For billionaire Trump, winning is everything

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump AP FILE PHOTO

MANCHESTER, New Hampshire—Donald Trump is a billionaire real estate tycoon with bravado to spare, a former reality television star who says winning is everything.

The unlikely Republican presidential front-runner now can claim his first victory in the political arena after notching up a win in the New Hampshire primary on Tuesday—to the horror of the political establishment.

The 69-year-old New Yorker has upended the 2016 presidential election by casting a spell over grassroots conservatives and not shying away from talking tough.

To his fans, he is the definition of American success, the cutthroat tycoon who can magically fix all that’s wrong with a country no longer sure of its place in the world, and home to an increasingly frustrated white working and middle class.

To his critics, he is a racist demagogue or, at best, a buffoon with an orange perma-tan and an odd helmet of hair who would either hand Hillary Clinton the White House—or lead the world into unmitigated catastrophe.

What is clear is that Trump isn’t really interested in following the traditional political playbook.

He insults women, Mexicans, Muslims—virtually everyone who crosses his path and yet his say-it-how-it-is honesty, defiance of political correctness and disdain for the political class has struck a chord matched by almost no other candidate.

Childhood

He promises to build a wall on the Mexican border, deport millions of illegal immigrants and stand up to China to “Make America Great Again.”

The Donald, as he is nicknamed, was born on June 14, 1946, in Queens, New York City, the fourth of five children.

His father Fred was a wealthy real estate developer and the son of German immigrants. His mother Mary was from Scotland.

Boisterous and unruly, he was packed off to New York Military Academy, a private boarding school near West Point, and graduated from Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in 1968 with an economics degree.

He then set to work for his father, who made money building and operating middle-income apartments in New York’s outer boroughs. But Queens and Brooklyn were never going to be enough for the young Donald.

He shot off to Manhattan and the big league, snapping up some of the flashiest real estate in the country, riding the wave of Reaganomics and coming to embody the swanky extravagance of the 1980s.

His true wealth is up for dispute. Trump told the Federal Election Commission he had more than $10 billion. Forbes insists it is no more than $4.5 billion.

Best known until then for his three marriages, media stunts and for whipping up a frenzy over Barack Obama’s birth certificate, Trump’s bid for the White House was initially met by mirth in June last year.

But within weeks, he catapulted to the top of the polls in a crowded field of Republican candidates and there he has remained. No matter whom he insults, his admirers only love him all the more. AFP