After months of muddled talk, willful ignorance, and blatant displays of genuine conflict of interest, Donald Trump has announced that he has circled back to the same non-solution that he started with months ago.
I will be holding a major news conference in New York City with my children on December 15 to discuss the fact that I will be leaving my great business in total in order to fully focus on running the country in order to MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN! While I am not mandated to do this under the law, I feel it is visually important, as President, to in no way have a conflict of interest with my various businesses. Hence, legal documents are being crafted which take me completely out of business operations. The Presidency is a far more important task!
Donald Trump talked about putting his business into a “blind trust” all the way back in the GOP primary debates where he promised to that his business would be run by his children and existing Trump organization executives. Which is, of course, not a blind trust in any sense of the term. Trump continued to talk about a blind trust while asking that his children be given security clearance, asking that his son-in-law be given security clearance, and involving all of them in supposedly diplomatic meetings in which Trump mingled his own business requests with the business of the United States.
Though it all, Trump continued to act as if he could not understand the whole concept of a blind trust, before eventually announcing that no such trust was even necessary because …
“The law’s totally on my side, meaning, the president can’t have a conflict of interest,” he said.
He could run his business and the presidency, both from the same desk, pitching some building projects in between discussions of just where a few bombs might fall.
But now Trump has clamped on his MAGA hat, waved a flag, and sacrificed by apparently offering—the same utterly inadequate plan he started with. It’s “visually important”!
There could be a surprise woven into this announcement, but considering the many times Trump and Trump’s army of surrogates have pretended that a perfectly-well-sighted trust is just the same as what other presidents have done in the past, and that a real blind trust would put his poor children out of work, it seems unlikely that Trump is going to propose anything that would place even the most laughable screen between the presidency and his business.
Trump wasn’t there personally when Ivanka arranged a little get-together explaining what a swell place the new Trump International Hotel in Washington, DC was for diplomatic shindigs, but foreign diplomats certainly got the message of how they could please the new president for just the cost of an overpriced hotel room. Consider that a demonstration project.
And Trump doesn’t have to be making day to day decisions to let the leader of Turkey know what a swell guy his business partner in the country happens to be, or drop a hint to the president of Argentina about that long-delayed building permit, or urge the leader of a UK party to do something about that support for wind.
Trump’s real estate is the very definition of “fixed assets.” It’s not going anywhere. He knows where it is. He knows the deals that are important to his business and the areas where they hope to grow.
Having Donald Trump theoretically step back from the wheel through some tissue-paper level of “blindness” won’t solve anything. But then, Trump has already declared that it doesn’t have to. So what does it matter if you catch him sneaking a peek?
After all “the president can’t have a conflict of interest.”