12 Interesting Facts About Donald Trump That You Should Know
By tushar083 - August 03, 2017
1. Trump has his own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame which he received for the reality TV show The Apprentice.
Apart from being a businessman and politician, Trump is also a television personality. He produced, participated and appeared as cameos in many films and television shows. In 2003, he also became the executive producer and host of the NBC reality show called The Apprentice and later acted as host for another similar show called The Celebrity Apprentice. He hosted The Apprentice for 14 seasons, earning as much as $1 million per episode, and in 2007 received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for his contribution to television.(source)
2. In 1999, Trump proposed a one-time tax of 14.25% on individuals with networth $10 million or more and claimed that it would raise $5.7 trillion which can wipe out the national debt.
Trump said that according to his calculations, his tax plan would burden only 1 percent of Americans who control 90 percent of the wealth, leaving the other 99 percent of the people with deep reductions on their federal income taxes. He also said that completely paying off national debt would save $200 billion a year in interest payments and that depositing $100 million annually in the Social Security trust fund would generate $3 trillion over the next 30 years.(source)
Trump has many attention-grabbing traits, and his hairstyle is one among them. Apparently, many people have asked him about his hair and what he does to it. He told Playboy that all he does is take a shower, wash his hair, read the newspaper while it dries, comb it and spray it. He has stated that the reason his hair looks so neat all the time is because he doesn’t expose himself to outside environment, as he spends most of his time in his limousine, private jet, helicopter, or his private club, and that the only time he is outside is when he plays golf. And according to what he said to Playboy, his wife gives him his haircuts.(source)
4. Trump was a registered Democrat between 2001 and 2009.
Trump has been thinking about being in the politics since as far back as 1987, when he enrolled as a Republican with the Board of Elections. In 1999, he changed to the Independence Party because he was thinking of running for President as a Reform Party candidate in 2000. Again in August 2001, he made another switch to being a Democrat, because he has many friends who are Democrats and that most of the politicians he knew are Democrats. In 2009, he again switched back to being a Republican stating that Republican Party is where his heart is.
5. SPY Magazine once sent some of the world’s richest people checks of 13 cents to see who would cash them. The only people to do so were an arms dealer and Donald Trump.
Published between the years 1986 and 1998, Spy Magazine was a satirical magazine, whose writers had an interesting idea to prank the rich in 1990. So they created a fully funded and incorporated company called National Refund Clearinghouse and opened a checking account. Then they sent a check of $1.11 to 58 well-known people such as Cher, Henry Kissinger and Donald Trump. Of the 58, only 26 cashed the check. They repeated the experiment with $0.64 to these 26 people, and only 13 of them cashed. Then they sent these 13 people checks for $0.13, and this time it was only 2 people – a Saudi Arabian arms dealer called Adnan Khashoggi and, of course, Donald Trump.(source)
6. Trump once tried to trademark the phrase “You’re fired!”
Trump is closely associated with a reality TV show called The Apprentice in which the contestants take part in challenges in order to get a chance to work under American billionaires. In the show, Trump dismisses some of the contestants using the phrase “You’re fired!”, which he intended to use in his games and casinos. The game he released called “Trump, the Game” has a tag that says “I’m back and you’re fired!” According to US Patent and Trademark Office website, he even filed a trademark application for the phrase.
7. Trump is one of the least charitable billionaires in the world and donated $3.7 million to his own charity over a period of 20 years, which is less than what WWE donated to his charity in 2007 alone.
The World Wrestling Entertainment gave a total of $5 million to Trump’s foundation, $4 million for his help in promoting that year’s WrestleMania festivities in 2007 and $1 million for when he was going to buy part of the WWE empire in 2009. Compared to many other billionaire tycoons such as Bill Gates, Warren Buffett or Michael Bloomberg, Trump’s contributions to charity are unbelievably small. Bloomberg’s contributions in 2008 alone totaled $235 million, Larry Ellison’s $73.2 million, and Johnny Carson left his charitable foundation $156 million.
8. Donald Trump tried to sue an author for $5,000,000,000 because he called Trump a millionaire instead of a billionaire.
In 2009, Trump filed a lawsuit against the author of the book TrumpNation: The Art of Being Donald, Timothy O’Brien, for $5 million. In the book the author cited three unnamed sources who estimated Trump’s net worth between $150 million and $250 million. However, the court ruled that Trump was not able to prove that the author committed “actual malice” and dismissed the defamation lawsuit. According to Trump’s lawyers, his own estimation has been “proven conclusively” to exceed $7 billion, yet during a deposition, he himself said that his sense of financial worth depends on his day-to-day feelings.
9. Trump dislikes shaking hands with other people and is a self-professed germophobe.
It isn’t just the hands of other people that Trump doesn’t want to touch, but everything that is touched or used by anyone else. He doesn’t even like to push the ground floor elevator button because it would have been pushed my many people. And apparently, he specifically avoids touching the hands of teachers because they are very likely to have been in physical contact with kids.(source)
10. The character Biff Tannen from the Back to the Future trilogy was based on Donald Trump.
In the trilogy, Biff Tannen, portrayed by actor Thomas F. Wilson, is a towering, violent and selfish bully who intimidates and cheats to get what he wants. Recently, after renewed interest in Back to the Future II, numerous commentators noted similarities between the older version of Biff Tannen and Donald Trump. When the writer Bob Gale was asked about these similarities, he replied that they were intentional and that the character was indeed based on Donald Trump, who was already well-known in the late 1980s for his real estate business.
11. In 1990, Trump threatened to sue the stock broker firm Janney Montgomery Scott after an analyst said Trump Taj Mahal wouldn’t survive financially. The analyst was fired for it and later the same year Taj Mahal declared bankruptcy.
Marvin Roffman, a veteran securities analyst focused on the gaming industry in Atlantic City, told a reporter from the Wall Street Journal that the lavish and financially shaky nature of Trump’s third casino Trump Taj Mahal would fail. In reaction to that Trump threatened to sue his employer and demanded that Roffman be fired. Roffman stood by his assessment and three days after the the Journal was out he was fired. Roffman later filed a lawsuit against Trump for using intimidation and forceful warnings of litigation, and had a clear victory.(source)
12. The companies owned by Trump filed for bankruptcy four different times.
All the four bankruptcies filed were related to over-leveraged Trump’s hotel and casino properties in Atlantic City operated under the name Trump Entertainment Resorts, during the years 1991, 1992, 2004 and 2009. Despite these four bankruptcies, Trump emerged a billionaire, perhaps owing to the fact that he never filed personal bankruptcy. Instead, it was the corporations, limited partnerships and LLCs in which he had ownership interests or the companies that had his name attached that filed for bankruptcy.
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