The quiz photo shows a younger Donald Trump in a dark suit and red tie, standing between his parents. The question is what he did for a living before the White House. Three of the four answers are jobs he never held.
A. Army general does not fit the record. Trump attended New York Military Academy as a teenager. He did not serve in the armed forces. When the draft lottery arrived in 1969, his birthday drew a high number and he was not called. There is no commission, no command, and no general’s stars.
B. US senator is the political wrong turn. He had talked about running for office for years. He did not hold a Senate seat, a House seat, or a governorship. The first office he won was the presidency, in 2016.
D. Tech CEO is the modern wrong turn. He licensed his name, sold steaks and vodka and a university, and later sat in a boardroom on television. He did not found a technology company, and he was not a Silicon Valley chief executive.
The photo itself is the clue. The man on the left is Fred Trump. The business in the family was buildings.
The answer is C. Real estate.
Donald John Trump was born on June 14, 1946, in Queens. His father, Fred, ran Elizabeth Trump & Son, a company that built and rented middle-class housing in Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island. Donald joined that company in 1968, after Fordham and the Wharton undergraduate program at the University of Pennsylvania. He took control in 1971 and renamed it the Trump Organization in 1973.
The move that made him a Manhattan name was the Grand Hyatt, opened in 1980 on the site of the old Commodore Hotel beside Grand Central. He did not have the cash to buy it outright. He used a Hyatt partnership, city tax abatements, and his father’s credit. Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue followed, opened in 1983: a black-glass tower with a brass atrium, luxury retail, and the company headquarters upstairs. Atlantic City casinos came next, then golf courses, then licensing deals that put the name on buildings he did not always own.
There were bankruptcies in the casino companies in the 1990s and 2000s. The public face recovered through The Apprentice, which premiered on NBC in 2004 and made “you’re fired” a catchphrase. The show was television. The company underneath it was still the one his father had built: real estate, renamed, moved to Manhattan, and branded.
He handed formal leadership of the Trump Organization to his sons Donald Jr. and Eric when he took office in 2017. Before that office, he was not a general, not a senator, and not a tech chief. He was a New York real estate developer.
