Donald Trump ran, and won, on a promise to “drain the swamp” of Washington corruption, said Eugene Robinson in The Washington Post. But so far, he seems intent on deepening it. The president-elect owns or has stakes in around 500 companies, at least 111 of which do business overseas. This creates a massive and unprecedented conflict of interest. One of Trump’s biggest lenders, for example, is Germany’s Deutsche Bank, currently negotiating a multibillion-dollar settlement with the Justice Department over abuses that contributed to the 2008 market crash.
Trump will soon preside over that same Justice Department. The potential for self-dealing is obvious, yet the billionaire president-elect has made only vague promises about firewalling himself off from his business empire. His favoured solution is to let his children run it, while he retains ownership. Yet his children also appear to be a key part of his White House transition team, judging from the way he recently invited his daughter Ivanka to sit in on a meeting with the Japanese prime minister. Clearly, Trump intends to turn the presidency into an arm of his family business.
This story is from the December 03 2016 edition of The Week UK.
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This story is from the December 03 2016 edition of The Week UK.
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