section_path: 2016 presidential election
section_name: 2016 presidential election
paragraph_text: 2016 presidential election
  
  Trump announced his candidacy for the 2016 election in June 2015. He campaigned as a rich, successful businessman and an outsider without political experience, and claimed media bias against him. His campaign statements were often opaque and suggestive, and a record number were false. He became the Republican front-runner in March 2016 and was declared the presumptive Republican nominee in May.
  
  Trump described NATO as "obsolete" and espoused views described by the Washington Post as noninterventionist and protectionist. His campaign platform emphasized renegotiating U.S.–China relations and free trade agreements such as NAFTA and strongly enforcing immigration laws. Other campaign positions included pursuing energy independence while opposing climate change regulations, modernizing services for veterans, repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act, abolishing Common Core education standards, investing in infrastructure, simplifying the tax code while reducing taxes, and imposing tariffs on imports by companies that offshore jobs. He advocated increasing military spending and extreme vetting or banning of immigrants from Muslim-majority countries. Trump's proposed immigration policies were a topic of bitter debate during the 2016 campaign. He promised to build a wall on the Mexico–U.S. border to restrict illegal movement and vowed that Mexico would pay for it. He pledged to deport millions of illegal immigrants residing in the U.S., and criticized birthright citizenship for incentivizing " anchor babies ". According to an analysis in Political Science Quarterly, Trump made "explicitly racist and sexist appeals to win over white voters" during his 2016 presidential campaign. In particular, his campaign launch speech drew criticism for claiming Mexican immigrants were "bringing drugs, they're bringing crime, they're rapists"; in response, NBC fired him from Celebrity Apprentice.
  
  Trump's FEC-required reports listed assets above $1.4 billion and outstanding debts of at least $315 million. He did not release his tax returns, contrary to the practice of every major candidate since 1976 and his promises in 2014 and 2015 to do so if he ran for office. He said his tax returns were being audited, and that his lawyers had advised him against releasing them. After a lengthy court battle to block release of his tax returns and other records to the Manhattan district attorney for a criminal investigation, including two appeals by Trump to the U.S. Supreme Court, in February 2021 the high court allowed the records to be released to the prosecutor for review by a grand jury. In October 2016, portions of Trump's state filings for 1995 were leaked to a reporter from The New York Times. They show that he had declared a loss of $916 million that year, which could have let him avoid taxes for up to 18 years.
  
  Trump won 306 pledged electoral votes versus 232 for Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton. After elector defections on both sides, the official count was 304 to 227. The fifth person to be elected president despite losing the popular vote, he received nearly 2.9 million fewer votes than Clinton, 46.3% to her 48.25%. He was the only president who neither served in the military nor held any government office prior to becoming president. His election marked the return of a Republican undivided government. Trump's victory sparked protests in major U.S. cities.