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.