Donald Trump may believe that it’s impossible for him to have a conflict of interest, but that doesn’t make those conflicts any less real. Or less profitable. And as Forbes points out, one of the biggest is also one of the most obvious.
Trump Tower officially lists the tenant as the Industrial & Commercial Bank of China, but make no mistake who's paying the rent: the Chinese government, which owns a majority of the company. And while the landlord is technically the Trump Organization, make no mistake who's cashing those millions: the president of the United States, who has placed day-to-day management with his sons but retains 100% ownership.
That’s a $2 million a year pipeline from Donald’s buddy Xi Jinping directly into Trump’s pocket. It’s enough to vault any Entenmann's thawed in the bowels of Mar-a-Lago into the ranks of the best cake ever. It’s also blatantly, and directly in violation of the Constitution.
It's a conflict of interest unprecedented in American history. But hardly unanticipated. The Founding Fathers specifically built this contingency into the Constitution through the Emoluments Clause, which prohibits U.S. officials from accepting gifts, titles or "emoluments" from foreign governments.
Sure, foreign leaders may name-drop the Trump Hotel in D.C. and complement Trump on the horrible and overpriced cocktails, but even the biggest suite in the place isn’t welding that direct to the bank account conflict like Trump’s real estate rentals.
The real money in the Trump empire comes from commercial tenants like the Chinese bank. Forbes estimates these tenants pay a collective $175 million a year or so to the president. And they do so anonymously.
Real estate gets legal exceptions that no other industry enjoys—and Trump is enjoying them all.
Federal laws, drafted without envisioning a real estate billionaire as president, require Trump to publicly disclose the shell companies he owns--but not the hundreds of businesses pouring money into them or even the extent of the money involved.
Even the hundred million plus arriving in Trump’s own personal account every year from unknown sources squatting in buildings blazoned with his name is far from the full accounting. In addition to where the money comes from to rent those units, the source of the funds to build them in the first place came through a series of foreign sources that are not completely mysterious.
The money to build these projects flowed almost entirely from Russian sources. In other words, after his business crashed, Trump was floated and made to appear to operate a successful business enterprise through the infusion of hundreds in millions of cash from dark Russian sources.
Russian sources paid to build Trump’s buildings. Now he’s sitting on a yearly income that’s almost entirely based on the money he collects from renting out space in those buildings. Most of that money comes from sources that we can’t see, but what we can see demonstrates that Trump’s conflict of interest is huge, and it goes well beyond just foreign interests.
Take any hot-button issue of the past year, and there's a good chance Trump's tenants lobbied the federal government on it, either in support of or in opposition to the administration's position. Nutritional-supplements giant GNC, which rents retail space from the president in New York City, advocated on health care reform. Nike, which pays an estimated $13 million in annual rent to Trump, spoke up on the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
So long as Trump directly and personally pockets every dollar coming from his buildings—and he is yet to surrender so much as 1 percent of his ownership. There’s not a single issue on which he doesn’t have a personal interest, and not a single issue on which his actions should not be suspect.
And of course, Donald Trump is in massive breach of the emoluments clause … not that anyone seems to be interested in doing something about that.
So the president remains in business with the world's two most populous countries. Even if he tries to avoid a bias, there's a clear feeling in foreign capitals that currying favor with his business can't hurt. It's a global perception problem, at best. "He does not forget his friends," said Emin Agalarov, who helped broker the infamous Russia campaign meeting in Trump Tower, according to Donald Trump Jr. When President Trump announced a travel ban from seven Muslim-majority countries, it was hard to miss that the ban excluded Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Azerbaijan and the United Arab Emirates--all places where he had previously pursued business deals.
