Donald Trump has his name on more than 500 corporations including numerous limited liability companies whose connections, ownership, and obligations are all but invisible to regulators. Trump’s business relationships are so hidden that we’re learning about his call with the Argentinian president only because it leaked to an Argentinian journalist. We’re learning about his deal to leverage the presidency at his properties in India from Indian newspapers. And worst of all, for most of the calls he makes, we’re not learning. Trump’s organization is like an iceberg. In the fog. In the dark. We may occasionally get a glimpse, but the great bulk of it is invisible.
And the damage it could do is immeasurable.
Donald Trump hasn’t been sworn in yet, but he is already making decisions and issuing statements to world leaders that radically depart from American foreign policy, all to the benefit of his family’s corporate empire. Because of this, the next president of the United States is already vulnerable to undue influence by other nations, including through bribery and even blackmail.
The nature of Trump’s business, in which the biggest asset isn’t even the buildings that have his name emblazoned in gold letters 20 feet high but the name itself, makes it impossible for Trump to free himself from entanglements through the kind of weak not-at-all-blind trust he has suggested.
Even though I am not mandated by law to do so, I will be leaving my busineses [sic] before January 20th so that I can focus full time on the Presidency. Two of my children, Don and Eric, plus executives, will manage them. No new deals will be done during my term(s) in office.
That’s not blind. It’s not a trust. And it’s a long way from being adequate to protect America’s national interests.
Nothing that Trump has suggested has come close to providing the kind of insulation that would not only prevent Trump from benefiting from deals made while in the White House, but put a workable barrier between Trump’s business and America’s business.
For example, Trump’s ties connect him—and America—to a murderous strongman who admires Hitler.
Duterte, who boasted to voters during the campaign that he had shot a fellow law school student for teasing him, has championed the killing of suspected criminals and street children by vigilante death squads. In 2015, he said that if he became president, up to 100,000 people suspected of links to illegal drugs could be killed. Just months after his election, Duterte said he was eager to lead a genocide of up to 3 million drug addicts. “I'd be happy to slaughter them,” he said. “At least if Germany had Hitler, the Philippines would have [me].” And in September, an admitted hit man testified to a Senate committee in the Philippines that Duterte presided over a killing campaign when he was mayor of Davao City.
That murderer has named Trump’s business partner in the Philippines, Jose Antonio, as envoy to the United States. So from the moment Trump takes office, the new president will be meeting with a man who is both his partner in deals that put millions of dollars in Trump’s pocket, and the representative of a man who is “happy to slaughter” without judge, jury, or evidence.
The Trump family’s dealings in the Philippines will set off a constitutional crisis on the first day of Trump’s presidency, if anyone in the federal government decides to abide by the law. There is serious debate as to whether Trump will be violating the Constitution’s Emoluments Clause—which prohibits office holders from accepting gifts from foreign states—since the majority of his company’s business is with other corporations and developers. That is not the case in the Philippines. The man writing millions of dollars’ worth of checks to the Trump family is the Duterte government’s special representative to the United States. To argue that these payments will be constitutional if they are paid to the Trump children, and not to Trump personally, is absurd. This conflict demands congressional hearings, and could be an impeachable offense.
It’s too late for Trump to avoid conflict. He’s already used his position as president-elect to extract business favors from some politicians and plant seeds with others. Trump’s selection of Rex Tillerson as secretary of state, when Tillerson has presided over what would be the biggest business deal in history if the United States would only move a few troubling sanctions, gives evidence that Trump doesn’t care about these conflicts—or about how his business deals warp long-held positions of the country.
Even before taking office, Trump's conflicts are altering America’s positions in the Philippines, in Russia, and especially in China where Trump’s statements are raising tensions and threatening both economic and military conflict.
Trump has vowed to label China a “currency manipulator” that artificially drives down the value of the renminbi, which would make Chinese goods cheaper to import. That would allow the United States to impose duties on Chinese imports to offset any currency manipulation. ...
On December 2, Trump—with no consultation with State Department specialists on the delicate relations between American and China—upended almost 40 years of U.S. policy by taking a phone call from the president of Taiwan, which broke away from the mainland in 1949. … This month, Trump pushed his position even further, saying he saw no reason to be bound by the One China policy that has smoothed Sino-American relations and instead advocating using it as a bargaining chip in trade and other negotiations.
… allegations have already emerged that the decision may have been influenced by his family’s financial interests.
Trump has long wanted to put his oversized name on a hotel in Taiwan. If risking 40 years of peace is the price for that deal, Trump is apparently ready to roll those dice.
And even that is just scratching the surface. Kurt Eichenwald's latest article at Newsweek delves into not just Trump’s conflicts in China and the Philippines, but also how Trump’s ties in Turkey could lead to a man being deported without evidence to face almost certain death, and how Ivanka has already used her position to completely erase the boundary between government and business.
What Trump is proposing isn’t even a trust, much less a blind trust. But that matters little when the only thing that would come close to being adequate is a complete liquidation of Trump’s business.