It has been a momentous week for the launch industry with SpaceX making headlines (not for the first time) well beyond the industry press. Its successful Falcon Heavy launch made front-page news across the world, capturing the imagination of people far beyond the space industry. In our Throwback Thursday feature we go back six years when Via Satellite interviewed the top executives of all the major launchers about how they saw the market developing. This article was originally published in the July 2012 issue of Via Satellite.

The launch services market is one of the most talked about in the satellite industry. With ferocious competition between exciting new entrants and established players, it remains to be seen how the market will shakeout in the next two to three years.

The order flow for new satellites is still pretty strong, which is good news for launch service providers, a competitive market in itself. However, from large Ka-band satellites to much smaller satellites, the market is as diverse as it has ever been, placing different demands on launch companies. It is a vibrant market.

It this roundtable, we talk to five commercial launch service executives about the state of the market, and whether or not there is enough business to go around. Included are Jean-Yves Le Gall, CEO, Arianespace; Frank McKenna, president, International Launch Services (ILS); Kjell Karlsen, president, Sea Launch; Gwynne Shotwell, president, SpaceX; and Fu Zhiheng, vice president, Launch Services Division, China Great Wall Industry Corporation (CGWIC).

VIA SATELLITE: How many commercial contracts do you expect to win in 2012? How does this projection compare to 2011?

Le Gall: We hope to sign between 10 and 12 contracts for launching satellites to GTO on the Ariane 5 in 2012, about the same number as in 2011. We also expect to sign two or three launch contracts for Soyuz and Vega, both of which are now fully operational at the Guiana Space Center.

McKenna: ILS expects to win seven to eight commercial contracts this year, which is consistent with what we have been receiving. We have been maintaining a backlog during the last three years of 21 to 24 systems and that goes on a two year lead time to maintain our launch rate of approximately seven to eight commercial launches per year. This year, we will conduct nine to 10 commercial launches. We see seven to eight awards as our average. Last year we received seven awards, and nine the year before that.

Karlsen: We fully expect four to five contracts or assignments against our multi-launch agreements this year. Obviously for us, this will be up from 2011 where we essentially got assignments from our multi-launch agreements with Intelsat and Eutelsat. In 2011, we were really focused on returning to launch operations and ensuring that this was achieved successfully, which we did with the launch of the Eutelsat Atlantic Bird 7 and Intelsat 18 satellites. This year, we will focus on expanding our sales and marketing efforts in order to add backlog to our manifest.

Shotwell: In 2011, we added 10 missions to the manifest. Seven of those were commercial and six were GTO flights. This year I anticipate around the same, with probably the same make up of deals as well.

Fu: Compared to the western launch services providers, we don’t have as many contracts as they do. But for Long March family, the launch missions in these years are intensively planned, mostly for domestic programs. In 2011, Long March conducted 19 launches, which surpassed the United States and ranked second in the world. In 2012, there are 21 launch missions planned for Long March. CGWIC would like to constantly expand its international business, to explore and establish new ties with the international community for mutual benefits and win-win partnership.

VIA SATELLITE: Is the amount of contracts available likely to remain stable through 2014?

Le Gall: I don’t have a crystal ball, but I can say that with the growing interest in having satellites provide direct broadcast television and Internet services and the strong growth in the economies of emerging countries, we are relatively optimistic for 2013-2014. We should continue to sign at least a steady number of contracts during this period.

McKenna: We expect that our launch rate will be maintained through that timeframe. In 2014-2016, we should start to see a reduction in the total amount of launches in the GEO market. We have predicted this for some time, and I think the institutional forecasts are catching up with that. Right now, we have a peak of GEO launches. That was planned with the FSS replacement cycle and with other factors such as financing and market conditions. But, we do see a cyclical element coming into play between 2014-2016 with less than 20 launches to GEO, which would be below the historical average.

Karlsen: I believe the number of satellite contracts and launches awarded will range from 19-23 in each of these years. We expect and are planning for a small cyclical downturn beyond that. We remain optimistic that continued improvements in spacecraft and launcher technologies will provide the basis of growth for our industry.

Shotwell: As far as the GTO flights are concerned, I think those are going to remain relatively stable. So, I think you are going to see between 18 and 22 satellites a year for GTO. I think there maybe a slight dip in 2013-2014, but it will go back up in 2015 when we think there will be 21 satellites a year. SpaceX, however, is the new entrant. We are having great success in the smaller end. Some of the providers have talked about a slowdown this year and next year, but we are not seeing it.

Fu: We foresee that in the international market, the satellite demand will remain stable in the next two years, which is around 20 per year. Most of these satellites would be for replacements of in-orbit satellites, while some would be for new business with new applications like Ka-band broadband services. Accordingly, the commercial launch services demand will also be stable. For Long March, we are also keeping a close watch on the current U.S. export reform, of which satellite is one of the main subjects. It is our strong belief that we would win more contracts with the high-reliability of the Long March if there were no unfair political restrictions on us.

VIA SATELLITE: Are there any particular regions like Latin America where you expect to see an upsurge in new orders?

Le Gall: The regions showing the strongest economic growth have the weakest ground telecommunications infrastructure, which means that satellites can play a significant role in meeting demand for bandwidth. Latin America certainly has this challenge, as well as the Gulf countries and the Asia-Pacific region. Since the beginning of the year we have signed three contracts in these regions.

McKenna: We do see an upsurge and ILS has participated in the growth in Latin America. There are also a significant number of projects in the Middle East, Africa and India, etc. We launched Intelsat-22 recently, which will provide satellite capacity for Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Europe, and on April 24 we launched Yahsat 1B for Yahsat, enabling the deployment of their YahClick network that will provide high-speed broadband services across South West Asia, Africa and the Middle East. In South East Asia, we see some growth but those are smaller satellites.

Karlsen: Latin America is definitely a growth area and Sea Launch is optimistic about prospects for this region going forward. Brazil appears to be a very promising market with Anatel’s recent auctions of four orbital slots, the Brazilian government’s plans for developing MilComSats and continued growth in the country’s DTH space. Then you have the recent satellite orders from SCT in Mexico. We are also confident about growth coming out of the Middle East and CIS regions where we see new satellite projects emerging.

Shotwell: We are doing quite well in South East Asia, and there are starting to be a lot of great opportunities in the Middle East for us also. I anticipate some heightened activity there. I would say later this year or early next year we hope to announce some deals with operators in the Middle East.

Fu: We do believe that there is a growing demand for the need of satellite telecommunications in the emerging countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America, where we also focus our attention. Meanwhile, in addition to GTO telecom satellites, the demand for the low earth orbit satellites and the piggyback launches are growing as well, which could be a new market for us.

VIA SATELLITE: Are increasing customer demands becoming a trend in the launch services market?

Le Gall: After a brief period of unrealistic expectations, fueled in part by the thought that launches were just another commodity and all one had to do was sign a contract to get one’s satellite into orbit, today it’s “back to basics” for most of our customers. They can fully appreciate that nothing replaces a launch services company committed to being ready, reliable and affordable, which is exactly what we offer at Arianespace, and the reason for our success!

McKenna: Customers have set up businesses plans that are demanding and very capital intensive. Their business models have specific technical requirements and include a significant amount of risk. Customers want consistent performance, on schedule delivery and good value.

In terms of trends, there are disruptive technologies and business models occurring in the launch market that has crept up slowly as the industry restructured during the last several years. We see a significant amount of competition, particularly in the low- to medium-class market, with the introduction of SpaceX and Falcon 9.

