Donald Trump Early life, ancestry, education and military status

Trump was born on June 14, 1946, in Jamaica Estates, Queens, a neighborhood in New York City.^[7] He was the second youngest child of Mary and Fred Trump's five children. Of his four siblings, three are living: Maryanne, Elizabeth, and Robert. Trump's older brother Fred Jr. died in 1981 from alcoholism, which Trump says led him to avoid trying alcohol or cigarettes.^[8]
Trump is of German ancestry on his father's side and Scottish ancestry on his mother's side; all four of his grandparents were born outside of the United States. His father Fred (1905–1999) was born in New York and became one of the biggest real estate developers in New York City.^[9][10] His mother, Mary Trump (née MacLeod, 1912–2000), was born in Scotland.^[11] Fred and Mary met in New York and married in 1936, settling together in Queens.^[11][12] His uncle John G. Trump, a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1936 to 1973, was involved in radar research for the Allies in the Second World War, helped design X-ray machines that provided additional years of life to cancer patients, and in 1943, the F.B.I. requested him to examine Nikola Tesla's papers and equipment when Tesla died in his room at the New Yorker Hotel.^[13] Trump frequently invokes his uncle as proof of his family's smart genes.^[14]
Drumpf, the family's ancestral name, was changed to Trump during Germany's Thirty Years' War in the seventeenth century.^[15] Trump has said that he is proud of his German heritage; he served as grand marshal of the 1999 German-American Steuben Parade in New York City.^{[16][nb 1]}

Trump as a teenager at New York Military Academy, June 30, 1964

The family had a two-story Tudor Revival home on Wareham Place in Jamaica Estates, where Trump lived while attending the Kew-Forest School.^[19] At Kew-Forest, Fred Trump served as a member of the Board of Trustees. Due to behavior problems, Trump left the school at age 13 and was enrolled in the New York Military Academy (NYMA),^[20] where he finished eighth grade and high school. In 1983, Fred told an interviewer that Donald "was a pretty rough fellow when he was small",^[21] and at least two people who resided nearby or attended his elementary school recall him as a bully, though others including Trump himself recall him as rambunctious.^[22] During his senior year, Trump participated in marching drills, wore a uniform, and attained the rank of captain.^[23] In 2015, he told a biographer that NYMA gave him "more training militarily than a lot of the guys that go into the military".^[24]
Trump attended Fordham University in the Bronx for two years, beginning in August 1964. He then transferred to the Wharton School of Finance and Commerce at the University of Pennsylvania, which offered one of the few real estate studies departments in United States academia.^[25][26] While there, he worked at the family's company, Elizabeth Trump & Son, named for his paternal grandmother.^[27] Trump graduated from Wharton in May 1968 with a Bachelor of Science in Economics.^[26][28][29]
Trump was not drafted during the Vietnam War.^[30] While in college from 1964 to 1968, he obtained four student deferments.^[31] In 1966, he was deemed fit for service based upon a military medical examination, and in 1968 was briefly classified as fit by a local draft board, but was given a 1-Y medical deferment in October 1968.^[32] In an interview for a 2015 biography, Trump attributed his medical deferment to heel spurs.^[24] In December 1969 Trump received a high number in the draft lottery, which would also have exempted him from service.^[32][33][34]