Pivotal moments in Donald Trump's US presidential campaign

Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton by a huge margin to become America's next President.

Donald Trump's successful campaign for the presidency may have rewritten the political playbook. Here are key moments from his ascent.

2015

* June 16 - Trump descends an escalator in the marble-lined atrium of Trump Tower in Manhattan to announce his campaign and perhaps his best-known campaign pledge: to build a "great, great wall" on the southern border with Mexico.

* July - Although his bid is initially dismissed as a sideshow by many commentators and journalists, opinion polls start showing Trump taking a lead in a crowded field of 17 Republican contenders.

* December 7 - Trump calls for a "total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country's representative can figure out what is going on." The call followed deadly attacks in Paris, for which Islamic State claimed responsibility.

2016

* February 1 - Despite being ahead in the polls, Trump comes in second in the Iowa caucuses, the first state nominating contest, losing to Ted Cruz, a senator from Texas popular among evangelical Christians.

* March 1 - Trump wins seven of the 11 states that vote on so-called Super Tuesday.

* March 3 - Mitt Romney, the Republican presidential candidate in 2012, delivers a scathing speech calling Trump a "con man," becoming an early mover in a wave of party leaders, including its living former presidents, who publicly reject Trump.

* March 11 - Trump continues to draw huge crowds to sometimes volatile rallies, where protesters and Trump supporters would sometimes come to blows, but a rally in Chicago had to be canceled at the last minute amid sometimes violent protests outside the venue.

* May 3 - Trump wins Indiana, becoming the party's presumptive nominee after Cruz and Ohio Governor John Kasich withdraw from the race.

* May 26 - Trump wins a majority of delegates, securing his nomination and foreclosing the possibility of a contested convention.

* June 20 - Trump fires his original campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski. Veteran Republican strategist Paul Manafort takes over the running of the campaign.

* July 15 - Trump announces Indiana Governor Mike Pence as his running mate. A far more traditional Republican figure, Pence often describes himself as "a Christian, a conservative and a Republican, in that order."

* July 21 - Trump accepts the Republican Party's nomination on the final day of the party's convention in Cleveland.

* August 17 - Trump taps Stephen Bannon, the chairman of the right-wing news website Breitbart News, as his campaign's chief executive and promotes senior adviser Kellyanne Conway to the post of campaign manager. Days later, Manafort, who was facing controversy over his previous consulting work in Ukraine, quits the campaign.

* September 1 - Trump flies to Mexico to meet with the country's president, Enrique Peña Nieto, culminating in a joint news conference. A brief diplomatic scuffle follows Trump's return, where he and the Mexican president dispute whether or not they discussed Trump's plan to have Mexico pay for the border wall.

* September/October - Trump clashes with Clinton before an audience of tens of millions in three presidential debates that are marked by their unusually ugly tone - Trump at one point said Clinton should be in jail. Public polls show that most Americans thought Clinton prevailed in all three debates.

* October 7 - A recording surfaces of Trump boasting in 2005 of how his celebrity allows him to grope women and "grab them by the pussy," prompting a dozen or so women to come forward to accuse Trump of making unwanted sexual advances. Trump dismisses the remarks as "locker room talk" and denies the accusations of unwanted advances.

* November 8 - Trump wins the US presidential election in one of the biggest upsets in decades.