Karlsen: There is an increased level of competition. While there has been robust supply on the satellite manufacturing side for many years, customers want that same level of diversity on the launch service side. That is why there was strong support for Sea Launch from the satellite operators during and after our restructuring. We have seen a trend for fewer contracts being competed, captive either by multi-launch agreements, political considerations or export credit financing. In terms of spacecraft mass, we see two segments shaping up — one in the heavy-lift category driven by Ka-band and DBS/DTH applications and the other in the light and medium class, say around 3,500 Kg and below, driven by new satellite products being introduced by Boeing, SS/L and Orbital.

Shotwell: I don’t see a trend in our customers being more demanding, but keep in mind that we are relatively new to the GTO market. There are some other trends that are worth mentioning though. I think the move towards electrical propulsion on some of these satellites is great. I would characterize the recent deals done in this area as game changers. You will see a lot of shaking up in the market because of that. Commercial communications satellites that were traditionally in the 5.5-ton range are getting into the Falcon 9 Class range, which drops their launch prices dramatically by 50 percent or more. That is great for us. We are seeing a slowdown in the 4.5 to 5.5 ton range. We are seeing a definite increase on the small side and beginning to see a build-up of increased mass on the larger side as well.

Fu: New launch vehicles have joined the commercial launch services competition, so there is no doubt that the competition is becoming more severe. On the one hand, the major players keep improving their capabilities and services; on the other hand, new entrants like SpaceX have already won a number of orders without fully demonstrating their GTO launch capability and are a big hit in the market. With more players in the market and the launch demand remaining flat, every player is now facing more fierce competition. On the customers’ side, the demand will evolve with the development of the industry and the technology progress. For example, we have seen more and more customers require the financial support from the contractor for programs, and the electronic propulsion satellite has set new requirements for the launch services providers. However, the most critical concern of the customers will always be the high-reliability and the launch schedule assurance, which are the advantages of Long March.

VIA SATELLITE: When the market goes through a slower phase, will there be enough business for all of the players?

Le Gall: First of all, I’m not convinced that the market will experience a downturn. For the moment we’re seeing the market hold up thanks to applications like direct broadcast TV, satellite Internet and mobile communications. Secondly, I think that even if the market were to contract, quality would be more crucial than ever. Quality of course means the reliability of the launcher. With 48 successful launches in a row, it’s now clear that Ariane 5 is the leader. I frequently say that we sell a lot more than just a launcher — we provide launch services. Arianespace has established a full suite of services surrounding the launch vehicle. Every day we progress, and this gives me great confidence regarding the future of our company and our industry.

McKenna: No. We have predicted another shakeout and we know how the industry has to restructure itself. If you have not prepared for the downturn, the industry will adjust and the weaker players will have to exit the market. The lead times on launches are predicated by 36-month lead times on the satellites. You can already see where that stress is going to occur. We have positioned ourselves very carefully in the heavy lift market with manifest management and upgrades to the vehicle, which our customers are demanding. So, our stream of business is remaining relatively constant. ILS and Khrunichev can adjust to a drop in demand because of the way we have managed our business.

Karlsen: We have built a solid business plan based on fewer launches than our competitors require per year. In the restructuring, we were able to discharge development-era debt from our balance sheet. We now have a very strong balance sheet and no long-term debt. As I mentioned, we have taken some of the lessons learned since 1998 and applied them to our day-to-day operations, which allow us to be successful with a smaller number of launches. I think that is one of things you have to do to withstand the cyclical nature of this industry. I believe we are fully prepared to do this.

Shotwell: I think we all decided at a panel in Hawaii a number of years ago that three providers in each segment, the small side and the big side, can probably sustain the business. I don’t know what everybody needs to stay alive. Arianespace has four to five GTO flights a year. Proton does 12 flights, four of which are for the Russian government. It does about eight a year. CGWIC does a lot of business, but most of it domestic. Given the fact that we have business in so many sectors, I can’t say there is a minimum amount we can have in any one sector, but we would like to have 50 percent or more in each sector. That is pretty aggressive and we don’t need anywhere near that number. I would say we are not doing a good job if we don’t get 30 percent to 40 percent market share in both the small and large side.

Fu: At present, there are quite enough players in the international launch services market while the satellite demand is slowing down. It seems that there is not enough commercial business for every player. However, we also note that many players in the market provide services to the government agencies in addition to commercial business. That will help the launch services providers to some extent.

VIA SATELLITE: Do you expect to see more high-powered Ka-band satellite contracts in the future?

Le Gall: The Ka-band satellite market is beginning to thrive because it’s one of the most effective ways of providing Internet connectivity for regions that are traditionally underserved, like rural America and sub-Saharan Africa. For the moment, use is relatively modest — this is more than just a question of satellites, in many cases it’s because of the distribution network. But things are moving ahead at a fast pace, and I believe that within five years, the launch of Ka-band satellites will account for a large slice of our market.

McKenna: A number of early successes have now occurred in Ka-band. ILS launched Ka-Sat, which validated the demand for this capability. We also launched ViaSat-1 last year, the heaviest satellite launched on ILS Proton at more than 6.7 metric tons. On April 24 we launched Yahsat 1B for Yahsat to serve commercial and government users, and in 2014 we will launch Inmarsat’s Global Xpress satellites. Boeing, Space Systems/Loral and Astrium are developing these satellites, and we are launching them. Will it be five satellites annually? No, but it will fill in a little bit of the trough as there is a continuing demand for fixed and mobile broadband around the globe.

Karlsen: Surprisingly, it was mentioned during the SATELLITE 2012 conference in Washington, D.C., that DirecTV has been the most successful Ka-band player in the market so far. I think a lot people took note of that. We are seeing continued proposal activity in Ka-band satellites and are well placed to compete for these with our existing launch capability. Sea Launch is currently working with our new owner, RSC Energia, to increase the lift capability of our vehicle to match the growth of these satellites. By the end of 2014, the lift-capability will grow to 6.700 kg, and a lengthening of our Boeing-made fairing will take place. This will make it easier to fit these larger Ka-band satellites on our system. Combined with our dedicated launcher configuration, this will provide a good solution for the marketplace.

Shotwell: There is no question there is a lot of future opportunities for us, but those satellites will require the Falcon Heavy. The Heavy is a perfectly suited vehicle for missions like that. You could do a dual manifest and have two of those huge satellites on one Heavy. There is no question that this is going to be an important market segment for us. We do have good relations with companies in that arena. We expect we will do one or two Falcon Heavy deals in the near-term. It should not surprise anybody if we announce two or three Falcon Heavy deals this year.

Fu: Currently there is a rising demand for this kind of satellites in the market, not only in the developed countries, but also in the developing counties and regions like Africa. China is also conducting the research and development of Ka-band satellite technology, and we expect to launch a Ka-band satellite in the coming years.

The post 2012 Throwback: Launchers Battle for Their Slice of the Pie appeared first on Via Satellite.

Успеха достигли не все, а лишь те компании, которые сумели грамотно провести маркетинговое исследование для новой продукции, изучили рынки и не стали гнаться за быстрой прибылью.

Объемы поставок медтехники для перинатальных центров растут как на дрожжах: со 113 млн рублей в 2015 году до 1,13 млрд рублей в 2016 году.

Теги:  ВПК, ОПК

• On Halloween this year a new law takes effect in New York City prohibiting employers from inquiring about a candidate’s salary history during the hiring process.
• It will move the spotlight away from a too-basic metric—compensation—and shine it on the most profound elements of long-term value for an organization: motivation, cultural fit, aspiration, understanding of the business and strategic intelligence.

A few years ago Richard D. Fairbank founder, chairman and chief executive officer of Capital One Financial Corporation, told Stanford Insights, "I tell people I'm stalking them, and you're on my short list." 

Companies that spend 2 percent of their time recruiting, he argued, spend 75 percent of their time managing recruiting mistakes.  His implied criticism was that executives spend a lot of time managing their balance sheet even though it doesn’t represent their company’s scarcest resource: great talent.

