Four months before US President Joe Biden and his predecessor Donald Trump face off in the election, they will wage a political battle on Thursday in the first televised debate of the 2024 election.
Ahead of the November 5 vote, the candidates are competing fiercely, and trying to woo all those Americans who are still considering their decision.
Here are some key biographical details to know about Trump, a Republican whose supporters remain wildly devoted to him despite his multiple criminal charges and his conviction in the first felony case against the former president.
Political Experience
The 78-year-old billionaire was a political novice when he successfully ran for president in 2016 against former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
To that point, Trump had never stood for election in a popular vote race.
Although he frequently reiterated that he might run for the White House, the claim was widely believed to be a publicity stunt.
Family and religion
Trump was born into a wealthy New York family in 1946. Contrary to legend, he is not a self-made man, but rather followed in the footsteps of his father, who built a family empire by constructing buildings in the area.
Trump was handed the reins of the family business in the 1970s, and later became a permanent fixture in American homes through his reality TV show “The Apprentice,” which first aired in 2004.
Being the father of five children by three different wives is hardly a model of Christian piety, yet he has cleverly endeared himself to America’s evangelical right wing.
Consistently praising family and religious values, Trump scored a landslide victory for conservative Christians by appointing Supreme Court justices who helped eliminate the national right to abortion.
Property
There has been much speculation over Trump’s finances over the years. However, earlier this year a judge ruled that Trump and his company had illegally inflated their wealth and manipulated the value of assets to obtain favorable bank loans or insurance terms.
Despite this, Trump is still very wealthy: according to Forbes magazine his wealth is estimated at several billion dollars, thanks to his real estate empire and the Trump Media & Technology Group, which includes his social media platform Truth Social.
Feeling
Trump, a cantankerous, angry and populist man, stunned the world when he was elected president in 2016.
Adored by supporters, his critics see him as a threat to American democracy and the country’s traditional international alliances.
The former president, who remains combative, still regularly mocks his political rivals, and his rhetoric has grown more aggressive as the election draws closer.
He calls his opponents “fascists” while saying immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.”
And he’s still falsely claiming he won the 2020 election.
Legal troubles
Trump’s life has been filled with serious legal charges, convictions, and verdicts.
Most recently in May, he was convicted in New York of 34 counts of falsifying business records to conceal payments of money to porn star Stormy Daniels during the 2016 election.
With this, Trump has become the first former US President to be convicted of a serious crime. He will be sentenced on July 11.
Trump faces three other pending criminal cases, including charges related to his unprecedented efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss to Biden, both at the federal level and in Georgia — where he asked officials to “find” enough votes to overturn Biden’s win in the state.
Apart from this, he is also accused of illegally keeping secret nuclear and defense documents in his estate in Florida after leaving the White House.
In addition to the criminal charges, Trump was also convicted in a civil case of sexually abusing and defaming former magazine columnist E. Jean Carroll in 1996, in which a judge ordered him to pay Carroll $88 million.
He was also fined $355 million plus interest by a New York judge for manipulating the value of properties to obtain favorable loans.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
