WASHINGTON ? Imagine a foreign potentate who uses his official position to promote his private businesses. Who makes face time with visiting dignitaries a perk for his paying customers. Whose top aide urges the citizenry to embrace products sold by the sovereign?s daughter.
For two months now, Americans have not had to imagine any of this. They have been living it.
As President Donald Trump enters his third month in office, he has already established at least one record, however dubious: the president most open and willing to use the prestige of the White House to enrich himself and his family.:scared
?I?m at a loss,? said Robert Maguire, an investigator with the Center for Responsive Politics, a group that advocates for more transparency in government and campaigns. ?This idea that the presidency is something to enrich your private interest to the extent he?s doing, not by going on the speaking tour or getting a big book deal after he leaves office, but while he?s in office, sort of milking the office for all it?s worth ― it?s tacky.?:0corn
For years, Trump made sure to feature one of his properties and his name-emblazoned jetliner in each episode of his reality TV show ?The Apprentice.? Just so, over the past seven weekends, Trump has visited his hotel in Washington, D.C., his golf courses in Palm Beach County and, most frequently, his Mar-a-Lago resort there. The weekend of March 11 ? only the second in a month and a half that he did not travel to Florida ? he had lunch with top aides at his golf course across the Potomac River from the White House. He did not play golf. He did not stay overnight. All he did was have lunch.
And with each of these visits have come the attendant media coverage, with photos and videos of his for-profit enterprises.
?He should not use his official position to promote his businesses. That doesn?t make him a good businessman. That makes him a bad president,? said Richard Painter, the former top ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush?s White House.:0008
Trump?s White House did not respond to emails for this story. And even some of his usual defenders declined to do so on this topic. ?It?s the full employment act for people who write about ethics,? said one former campaign official on the condition he could speak anonymously.
Matt Mackowiak, a Texas-based GOP consultant who often defends Trump, said he couldn?t really offer a sincere defense on this one. ?I think he enjoys being at his own properties. He has pride in them. He is comfortable in them. He feels he has a level of control over them,? he said. ?Should he not be allowed to go to his own properties??
? Richard Painter, former top ethics lawyer for George W. Bush?s White House
Trump?s behavior has no precedent, going back to at least the turn of the last century, ethics experts say. Even in the presidency most often associated with open corruption, it was Warren Harding?s Interior secretary, not Harding himself, who had taken bribes in the Teapot Dome oil lease scandal.
Presidents in recent years have taken care to place their assets in blind trusts, to eliminate possible perceptions of conflicts between their personal interests and those of the United States.
?I don?t think any president in modern history has had a serious conflict,? Painter said.
At a Jan. 11 news conference, though, Trump declared that the president of the United States was legally incapable of having any conflicts of interest, and that, if he chose to, he could serve as president while also running his businesses.
Rather than place his assets in a blind trust ? in which he would not even know what holdings he owned, let alone be able to control them ? Trump merely turned over temporary managerial control to his adult sons. And they, in turn, have been aggressively marketing the Trump brand abroad, taxpayer-provided Secret Service contingents in tow.
Eric Trump earlier this month even boasted about how well it is going. ?I think our brand is the hottest it has ever been,? he told the New York Times.
Meanwhile, the family of his brother-in-law and top White House aide, Jared Kushner, is reportedly negotiating a deal with a Chinese firm that analysts are calling unusually favorable to the Kushners. It would allow them to dramatically reduce their liability on a nine-figure loan on a Manhattan high-rise. At the same time, Kushner has emerged as Trump?s informal but possibly most influential foreign policy negotiator and has already met with Chinese leaders among others.
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