Great CEOs are held in high regard for clever management of financial metrics.  But great CEOs should be equally regarded for their management of human capital.  Measured by time, talent and workforce energy it is a scarce resource.  Scarcest of all is difference-making talent.

The average company considers only about 15 percent of its employees to be difference makers.  Based on my own firm’s research, inspired employees are three times more productive than dissatisfied employees.  An organization’s energy is a function of its number of inspired employees.  But they are rare.  Finding, developing and retaining difference-makers is tough; no wonder the business press refers to a “war” for talent.  For most organizations, only one out of eight employees is described as “inspired”.

The cost of selecting the wrong person can run into hundreds of thousands, even millions of dollars, not to mention the potential negative impact to a company’s morale and productivity.

The cost of selecting the wrong person can run into hundreds of thousands, even millions of dollars, not to mention the potential negative impact to a company’s morale and productivity.

  Competitive compensation policies are only the most obvious example of what it takes to win a competitive edge in the talent market.  Understanding the alteration of traditional talent pools is another.

That is precisely why disruptions like New York’s equal-pay law are, perhaps ironically, a gift to those of us working in talent strategy.  On Halloween this year a new law takes effect in New York City prohibiting employers from inquiring about a candidate’s salary history during the hiring process.  The law is explicitly intended to untrack lifelong pay inequalities for women by uncoupling them from their salary histories.  From now on any such inquires will be treated as unlawful and discriminatory.

They move the spotlight away from a too-basic metric—compensation—and shine it on the most profound elements of long-term value for an organization: motivation, cultural fit, aspiration, understanding of the business and strategic intelligence.

Companies in our industry that take command of their evolution are strategic advisors, not resume dealers.  They are seizing an opportunity to become guides in an operational environment where the old borders and landmarks have been blown away. 

The leading search firms today are technology-centered and data-driven in support of a simple strategic insight.  Clients want to know which candidates will thrive in their individual organizations—they want to know fit, in other words, and potential.  They want to hire efficiently and accurately.  Measured by the time and money saved on unsuccessful hires this is profoundly valuable intelligence for CEOs and HR executives.

Consider the case of financial-services firms.  The talent they want may now be more readily found in other industries, especially Silicon Valley. 

Consider the case of financial-services firms.  The talent they want may now be more readily found in other industries, especially Silicon Valley. 

Other firms, intent on grafting the technical innovation of Silicon Valley to their businesses, have learned the hard way that recruiting such talent is often not an issue of compensation but of competing with the creativity, lifestyle, intellectual stimulation and stability found in the Valley.  Clients need guidance in understanding the ways in which quants are an entirely different breed from financial modelers.  That’s one of the things a good search firm can provide.

Disruptions like the New York law will play to their strengths.

The authors of the legislation may not have intended that consequence.  But we should thank them just the same.

Richard Stein is chief growth officer at Options Group in New York. 

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: The only right way to pop your pimples

PARIS — Leading launch service providers say emerging companies developing a generation of dedicated small-satellite launchers will struggle to compete in the marketplace and will ultimately lose out to the bigger players.

Speaking at the World Satellite Business Week in Paris Sept. 12, top executives of the world’s five leading launch service providers agreed that the future small-satellite launch market will favor ridesharing and customized services on larger launch vehicles rather than tailored launches by the newcomers.

“At SpaceX, we started with a small launch vehicle,” said SpaceX President and COO Gwynne Shotwell, whose company has launched its Falcon 9 rocket 13 times since last September’s on-pad fueling accident destroyed a Spacecom’s Amos-6 satellite. “We really wanted to make a business of Falcon 1 … we just could not make it work.”

United Launch Alliance CEO Tory Bruno, whose company operates the Atlas 5 and Delta 4 rockets for a U.S. government-dominated customer base, said some of the newcomers may initially succeed in the market only to be taken down by the big players later on.

“I think it’s a function of time,” Bruno said. “Initially, they will begin and they will try and service the small satellite launch market. But as that becomes a real market, that attracts the rest of us.  I think the real economics will favor rideshares as a solution so then it flips to the other side.”

ILS President Kirk Pysher, whose Reston, Virginia-based company operates Russia’s Proton rocket for commercial customers, agreed.

“I believe that the most effective and reliable ride for them is with us who are sitting here today,” he said referring to the five members of the panel that also included Arianespace CEO Stéphane Israël, China Great Wall Industry Corporation (CGWIC) executive vice president Gao Ruofei and Ko Ogasawara, vice president and director of space systems business development at Mitsubishi Heavy Industries.

“But there could be a niche market out there for small launchers,” Pysher added.

Virgin Orbit CEO Dan Hart, speaking the day before on a panel with Blue Origin’s Clay Mowry, was understandably more bullish on the prospects for dedicated smallsat-launchers — at least for the air-launched LauncherOne under development at Virgin Orbit’s Long Beach, California, factory.

“We’ll get up into flight in the first part of 2018, and then we will be ramping up quickly. We are going into commercial operation next year, and then doubling our launch rate in 2019, and doubling again in 2020,” he said, adding that the company “will have customers on flights number two and three.”

Small satelites, big opportunity?

Small satellites, the panelists said, are playing an increasingly important role for their respective businesses, especially as the industry has seen a decline in the number of geostationary satellite launches.  This year has seen just four new GEO satellite orders, down sharply from the 10-15 such orders usually seen.

In 2016, 60 percent of the 220 satellites launched weighed less than 500 kilograms, underscoring a trend towards smaller and smaller spacecraft, according to conference organizer Euroconsult.

Adjusting to the changing demand is both a challenge and an opportunity for established launch providers, the panelists said.

“We have a significant technical project, which is not a GEO satellite anymore,” said Israël, a reference to Arianespace’s role as launch provider for the OneWeb and O3b non-geostationary-orbit constellations.

“The LEO and MEO constellations are very important projects. This is why I consider this (the metric of geo satellites) totally irrelevant.”

Pysher said ILS is also seeing a lot of interest from small satellite operators and is looking for was to offer more affordable prices. The cost of launch is currently a major hindrance for small sat operators. According to Pysher, it is frequently more expensive to launch a small satellite than build it.

“By being able to accommodate the smallsat market, we can reduce the launch cost of the primary customer that is going to GEO,” he said.  “We can also provide the small satellite with a reliable and effective ride, which is a challenge for them today.”

ILS conducted its second Proton launch of the year Sept. 11, delivering Hispasat’s Amazonas-5 satellite to geostationary transfer orbit. A Sept. 28 launch is planned for AsiaSat-9.

Under pressure

The launch providers expect the pressure for lower and lower prices to continue shaping the industry.

“It wasn’t that long ago when we were charging $100 million for a commercial launch,” Pysher said. “Today, we are somewhere with numbers that start with 5s and 6s so we are talking about a 40 to 50 percent reduction in the launch price.”

Ridesharing, Pysher said, would be the most efficient way in the future to achieve the further price decreases some customers are demanding.

“We are frequently asked what type of technology are we implementing for our launch vehicles to get the price down to $25 million per launch,” Pysher said. “My answer is ‘none.’ The only way to achieve that is to have a shared launch and then also developing satellites that perhaps don’t have the 15-year life span anymore. Maybe a five-year life span.”

Shotwell agreed: “To get to $30 million per launch, you may get there with reusability but you for sure get there by dividing $60 million by two.”

Vertical integration

The rocket makers also said that the requirements to reduce cost is driving them to manufacture more of the rocket components in house instead of sourcing sub-systems through a wider supply chain.

“If you want to have more control over the price structure of your product, that drives you towards the higher degree of vertical integration,” Bruno said. “Producing more of the content of the rocket, more of the components in house.”

SpaceX’s Shotwell commented: “We started this way from the beginning, we found that the aerospace supply chain had too long time lines, very expensive components so we ended up producing most of the rocket components in house, we ended up taking in much more of the rocket than we originally expected.”

