If you hire a narcissist who thins he’s the only important person in the nation, then you task him with doing what’s best for the nation, you get Donald Trump's presidency.
Donald Trump stands to personally profit from the legislative agenda he is expected to push in his first 100 days, raising questions about whether he can separate his financial interest from his public office without totally cutting ties from his business empire.
It also generates some immediate answers: No.
Unless Trump divests himself of the big stack of companies (that own companies, that own companies, that have unlisted deals, cross-deals, and mountains of debt) there’s no way Trump can avoid creating conflicts of interest every time he opens his mouth or applies his finger-stumps to a Twitter screed. That includes selling off the right to put giant T-R-U-M-P letters onto buildings to someone whose name doesn’t include those letters.
But since none of that is going to happen, Trump knows exactly what actions he can take as president to fatten his own wallet.
The top items on the president-elect’s policy checklist — from rewriting the tax code to scrapping Wall Street regulations to repealing Obamacare — have for years been Republican orthodoxy. But Trump could see a direct benefit to muscling through broad tax cuts and eliminating regulations: billions of dollars in new savings for him and his family and fresh revenue for his business portfolio, according to a POLITICO analysis of Trump’s public statements and financial disclosures and interviews with tax experts.
All of which makes the money Trump “spent” on the campaign—money which could have come to Trump from anywhere, since he’s not obligated to show either his taxes or further financial statements—a very cheap investment when compared to the returns.