The Mar-a-Lago Storeroom

Thirty-four counts of falsifying business records: a Manhattan jury convicted him on all of them on May 30, 2024. On November 5, 2024 the country elected him the forty-seventh President of the United States. He had already been the forty-fifth, elected on November 8, 2016, impeached twice, acquitted twice, indicted four times.

The record before the politics is a New York one. Donald John Trump was born at Jamaica Hospital in Queens on June 14, 1946, the fourth of five children of Fred Trump, a Queens real-estate developer, and Mary Anne MacLeod, an immigrant from Lewis Island, Scotland. He was moved out of the Kew-Forest School at thirteen and sent to the New York Military Academy for disciplinary reasons. Two years at Fordham, two more at the Wharton School, and in 1968 he joined his father's company; he was its president by 1971. The Grand Hyatt came in 1980, Trump Tower in 1983, Trump Plaza in Atlantic City in 1984, the Taj Mahal in 1990. He bought Mar-a-Lago in 1985. He hosted The Apprentice on NBC from 2004 to 2015 and declared for the Republican nomination on June 16, 2015.

Theodore Pemberton's biography works with the procedural rigour the case file requires. It covers the Queens childhood and the military academy years, the apprenticeship in Brooklyn and Queens rental housing, the long Manhattan rise of the Roy Cohn era, the three marriages and the five children, The Art of the Deal and the Apprentice years, the 2015-2016 Republican primary and the upset of Hillary Clinton, the first term and the two impeachments, the Capitol riot of January 6, 2021, the four indictments, the Manhattan conviction, the assassination attempt at Butler, Pennsylvania on July 13, 2024, and the November 2024 election and the second inauguration. Four decades carry him from New York gossip to American reality television to the central question of the country's politics.