SpaceNews.com

Each year, I keep a running list of exceptional nonfiction that I encounter as I publish The Best of Journalism, an email newsletter that I curate weekly for its subscribers. This is my annual attempt to bring roughly 100 of those stories that stood the test of time to a wider audience. I could not read or note every worthy article published in the past few years, and I haven't included any paywalled articles or anything published at The Atlantic. But everything that follows is worthy of wider attention and engagement. I hope it provides fodder for reflection and inspiration for future writing. My thanks to all of the publishers, editors and, writers who made these gems possible.

The Art of Storytelling

POPULAR MECHANICS / Marooned Among the Polar Bears by Justin Nobel

“Sergey Ananov is trapped on a slab of ice in the Arctic Circle. He has no locator beacon, no phone, and barely any water. The fog will hide him from any rescuers. Night will come. Hypothermia will come. And whatever large, powerful creatures that scratch out their existence in this primordial world—maybe they will come too.”

STARTUP / Season Four by Lisa Chow (audio)

Dov Charney recounts his rise and fall at American Apparel and tries to make a comeback.

THE NEW YORKER / Citizen Khan by Kathryn Schulz

“Wyoming is huge—you could fit all of New England inside it, then throw in Hawaii and Maryland for good measure—but it is the least populous state in the Union; under six hundred thousand people live there, fewer than in Louisville, Kentucky. Its Muslim population is correspondingly tiny—perhaps seven or eight hundred people. Contrary to the claims of Stop Islam in Gillette, however, the Muslims who established the mosque are not new to the region. Together with some twenty per cent of all Muslims in Wyoming, they trace their presence back more than a hundred years, to 1909, when a young man named Zarif Khan immigrated to the American frontier.”

DAGBLADET / The Baby in the Plastic Bag by Bernt Jakob Oksnes

“The plastic bag is stained with blood. He leans down, grasps one of the handles, and realises that there is yet another carrier bag inside the first, its handles knotted together. As he works to untie the knot, muffled whimpers can be heard from within. The knot gives way and the plastic handles slide apart. As Tor glances inside the bag, he beholds what lies within. It is a human being. A living newborn baby, blue and cold.”

CHICAGO MAGAZINE / Dispatches From the Rap Wars by Forrest Stuart

“For the gang—and others like it—the rappers are designated as the ticket out of poverty. It becomes the responsibility of the rest of the members to support and protect them. Each rapper has ‘shooters.’ These are members who make good on the threats the rappers dish out in their lyrics. And, yes, that means shooting—and sometimes killing—people. CBE has about a dozen shooters. A.J. may be the one holding an automatic weapon in his Instagram photos, but he has never shot at the opps.”

ROADS & KINGDOMS / The Barnacle Queens of the Spanish Seaside by Matt Goulding

“When she left her job to work the rocks, she fell instantly in love with almost everything about her new profession: the open air, the ever-changing office space, the sisterly camaraderie. But she didn’t love the way she and her fellow women were treated.”

GQ / Inside the Federal Bureau of Way Too Many Guns by Jeanne Marie Laskas

“There's no telling how many guns we have in America—and when one gets used in a crime, no way for the cops to connect it to its owner. The only place the police can turn for help is a Kafkaesque agency in West Virginia, where, thanks to the gun lobby, computers are illegal and detective work is absurdly antiquated. On purpose. Thing is, the geniuses who work there are quietly inventing ways to do the impossible.”

SPIEGEL / Three Shepherds on a Surreal Front by Christoph Reuter

“The attempt to retake Mosul from Islamic State has been underway for almost two weeks. Resistance is fierce and chaos on the front lines has resulted in some surreal scenes.”

HUFFPOST / Meet the Ungers by Jason Fagone

“When they were young, 230 men and one woman were convicted of terrible crimes—murders, rapes, robberies. They thought they were going to die in prison. They were supposed to. But then, just a few years back, Merle Unger Jr., one of the most notorious escape artists of our time, discovered an ingenious (and legal) way to get them out. It was an unimagined second chance for them—and a nerve-wracking experiment for everyone else.”

THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE / David’s Ankles: How Imperfections Could Bring Down the World’s Most Perfect Statue by Sam Anderson

“My mind could not stop imagining it. An earthquake hits the center of Florence: The church bells ring out of time, terra cotta tiles rain down from the Renaissance rooftops, priceless paintings rattle off the walls of the Uffizi. Meanwhile, inside the Accademia Gallery, the David’s pedestal begins to tilt. Slightly at first, just enough to shift the statue’s gaze, so that he looks not at his old enemy anymore—the implied Goliath off in the distance—but at a new one: the floor he’s been standing on for 134 years.”

THE LOS ANGELES TIMES / Framed by Christopher Goffard

“She ran down the hall, seized by panic. She thought it must be about her husband, who was now working as a traveling wine salesman. He was on the road all the time, and she thought he’d been in an accident. Officer Charles Shaver tried to calm her down. He was not here about her husband. Did she have anything in her car she shouldn’t have?”

VANITY FAIR / Joan Rivers’s Remarkable Rise to (and Devastating Fall From) Comedy’s Highest Ranks by Leslie Bennetts

“Only a few months earlier, Joan Rivers had everything she ever wanted: fame and fortune, the job of her dreams, a loyal husband, a loving child, a lavish estate—and a future that beckoned with enticing possibilities. After years of struggle, she had not only succeeded as a comedian, but made history on the newly launched FOX Network as television’s first and only female late-night talk show host. And now she’d lost it all.”

Slices of American Life

ESPN / O.J.: Made in America (video)

The year’s best documentary.

THE WASHINGTON POST / From Belief to Outrage: The Decline of the Middle Class Reaches the Next American Town by Eli Saslow

“Fast-food consumption was beginning to tick up. Foreclosures were up. Meth usage up. Heroin up. Death rate up. In Dan Quayle’s Middle America, one of the biggest news stories of the year had been the case of a mother who had let her three-week-old child suck heroin off her finger.”

THE WEEKLY STANDARD / Big Budget Items by Andrew Ferguson

“As you walked around you got the idea that here, right here, after 200 years of ceaseless propulsion across a vast continent, the American dream had finally come to rest. This is where it had been heading all along. And then you turned a corner and saw that Frank Gehry didn't like it.”

VIRGINIA QUARTERLY REVIEW/ Vertical Descent by Elisabeth Donnelly

“If sport, in the truest, downright ancient-Olympic sense of the word, is embodied by a lone warrior running to Marathon to tell the troops news of war, then ‘synchro,’ as it’s called by insiders, is its opposite. It’s not a war game. It’s not a show of superior speed and cunning in comparison to a direct opponent. It developed over the last hundred years, and it’s obstensibly, on the surface, showbiz. Yet while showbiz may be in its origins, synchro is a celebration of extraordinary athletes proving that they can perform with skill and beauty in the water. It combines dance, gymnastics, choreography, originality, and artistry in order to tell a story. The competition, as it is, is seeing who can be more perfect in the water.”

THE LINCOLN JOURNAL STAR / A Mom for All Ages by Marcella Mercer

“Medicine for Arianna and Dontae alone tops out at $12,200 a month. The family’s medical needs are so massive and complex that Lynn’s Dakotamart Pharmacy in nearby Belle Fourche hired an additional full-time employee just to process their prescriptions. By age 3, it had cost about $3 million to keep Arianna alive.”

REPLY ALL / A Simple Question and Lost in a Cab by PJ Vogt and Alex Goldman (audio)

SACRAMENTO NEWS & REVIEW / Homeless—and In Hiding by Raheem F. Hosseini

“There are more than a dozen—mostly of Southeast Asian descent, dehydrated and dazed groggy by the sun—but this represents only a third of the people who called this field home and flew under the radar of Sacramento County’s lead homeless agency. Or at least they used to.”

