Donald Trump – Early life, Education, Career and Foreign Policies

On November 15, 2022, Trump announced his candidacy for the 2024 presidential election and set up a fundraising account. In March 2023, the campaign began diverting 10 percent of the donations to his leadership PAC. His campaign had paid $100 million towards his legal bills by March 2024.

In December 2023, the Colorado Supreme Court ruled Trump disqualified for the Colorado Republican primary for his role in inciting the January 6, 2021, attack on Congress. In March 2024, the U.S. Supreme Court restored his name to the ballot in a unanimous decision, ruling that Colorado lacks the authority to enforce Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which bars insurrectionists from holding federal office.

During the campaign, Trump made increasingly violent and authoritarian statements. He also said that he would weaponize the FBI and the Justice Department against his political opponents and use the military to go after Democratic politicians and those that do not support his candidacy.

He used harsher, more dehumanizing anti-immigrant rhetoric than during his presidency. His harsher rhetoric against his political enemies has been described by some historians and scholars as authoritarian, fascist, and unlike anything a political candidate has ever said in American history. Age and health concerns also arose during the campaign, with several medical experts cited by The New York Times highlighting an increase in rambling, tangential speech and behavioral disinhibition.

Trump mentioned “rigged election” and “election interference” earlier and more frequently than in the 2016 and 2020 campaigns and refused to commit to accepting the 2024 election results. Analysts for The New York Times described this as an intensification of his “heads I win; tails you cheated” rhetorical strategy; the paper said the claim of a rigged election had become the backbone of the campaign.

On July 13, 2024, Trump’s ear was grazed by a bullet in an assassination attempt at a campaign rally in Butler Township, Pennsylvania. Two days later, the 2024 Republican National Convention nominated him as their presidential candidate, with Senator JD Vance as his running mate. On September 15, 2024, Trump was targeted in another assassination attempt in Florida.

Trump was elected the 47th president of the United States in November 2024, defeating incumbent vice president Kamala Harris, the second president in U.S. history after Grover Cleveland to be elected to a nonconsecutive second term. The Associated Press and BBC News described it as an extraordinary comeback for a former president. The first Republican to win the popular vote since 2004, Trump did so with 49.9% of the vote and a margin of 1.6% over his opponent, the third-smallest margin since 1888.

Trump was the only president never to reach a 50 percent approval rating in the Gallup poll, which dates to 1938, partially due to a record-high partisan gap in his approval ratings: 88 percent among Republicans and 7 percent among Democrats. Trump’s early ratings were unusually stable, ranging between 35 and 49 percent. He finished his term with a rating between 29 and 34 percent—the lowest of any president since modern polling began—and a record-low average of 41 percent throughout his presidency.

In Gallup’s annual poll asking Americans to name the man they admire the most, Trump placed second to Obama in 2017 and 2018, tied with Obama for first in 2019, and placed first in 2020. Since Gallup started conducting the poll in 1946, Trump was the first elected president not to be named most admired in his first year in office.

A Gallup poll in 134 countries comparing the approval ratings of U.S. leadership between 2016 and 2017 found that Trump led Obama in job approval in only 29 countries, most of them non-democracies; approval of U.S. leadership plummeted among allies and G7 countries. By mid-2020, only 16 percent of international respondents to a 13-nation Pew Research poll expressed confidence in Trump, lower than China’s Xi Jinping and Russia’s Vladimir Putin.

In the C-SPAN “Presidential Historians Survey 2021”, historians ranked Trump as the fourth-worst president. He rated lowest in the leadership characteristics categories for moral authority and administrative skills. The Siena College Research Institute’s 2022 survey ranked Trump 43rd out of 45 presidents.

He was ranked near the bottom in all categories except for luck, willingness to take risks, and party leadership, and he ranked last in several categories. In 2018 and 2024, surveys of members of the American Political Science Association ranked Trump the worst president.