In an interview with Forbes, Donald Trump's dumbest son Qusay gives away the game: Even the ruse of Trump handing ownership of his companies to his own sons while in elected office, ownership that he will then reclaim after he leaves that office, was itself a con. Because Donald Trump will be getting personal updates on his businesses' performance on a regular basis.
“There is kind of a clear separation of church and state that we maintain, and I am deadly serious about that exercise,” [Eric Trump] says, echoing previous statements from his father. “I do not talk about the government with him, and he does not talk about the business with us. That’s kind of a steadfast pact we made, and it’s something that we honor.”
But less than two minutes later, he concedes that he will continue to update his father on the business while he is in the presidency. “Yeah, on the bottom line, profitability reports and stuff like that, but you know, that’s about it.” How often will those reports be, every quarter? “Depending, yeah, depending.” Could be more, could be less? “Yeah, probably quarterly.” One thing is clear: “My father and I are very close,” Eric Trump says. “I talk to him a lot. We’re pretty inseparable.”
So Trump has "separated" himself from the family business, except for the part where they're just keeping his chair warm for him and he's getting updates on the state of that business and maybe a few hints as to what the government might or might not do that would really help that business out.
It’s important to keep in mind that this whole increasingly ridiculous exercise is the Trump "solution" to the expectation that every other president and key elected official will divest themselves from their business interests in office so that they cannot use that office as a profit center for that business.
“The statement that the president made earlier that he wasn’t going to talk to his children about the business sounded good, but the reality was there was no way to enforce it,” says Larry Noble, general counsel of the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center and a former chief ethics officer at the Federal Election Commission. “He is breaking down one of the few barriers he claimed to be establishing between him and his businesses, and those barriers themselves were weak to begin with. But if he is now going to get reports from his son about the businesses, then he really isn’t separate in any real way.”
We just had an election in which Republicans were in a fury over the supposed crookedness of their opponent. It switched to open support for Trump's obvious crookedness in the span of weeks. Now the man's spending every weekend checking in at his own companies, getting status updates, and giving a wink and nod as those companies promote access to the presidency as a customer perk, and they don't have a thing to say about it. Party over country trumps all.