OXFORD AMERICAN / Ride Along With the Cow Police by Matt Wolfe

“Cattle rustling, signature crime of the Old West, has returned to Texas.”

ARS TECHNICA / Finding North America’s Lost Medieval City by Annalee Newitz

“A thousand years ago, huge pyramids and earthen mounds stood where East St. Louis sprawls today in Southern Illinois. This majestic urban architecture towered over the swampy Mississippi River floodplains, blotting out the region's tiny villages. Beginning in the late 900s, word about the city spread throughout the southeast. Thousands of people visited for feasts and rituals, lured by the promise of a new kind of civilization.”

GQ / Inside the Church of Chili’s by Daniel Riley

“Like most chains, there’s plenty that’s cheesy about Chili’s Grill and Bar. But there is also something special—something that converts its most devoted employees into enthusiastic, unblinking evangelists. Their devotion to The Sizzle is pure, and these are their secrets.”

THE WASHINGTON POST / ‘What Kind of Childhood Is That’ by Eli Saslow

“After losing their parents to overdoses, three children confront America's opioid epidemic.”

THE GUARDIAN / McDonald’s: You Can Sneer, But It’s the Glue That Holds Communities Together by Chris Arnade

“When many lower-income Americans feel isolated and empty, they yearn for physical social networks. And all across the U.S., this happens organically at McDonald’s.”

WIRED / The Internet Really Has Changed Everything by Rex Sorgatz

“Napoleon would be trapped in the amber of time, in a big glass case, if not for one thing: access to information.”

CITY JOURNAL / Portrait of the Neighborhood as a Hipster Haven by Kay S. Hymowitz

“Williamsburg’s creative class has learned the ways of market competition, profits, distribution, business plans, customer satisfaction, and vertical markets, along with sustainability, organic materials, and community responsibility. The marriage between art, millennial politics, and old-fashioned capitalism will strike some as Marx’s worst fear come true. But even the haters would have to admit that it tastes and looks good.”

THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE / What Happened to Worcester? by Adam Davidson

“These two trapped, poor, broken people somehow met and managed to put all that pain behind and create a new life in what still felt like the fresh, quickly growing frontier of central Massachusetts. Bumpa, following a tip from a minister who had moved to Worcester, seems to have arrived in the city with an office job in hand, at the Heald Machine Company, where he worked until his retirement decades later. A combination of historical luck, a fast-growing economy, and his own hard work enabled him to carve out a good life that must have seemed unattainable when he was younger.”

THE WASHINGTON POST / ‘How’s Amanda?’ by Eli Saslow

“She had no job, no high school diploma, no car and no money beyond what her mother gave her for Mountain Dew and cigarettes. A few days earlier, a dentist had pulled all 28 of her teeth, which had decayed from years of neglect. It had been a week since she’d seen her 9-year-old twin sons, who lived in a nearby suburb with their father, and lately the most frequent text messages coming into her phone were from a dealer hoping to lure her back with free samples.”

COMMENTARY and NATIONAL REVIEW / Trump’s Terrifying Online Brigades and Why White-Nationalist Thugs Thrill to Trump by James Kirchick

“Though we all have reason to be annoyed by the resurgence of political correctness, the alt-right remedy is the oratorical inverse of the problem they claim to despise. Social-justice warriors needlessly shut down debate and proscribe words and ideas to assuage the feelings of allegedly vulnerable minority groups; the alt-right flings around racial epithets and Der Stürmer cartoons purely to transgress accepted social codes. And that’s only the most charitable explanation for their behavior, assuming as it does that they don’t ‘really’ mean what they say. But what about that element of the alt-right that actually does have a political agenda beyond annoying its adversaries?”

THE CUT / From Pickup Artist to Pariah by Rachel Monroe

“Jared Rutledge fancied himself a big man of the ‘manosphere.’ But when his online musings about 46 women were exposed, his whole town turned against him.”

THE WEEK / The columns of Michael Brendan Dougherty in aggregate, including America Is More Divided Than Ever. So Why Is Obama Optimistic?, Why Is America Backing Saudi Arabia’s Atrocious War in Yemen? Donald Trump’s Malicious Stupidity, How Hillary Clinton Could Blow It, Trump vs. Clinton Is a Verdict on America, How Donald Trump Watered Down the Very Idea of American Greatness, This Election Is God’s Judgment on Us, and The Limits of a Trump Presidency

Food

THE NEW YORKER / The Most Exclusive Restaurant in America by Nick Paumgarten

“Damon Baehrel’s methods are a marvel, and his tables are all booked until 2025. Or are they?”

THE RINGER / The Burning Desire for Hot Chicken by Danny Chau

“Hot chicken was a dish created for the express purpose of bringing a man to his knees. Its origin myth wasn’t the result of a mistake, like chocolate chip cookies, Coca-Cola, or the French dip sandwich. Hot chicken was premeditated; to this day, every bite of Nashville hot chicken is touched by the spectral presence of a betrayed lover.”

TAMPA BAY TIMES / Farm to Fable by Laura Reiley

“What makes buying food different from other forms of commerce is this: It’s a trust-based system. How do you know the Dover sole on your plate is Dover sole? Only that the restaurateur said so. And how can you be sure the strawberries your toddler is gobbling are free of pesticides? Only because the vendor at the farmers market said so. Your purchases are unverifiable unless you drive to that farm or track back through a restaurant’s distributors and ask for invoices. I did.”

FOOD 52 / In Sickness, In Health, In White Castle by Allison Robicelli

“The children the doctors said you’d never bear came immediately. He didn’t drive, but occasionally he took three trains to White Castle to surprise you with a sack of ten. Sometimes you were so happy you’d cry. Sometimes you’d scream at him for not psychically knowing you were nauseous. You’re amazed that he never once—back then and in all the years that followed—stopped trying to make you happy.”

THE RINGER / Sriracha Is a Quintessentially American Flavor by Danny Chau

“David Tran’s exact sriracha recipe may not be available to the public, but with only six core ingredients (red jalapenos, garlic, distilled vinegar, sugar, salt, and xanthan gum), it’s as open source as any name-brand foodstuff. But no matter how good or bad an outside interpretation, the signifiers always lead you back to the source, to the first time you let the rooster into your life.”

LUCKY PEACH / Why New York Is Better Than San Francisco by Peter Meehan

“My best memories are experiences of texture more than flavor: crinkly, crumpled, shiny foil keeping a sandwich swaddled in steam-softened white paper piping hot; the kaiser roll crumbly, the fine cornmeal from its underside adding a pleasant grit to the assemblage; the bacon on the border of unbearably crisp but not too far gone; the egg, if eaten while magma-hot, still passably tender; squeezed-out packages of ketchup providing cool, sweet counterpoint.”

EATER / Maybe Just Don’t Drink Coffee by Matt Buchanan

“At this point you could, as more than half of all American adults do on a daily basis, drink a cup of coffee to stave off the fog of imminent unconsciousness. After all, you love coffee. And not just because of the caffeine. But have you really thought it all through?”

LIFE & THYME / Good Graces by Carolyn Phillips

“As my mother-in-law reaches out and refills my cup, I do not know whether I am more shocked by the senseless cruelties in her story or by the fact that she has just now actually served me tea.”

EATER / The People’s Cheeseburger by Willy Blackmore

“Locol’s messaging isn’t geared toward people who will not be its primary customers. Choi and Patterson don’t openly talk about conscious capitalism or triple-bottom lines. They’re mostly just leaning on the premise that serving neighborhoods like Watts, which often have a dearth of food options beyond corner stores and outposts of gigantic chains, is good business both ethically and fiscally, and likely to be profitable.”

