Throughout an election campaign, US voters are bombarded with images of the two candidates – speaking from podiums, greeting rally crowds and stepping down aircraft stairs. Here’s a different visual perspective of who they are and where they’ve come from.
Long before they even knew what the White House was… Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are pictured above both aged three.
Decades apart, Democratic presidential nominee Harris spent her early years in Oakland, California, and Republican nominee Trump was raised in the New York borough of Queens.
Harris (left in the left-hand image below) and her sister Maya (centre) were primarily brought up by their Indian mother, Shyamala Gopalan Harris, a cancer researcher and social activist.
Trump’s father Fred Trump was the son of German immigrants and his mother Mary Anne MacLeod Trump was born in Scotland. They enrolled him in the New York Military Academy at age 13.
Harris spent five years at high school in Montreal, Canada, where her mother took up a teaching job at McGill University. She later enrolled in the historically black college, Howard University in Washington DC.
Trump has said his five years at the academy, which began in 1959, gave him military training and helped shape his leadership skills. He later sat out the Vietnam War due to deferments – four for academic reasons and one due to bone spurs.
From an early age, Harris was taught by her mother the importance of the civil rights movement and she attended the annual Martin Luther King Jr Freedom March in Washington in 2004.
After earning a degree from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, Trump became favoured to succeed his father at the helm of the family business.
Harris returned to California, where she rose swiftly to the top of the state’s criminal justice system – taking a job as its attorney general – and used that momentum to mount a successful run for the US Senate in 2016.
At the same time as she entered Congress, Trump was stepping into the White House for the first time, having stunned the world to defeat Hillary Clinton.
Three years later Harris ran a lacklustre presidential campaign, but was picked by the victor of the Democratic race, Joe Biden, to be his running mate. They proved to be the winning ticket, defeating Trump and Mike Pence.
The end of the Trump presidency and the start of the Biden-Harris term were marked by Covid lockdowns, mask mandates and social unrest following the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
Harris struggled at times to make her mark as vice-president, but found her voice in 2022 when the US Supreme Court ended the constitutional right to abortion.
President Biden was happy for her to become the White House champion for the pro-choice movement.
It was Trump who had made the Supreme Court more conservative, paving the way for the abortion ruling.
During his time in the Oval Office, he also took the US out of the Paris climate accord and took steps to reduce immigration.
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Harris’s debut international visit as vice-president was to Guatemala in 2021, as part of the responsibility she was given to reduce the numbers of Latin American migrants reaching America’s southern border with Mexico.
Foreign policy issues that have dominated her time in office include the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, as well as the chaotic US troop withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Trump’s first visit overseas as president was to Saudi Arabia in 2017. Trump advocates isolationist policies that involve disentangling his country from foreign conflicts and promoting American industry.
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Harris is married to Doug Emhoff (pictured below), who campaigns regularly on her behalf. She is stepmother – or “Momala”, as she says – to Emhoff’s children from his first marriage, Cole (left) and Ella (right).
Various members of Donald Trump’s family have played roles in his political career, though appearances in the 2024 campaign by his wife, former First Lady Melania Trump, have been limited.
With his first wife, Ivana, Trump had three children: Donald Jr (second left in the lower picture), Ivanka (second right) and Eric (right). He had a daughter, Tiffany (left), with his second wife, Marla Maples. He married his third wife Melania (third left) in 2005, with whom he has one son, Barron.
Harris entered the 2024 presidential race relatively late in the process, replacing Joe Biden who pulled out.
She made history as the first black and Asian-American woman to lead a major party’s presidential ticket, and went on to give a speech at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Illinois.
In the same election, Donald Trump earned the rare distinction of earning a third presidential nomination from his party. He spoke at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin – sporting a bandaged ear after surviving the first of two assassination attempts during the campaign.
Picture editing by Phil Coomes
