Only about half of Americans think Donald Trump was born into wealth

Donald Trump's father, Fred Trump, was a wealthy man when his son was born in 1946, having at that point spent 20 years buying and selling homes as well as owning one of the country's first supermarkets. Things only went up from there: "By the 1970s, Fred was a multi-millionaire," The Week explains here. "When he died in 1999, he was worth as much as $300 million."

But many Americans do not think Donald Trump was born into wealth, a Mason poll shared with The Washington Post indicates. Only 42 percent of Republicans and 53 percent of Democrats think Fred Trump was "wealthy" when his son Donald was born, the poll found. "Most of the rest were relatively evenly split between [thinking Trump was] upper middle class, middle class, and working class — suggesting that they believe that Fred Trump's social class was essentially the same as the people in Queens who were buying his homes in the 1920s for about $4,000 (or roughly $56,000 in today's dollars)," The Washington Post reports.

Hillary Clinton has repeatedly hit Trump over his privileged roots, including citing at the debate a $14 million loan he took from his father to start his business; that loan is the equivalent of about $31 million today, Politico reports.

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Trump defended himself by saying that the loan was "very small."