Fred Trump built his fortune one brick at a time — thousands of modest rental homes and apartment complexes spread across Brooklyn and Queens, New York, erected for the working and middle class after World War II. His fourth child, Donald John Trump, was born on June 14, 1946, in the Jamaica Estates neighborhood of Queens. The family was wealthy by any ordinary measure, but Fred ran a tight, demanding household. He took his sons to construction sites before they were teenagers, and he had little patience for idleness.

Donald was restless in school, and at thirteen his parents enrolled him in the New York Military Academy (NYMA), a private boarding school in upstate New York. The structured, competitive environment suited him. He became a good baseball and football player and rose to student captain by his senior year. He later credited NYMA with teaching him discipline — though some classmates have remembered him primarily for his competitive drive and hunger for status.

After two years at Fordham University in the Bronx, Trump transferred to the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, graduating in 1968 with a degree in economics. He has cited the Wharton credential throughout his career as evidence of intellectual seriousness. During the Vietnam War era, Trump received several student draft deferments followed by a medical deferment for bone spurs in his heels — a point critics have raised repeatedly and supporters have generally dismissed as routine for the period.

He went to work immediately for his father's company. Fred Trump's real estate operation was profitable but unglamorous — row houses in the outer boroughs, not Manhattan skyscrapers. Donald had bigger ambitions. In the early 1970s he began cultivating relationships with New York politicians, bankers, and journalists, seeing Manhattan as the arena that would turn a Queens developer into a national name.

His first major move was the renovation of the rundown Commodore Hotel next to Grand Central Terminal. Working with the Hyatt Corporation and securing a controversial tax abatement from New York City, Trump turned the building into the Grand Hyatt Hotel, which opened in 1980. The deal announced him as a player in Manhattan real estate. He had taken over management of his father's company, renamed the Trump Organization, and he was just getting started.

The signature achievement of this period was Trump Tower, completed in 1983 on Fifth Avenue in Midtown Manhattan. The fifty-eight-story glass-and-bronze building combined luxury condominiums, commercial space, and a six-story atrium. Celebrities and executives bought units. Trump moved his own residence there. The building was less a piece of real estate than a personal brand statement — his name appeared on the facade in large gold letters, and that formula (a prominent property bearing the Trump name) became his template going forward.