GIMLET MEDIA / Milk Wanted by Phia Bennin (audio)

“A breast milk paradise, shady breastmilk scammers, and the surprising history of breast milk in the United States.”

ROADS & KINGDOMS / A Last Dinner in the Jungle by Shane Mitchell

“Here, atop a toxic landfill, mired in mud and muck, in a makeshift kitchen lacking running water or refrigeration, was a bird to sing about. A spicy paste clung to pieces of meat, juicy without being greasy. What do you crave when you can’t go home again? Or worse, fear being sent back? Perhaps this drumstick, DayGlo red with spices.”

Essays

THE WEEKLY STANDARD / The Migrants of Calais by Christopher Caldwell

“We are using antiquated categories that make the most explosive social problems of our time wholly invisible to us. The geographical segregation into globalized and unglobalized areas has created a sort of epistemological trap. From the age of social democracy, when class was measured by one dimension, income, we have inherited the habit of assuming political issues will pit ‘the rich’ against ‘the poor.’ But today's issues don't. The dividing line on most issues is whether people are being helped or hurt by the global economy.”

GARDEN AND GUN / The Columns Hotel by Rick Bragg

“It was as if someone had taken so much of what is lovely and unique about this place and just hung it on the thick, wet air, to be admired. It was just a moment, fine in itself.”

HAZLITT / Hunger Makes Me by Jess Zimmerman

“A man’s appetite can be hearty, but a woman with an appetite—for food, for sex, for simple attention—is always voracious: she always overreaches, because it is not supposed to exist.”

VIRGINIA QUARTERLY REVIEW / Cost of Living by Emily Maloney

“At some point I started billing differently. I can’t say when. It could have been when we had a patient die and I had to bill his family. It could have been when I saw the dizzying costs that were itemized for inpatient bills, or the time the woman I evaluated—my patient, our patient—and then billed was saddled with an amount she could never hope to pay. I remember her: how she came in and explained that things were difficult, that she didn’t have insurance, but she needed someone to lance the boil that had erupted at her waistline. It had been causing her incredible pain, to the point where she could no longer dress herself. Please, she said. But she had already been registered, been given an ID bracelet, all the apparatuses of the emergency department and its tracking. Her bill popped up later on my screen; I saw the amount. This, somehow, totaled the cost of living. I thought of my own unpaid medical debt, reduced the amount, told no one, and let the next chart flash across my screen.”

n+1 / Every Body Goes Haywire by Anna Altman

“It’s inconceivable to most people that this is it—there is no other, underlying condition. The headaches are the condition itself.”

ELLE / My Destructive Dependency on Migraine Drugs by Dana Goldstein

“For a period of several years that ended only six months ago, I had a migraine, of varying degrees of intensity, essentially 100 percent of the time that I was awake.”

THE GUARDIAN / Dance Lessons for Writers by Zadie Smith

“On YouTube you will find them, locked in many dance-offs, and so you are presented with a stark choice. But it’s not a question of degrees of ability, of who was the greater dancer. The choice is between two completely opposite values: legibility on the one hand, temporality on the other. Between a monument (Jackson) and a kind of mirage (Prince).”

LIT HUB / Walking While Black by Garnette Cadogan

“The sidewalk was a minefield, and every hesitation and self-censored compensation reduced my dignity. Despite my best efforts, the streets never felt comfortably safe.”

FACEBOOK / What It’s Like to Be Black in Naperville by Brian Crooks

“Please, bear with me for a few minutes. Hopefully, it'll help you understand why I feel the way I do about what's been going on.”

NATIONAL AFFAIRS / Renewing the University by Alan Jacobs

“When students demand the intervention of administrative authority to solve every little conflict, they end reinforce a power structure in which students and faculty alike are stripped of moral agency, in which all of us in the university—including the administrators themselves—become instruments in the hands of a self-perpetuating bureaucratic regime. Few social structures could be more alien to the character of true education.”

FILM COMMENT / The Great Recession by Shonni Enelow

“While cooler styles have always been with us, from Greta Garbo and Cary Grant to Steve McQueen and Charlotte Rampling, those actors communicate that they are above or outside of emotion, either aristocratically detached or winningly unflappable. In contrast, the thread of resistance to and evasion of spectacular emotionality among many in today’s new generation of stars doesn’t evoke emotional detachment or indifference but rather a tortured mistrust of expression itself—one that, in its understated way, clearly forms its own kind of emotional appeal to the audience at the same time as it dramatizes why the actor must resist making one.”

REAL LIFE / Auto Format by Navneet Alang

“Twitter has colonized my mind. Almost every day for just under a decade, I have checked the site, have tweeted, retweeted, been subtweeted. My mental map is the frontier surrendered, and Twitter is the empire. To become occupied by a social network is to internalize its gaze. It is to forever carry a doubled view of both your own mind and the platform’s.”

BRIGHT WALL / DARK ROOM / The Grace of Keanu Reeves by Angelica Jade Bastién

“Keanu, of course, isn’t the first star to exist at the crossroads of virile and vulnerable. Actors like James Dean, Montgomery Clift, and Paul Newman embody a similar alchemy that have drawn women (and men) to them. But these actors often seem to fight against the lustful gaze of the camera, while Keanu supplants himself to it. Where they seem cynical, disinterested, or too wounded as a romantic lead, Keanu is utterly open.”

THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR / Saving the Self in the Age of the Selfie by James McWilliams

“Daily life offers endless opportunities to cultivate character-building behaviors that, once they become habitual, can nurture our weapons of resistance rather than exchange them for the conveniences of the Internet. Four of these habits stand out as essential to the preservation of an anchored identity: spending time alone, engaging in meaningful conversations, forming friendships, and pursuing an activity within a community. Imagine, if you can, an identity that’s permitted to develop with minimal interference from digital culture and you’ll begin to grasp the benefits that these four kinds of stresses can have on a self hoping to develop a healthier relationship with digitized life.”

THE WEEKLY STANDARD / Love Me Do by Andrew Ferguson

“A bit past the midpoint of the last century, roughly from early 1967 to late 1969, a sizable number of human beings believed that Paul McCartney was the coolest man who ever lived. Compared with your average world-historical claim, this one was not unreasonable.”

PRISON UK / Preparing for Prison by Alex Cavendish

“Never underestimate that cold click of steel as your wrist is cuffed, chaining you to another human being who now has control over you. Most newly convicted prisoners are so shocked at the experience that they become compliant. I know I did.”

GARDEN AND GUN / Dog Days of Youth by Douglas Cutting

“At daybreak, about the moment when ducks move before legal light, I snapped off the couch from a bad dream and looked around. Total silence. I scrambled to the porch door. Saw Gauge Man on his bed, sound asleep. Stared. Looked around again, buzzing with exhaustion and delirium. Looked back at my dog—slick pawed and skinned up around his nose and chin—and realized it was real. He’d run a long way back from somewhere, and he was home, and so I piled onto the old dog bed with him and buried my face in his fur and suddenly recognized all the spaces he filled.”

AEON / Nadia’s Story by Ana Todorović

“We could get into an ambulance and go to Southampton, where I would have a caesarean and Nadia would be put on a machine for some time, ‘to give her heart a rest’. Then she would be treated with drugs, and she would have to stay in hospital. Perhaps for six months, perhaps for a year. She might not survive the birth, or the machine, or the medication, but if she did, there would be some chance of a full recovery. And some chance of a partial recovery, a life with a debilitating heart disease, or disability, or both. The alternative path would be to ‘put her to sleep’ with a needle to the heart, after which her birth would be induced and it would all be over.”

Identity & Difference

THIS AMERICAN LIFE / Will I Know Anyone at This Party? (audio)

“Right now lots of Republicans feel like they don’t recognize their own party. Like a Minnesota congressman who’s confused when the residents in his district, people he’s known for years, start calling for a ban on Muslims moving to their town.”

