Six Bankruptcies
The Trump business record is complicated in ways that neither his supporters nor his critics adequately acknowledge. The genuine achievements are real. Trump Tower, completed in 1983, was a landmark Manhattan development that established his brand as a symbol of New York luxury. His golf courses, whatever one thinks of his character, are among the finest in the world. His ability to brand properties — to make the Trump name a premium marker that commanded higher prices — was a genuine business skill that produced real revenue.
The six business bankruptcies — of Trump Taj Mahal, Trump Plaza Hotel, Trump Plaza Casino, Trump Hotels and Casino Resorts, Trump Entertainment Resorts, and Trump Hotels — are also real. They involved hundreds of millions in debt defaults, losses to bondholders and small contractors and employees, and the kind of financial engineering that transferred risk from Trump personally to his creditors and investors. He personally survived the bankruptcies in better financial condition than many of the people who had done business with him. That is not illegal. It is a business record.
The reality television years — The Apprentice, from 2004 to 2015 — were arguably the most commercially successful period of his career, and they are the period that most directly created the political persona he carried into the 2016 election. The Apprentice made Trump famous to a demographic that had not been following his business career — middle-American, non-New York, working and middle class — and presented him as a decisive, successful executive whose judgment was worth deferring to. The show was more fiction than documentary. Its political impact was entirely real.
The Psychological Profile
Psychologists who have written about Trump — from a distance, observing public behavior rather than conducting clinical assessments — have consistently noted a cluster of traits that appear across his career with unusual consistency: an extreme sensitivity to perceived slights and criticism, a relationship with truth that is instrumentalizing rather than principled, a preference for loyalty over competence in subordinates, and an energy and confidence that is unusually self-sustaining in the face of failure and setback.
These traits interact with his political environment in specific ways. The sensitivity to criticism produces the counterpunching style that his supporters find satisfying and his critics find disqualifying. The instrumentalizing relationship with truth produces the stream of false statements that fact-checkers catalog and his supporters largely discount. The preference for loyalty over competence has produced both the turnover in his administrations and the protection of associates who have served him badly. The resilience — the ability to survive multiple crises that would have ended other political careers — is genuinely remarkable and is a real psychological asset in the brutal environment of presidential politics.
What He Believes
The question of what Trump actually believes — as distinct from what he says to his various audiences — is genuinely difficult. He has held almost every political position at some point, often simultaneously. He was a Democrat for parts of his adult life. He donated to Hillary Clinton's Senate campaign. He has been pro-choice and anti-abortion, for universal healthcare and against it, for various gun control measures and against them.
The beliefs that appear consistent across his career are fewer but more interesting: a conviction that America is being taken advantage of by foreign countries in trade and military alliances; a belief that strong personal relationships and deal-making can solve problems that institutional processes cannot; a distrust of expert consensus that seems to be partly temperamental and partly strategic; and a view of loyalty as the highest virtue and disloyalty as the highest offense.
These are not the ideological commitments of a conventional conservative. They are the beliefs of a particular kind of businessman and a particular kind of New Yorker. They have shaped his presidencies in recognizable ways — in the trade confrontation with China, in the bilateral deal-making of the Abraham Accords, in the dismissal of intelligence community consensus, in the treatment of perceived disloyal Republicans like John Cornyn.
The Verdict
Donald Trump is neither the genius his supporters claim nor the monster his critics fear. He is a specific person with specific capabilities and specific limitations, operating in a political environment that amplifies both. He is more formidable as a political figure than almost anyone predicted in 2015, and more constrained as a president than his most alarmed critics anticipated. He has achieved real things and failed at real things, often for reasons that follow predictably from who he is.
History will have decades to render its verdict. What we can say now is that he is something American democracy has not produced before — and that the system has so far survived the experiment, changed by it in ways that are not yet fully visible, holding in forms that are more resilient than the pessimists predicted and less intact than the optimists hoped.