THIS AMERICAN LIFE / Who’s Really on Line One? by Zoe Chace (audio)

A radio producer “goes to Greenville, South Carolina to talk with Tony Beam – host of the radio show Christian Worldview Today. Tony and his listeners are evangelical Christians, and usually, Tony backs a candidate for office and his listeners tend to agree with him. But this election season, things are playing out very differently.”

MOTHER JONES / I Spent 5 Years With Some of Trump’s Biggest Fans. Here’s What They Won’t Tell You by Arlie Russell Hochschild

“The deep story of the right goes like this: You are patiently standing in the middle of a long line stretching toward the horizon, where the American Dream awaits. But as you wait, you see people cutting in line ahead of you. Many of these line-cutters are black—beneficiaries of affirmative action or welfare. Some are career-driven women pushing into jobs they never had before. Then you see immigrants, Mexicans, Somalis, the Syrian refugees yet to come. As you wait in this unmoving line, you’re being asked to feel sorry for them all. You have a good heart. But who is deciding who you should feel compassion for? Then you see President Barack Hussein Obama waving the line-cutters forward. He’s on their side.”

OXFORD AMERICAN / The Last Florida Indians Will Now Die by Justin Nobel

“As a child, I learned of certain native tribes and their respective homelands—the Cherokee in the South, the Navajo in the Southwest, the Iroquois in New York State. What I wasn’t taught is that these tribes exist because they were defeated, and in defeat they signed treaties with the U.S. government. As awful as their lot was, these treaty tribes are now recognized by the federal government, meaning at least some money is available for healthcare, housing, and schools. These tribes also have the right to operate casinos. Perhaps most significantly, they have the legal right to exist, a spot in the record. They will be remembered, if only because some bureaucrat has made a mark in a list.”

THIS AMERICAN LIFE / Tell Me I’m Fat and Once More, With Feeling (audio)

Stories on a theme.

THE WASHINGTON POST /  The White Flight of Derek Black by Eli Saslow

“His father, Don Black, had created Stormfront, the Internet’s first and largest white nationalist site, with 300,000 users and counting. His mother, Chloe, had once been married to David Duke, one of the country’s most infamous racial zealots, and Duke had become Derek’s godfather. They had raised Derek at the forefront of the movement, and some white nationalists had begun calling him ‘the heir.’”

THE NEW YORKER / White Plight? by Hua Hsu

“In working-class America, an élite-resenting identity politics has emerged in which whiteness spells dispossession.”

THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE / Choosing a School for My Daughter in a Segregated City by Nikole Hannah-Jones

“I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel pulled in the way other parents with options feel pulled. I had moments when I couldn’t ignore the nagging fear that in my quest for fairness, I was being unfair to my own daughter. I worried—I worry still—about whether I made the right decision for our little girl. But I knew that I made the just one.”

GQ / My Son, The Prince of Fashion by Michael Chabon

“I took my son to Paris Fashion Week, and all I got was a profound understanding of who he is, what he wants to do with his life, and how it feels to watch a grown man stride down a runway wearing shaggy yellow Muppet pants.”

1843 / Eton and the Making of a Modern Elite by Christopher de Bellaigue

“The world’s most famous school aspires to become an agent of social change; but, as old boy Christopher de Bellaigue learns when he goes back, it is also an increasingly effective way for the global elite to give its offspring an expensive leg up in life.”

AEON / Gender Is Not a Spectrum by Rebecca Reilly-Cooper

“Nobody, and certainly no radical feminist, wants to stop anyone from defining themselves in ways that make sense to them. So if you want to call yourself a genderqueer femme presenting demigirl, you go for it. Express that identity however you like. A problem emerges only when you start making political claims on the basis of that label, demanding that others call themselves cisgender, because you require there to be a bunch of conventional binary cis people for you to define yourself against.”

BUZZFEED / To Love Your Sister Is to Grieve Your Twin by Tomi Obaro

“She is my best friend, but that phrase doesn’t quite do the relationship justice. Our kinship is so binding that there are memories I have of us where I’m not sure if I was actually there or if she was there and I’m just hijacking the recollection. Growing apart, or becoming sisters and not twins, was mostly horrifying, but sometimes it’s a relief. It means my worst fear, her death, can’t devastate me as much as it once could.”

THE PLAYERS’ TRIBUNE / A Guy Like Me by John Scott

“People think enforcers skate out there for two minutes a night, take a few pops and call it a night. What a life, right? But I’ll be honest. You can never shut it off. It’s a 24/7 job. When you know a fight is coming up, you can never shut off your brain. You can be the toughest guy in the NHL, and there’s still that fear. I’d stay up all night on HockeyFights.com and YouTube, researching the tendencies of the next enforcer on the schedule.”

ESPN / The Art of Letting Go by Mina Kimes

“MLB's code is clear: Flip your bat and you'll pay. But in South Korea, flips are an art. How does this alternate world exist? And what does it say about us?”

ELLE / The Afterlife of a Ballerina by Alice Robb

“At age 16, Alexandra Ansanelli was anointed a prodigy. By 22, she was a principal for the New York City Ballet. At 26, she was a principal for the Royal Ballet. By 28, she had given it all up.”

OXFORD AMERICAN / Blood Ties by Alex Mar

“A self-mythologizing takes place when we assimilate the stories of our ancestors into our own—it’s automatic. We tell ourselves that their triumphs have somehow entered our bloodstream.”

SPIEGEL / A Visit to Ground Zero of Refugee Anxiety by Takis Würger

“Clausnitz became shorthand for the xenophobic side of Germany after residents threatened a bus full of refugees. We spent a month in the town to find out what happened.”

THE BUCKLEY CLUB / My Open Letter to Conservatives by Conservative Black Man

“Conservatives need to try to understand why black people feel the way we feel about some of these things. Would it hurt for you to show compassion for a mother who has lost her son to a derelict police officer, rather than pointing out the black on black crime statistics in Chicago? Why is the first reaction to the mentioning of the KKK a pivot to the Black Panthers as if the Black Panthers were ever at the top of that figurative mountain? Have you ever tried to understand what most black people feel when they see the Confederate flag? Have you taken the time to ask any?”

RAND / Assessing the Implications of Allowing Transgender Personnel to Serve Openly

This lengthy report is more dry than everything else recommended here, but is noteworthy as the most careful, logical, informative, fact-based approach I’ve seen on this subject. If you want the research brief instead, it’s here. A short, polished essay is here.

LAPHAM’S QUARTERLY / The Anomaly of Barbarism by John Gray

“While much remains unknown, there is nothing mysterious in the rise of ISIS. It is baffling only for those who believe—despite everything that occurred in the twentieth century—that modernization and civilization are advancing hand in hand. In fact, now as in the past some of the most modern movements are among the most barbaric. But to admit this would mean surrendering the ruling political faith, a decayed form of liberalism without which Western leaders and opinion formers would be disoriented and lost. To accept that liberal societies may not be ‘on the right side of history’ would leave their lives drained of significance, while a stoical response—which is ready to fight while being doubtful of ultimate victory—seems to be beyond their powers. With mounting bewilderment and desperation, they cling to the faith that the normal course of history has somehow been temporarily derailed.”

STANDPOINT MAGAZINE / Islam and the French Republic: From the Banlieues to Le Pen Land by Ben Judah

“A Jew can’t live where he wants anymore. Bit by bit, everyone is moving from the banlieues. As soon as there are ethnic populations, and as soon as it gets, shall we say, problematic, the Jews move. The visible ones — they get constantly attacked.”

THE GUARDIAN / My Night Out in Cleveland With the Worst Men on the Internet by Laurie Penny

“The most widely accepted definition of a troll is a provocateur—someone who says outrageous, extreme or abusive things to elicit a reaction. For them, the reaction itself is the win. The key distinction is between the attention-hustlers—the pure troll howlers who play this grotesque game for its own sake and their own—and the true believers.”

CRACKED / How Half of America Lost Its Fucking Mind by David Wong

“Basic, obvious truths that have gone unquestioned for thousands of years now get laughed at and shouted down. … The foundation upon which America was undeniably built—family, faith, and hard work—had been deemed unfashionable and small-minded. Those snooty elites up in their ivory tower laughed as they kicked away that foundation, and then wrote 10,000-word thinkpieces blaming the builders for the ensuing collapse.”

SLATE STAR CODEX / Book Review: Albion’s Seed by Scott Alexander

Failures of Justice

THE GUARDIAN / Inside the Fight to Reveal the CIA’s Torture Secrets by Spencer Ackerman

“The Panetta Review saga would spur a furious CIA to take an extraordinary step: it would spy on its own legislative overseers—especially Jones. The episode would spill out publicly the following March, when top committee Democrat Dianne Feinstein, who had already taken a huge political risk in pushing the torture inquiry, accused the CIA on the Senate floor of triggering what she called a constitutional crisis. Both sides requested the justice department pursue a criminal investigation on the other. The bitterness would nearly overshadow a landmark report, a fraction of which was released to the public in December 2014, that documented in chilling detail the depravations CIA inflicted on terrorism suspects after 9/11.”

COSMOPOLITAN / Why Did It Take 9 Hours and 3 Emergency Rooms For This Woman to Get a Rape Kit? By Jillian Keenan

“The complicated, infuriating, little-known reasons why women can be denied emergency care after a sexual assault.”

ROADS & KINGDOMS / The Dog Thief Killings by Calvin Godfrey

“The dog would serve as the centerpiece of a big party attended by former colleagues and war buddies. His wife would spend the better part of a day cooking it up, organs and all; his job was to make sure they got a good one, properly prepared.”

MEDIUM / Chronicles of a Concerned Citizen by Aglaia Berlutti

“A reflection on the wave of lynchings in Venezuela.”

THE INTERCEPT / Operation Smoke and Mirrors by Jamie Kalven  

“Two Chicago police officers uncovered a massive criminal enterprise within the department.”

MOTHER JONES /  My Four Months as a Private Prison Guard by Shane Bauer

“Inmates are glued up against the TV room window, watching a young white cadet named Miss Stirling pick through their stuff. She’s pretty and petite, with long, jet-black hair. The attention makes her uncomfortable; she thinks the inmates are gross. Earlier this week, she said she would refuse to give an inmate CPR and won’t try the cafeteria food because she doesn’t want to ‘eat AIDS.’ The more she is around prisoners, though, the more I notice her grapple with an inner conflict. ‘I don’t want to treat everyone like a criminal because I’ve done things myself,’ she says.”

BUZZFEED / The Court That Rules the World by Chris Hamby

“A parallel legal universe, open only to corporations and largely invisible to everyone else, helps executives convicted of crimes escape punishment.”

REASON / The Truth About the Biggest U.S. Sex Trafficking Story of the Year by Elizabeth Nolan Brown

“The reality—as evidenced by police reports, court documents, online records, and statements from those involved—is far less lurid and depraved. Instead of a story of stark abuse and exploitation, it's a story of immigration, economics, the pull of companionship and connection, the structures and dynamism that drive black markets, and a criminal-justice system all too eager to declare women victims of the choices they make.”

THE NEW YORK TIMES / The Fighter by C.J. Chivers

“The Marine Corps taught Sam Siatta how to shoot. The war in Afghanistan
taught him how to kill. Nobody taught him how to come home.”

DIGG / Broken by Kevin Heldman

“When we talk about hoods and bad neighborhoods, crime zones and ghetto areas in NYC and you then compare them to East New York, all those areas that fit those definitions are nothing like East New York. East New York is sicker, sadder, more dysfunctional, more isolated, harsher, frailer, madder, toxic, broken through and through everywhere.”

PRO PUBLICA and NEW YORK DAILY NEWS / The NYPD IS Kicking People Out of Their Homes, Even If They Haven’t Committed a Crime by Sarah Ryley

“The NYPD Is kicking people out of their homes, even if they haven’t committed a crime. The nuisance abatement law was created in the 1970’s to combat the sex industry in Times Square. Since then, its use has been vastly expanded, commonly targeting apartments and mom-and-pop bodegas even as the city’s crime rate has reached historic lows.”

ESPN / The Hardest Choice Demaryius Thomas’s Mom Will Make by Eli Saslow

“She spent 15 years cut off from America in a 20-by-20-foot concrete cell, and now she has an invitation to the biggest American spectacle of all.”

REASON / Confessions of an Ex-Prosecutor by Ken White

“The day O.J. Simpson was acquitted, I began my career as a federal prosecutor. I was 26—a young 26 at that—on the cusp of extraordinary power over the lives of my fellow citizens. After years of internships with federal and state prosecutors, I knew to expect camaraderie and sense of mission. I didn't expect it to influence how I thought about constitutional rights. But it did.”

SPIKED / The Tyranny of Transparency by Tim Black

“This isn’t a legal problem. It can’t be corrected by frantic invocations of Article 8 of the Human Rights Act. No assertion that ‘Everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence’ can magically restore substance to the idea of privacy. That’s because the idea of privacy has not been legally debased; rather, it’s been culturally and politically undermined.”

THIS AMERICAN LIFE, PRO PUBLICA, and THE MARSHALL PROJECT / Anatomy of Doubt by Robyn Semien and An Unbelievable Story of Rape by T. Christian Miller and Ken Armstrong (the print version appeared at the very end of 2015)

“If she met certain conditions for the next year, the charge would be dropped. She would need to get mental health counseling for her lying. She would need to go on supervised probation. She would need to keep straight, breaking no more laws. And she would have to pay $500 to cover the court’s costs.Marie wanted this behind her. She took the deal.”

Exploring the Unknown

THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE / The Secrets of the Wave Pilots by Kim Tingley

“For thousands of years, sailors in the Marshall Islands have navigated vast distances of open ocean without instruments. Can science explain their method before it’s lost forever?”

PHILOSOPHY NOW / A Golden Manifesto by Mary Midgley

What a bygone moment of female ascendance in philosophy can teach us about the pursuit of truth.

HARPER’S / What Came Before the Big Bang? by Alan Lightman

“Physicists hope that within the next fifty years or so, string theory or other new theoretical work will provide a good understanding of quantum gravity, including an explanation of how the universe began.”

THE GUARDIAN / Artificial Intelligence: ‘We’re Like Children Playing With a Bomb’ by Tim Adams

“If you look at all the things the world is spending money on, what we are doing is less than a pittance. You go to some random city and you travel from the airport to your hotel. Along the highway you see all these huge buildings for companies you have never heard of. Maybe they are designing a new publicity campaign for a razor blade. You drive past hundreds of these buildings. Any one of those has more resources than the total that humanity is spending on this field. We have half a floor of one building in Oxford, and there are two or three other groups doing what we do. So I think it is OK.”

AEON / The Empty Brain by Robert Epstein

“We don’t store words or the rules that tell us how to manipulate them. We don’t create representations of visual stimuli, store them in a short-term memory buffer, and then transfer the representation into a long-term memory device. We don’t retrieve information or images or words from memory registers. Computers do all of these things, but organisms do not.”

AUDUBON MAGAZINE / Can the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker Be Found in Cuba? by Mac McClelland

“Earlier, the photographer sidled next to the writer and asked, as they both turned their faces away from the merciless beating of the oxen, a patch of protected Cuban forest being deforested with the tearing down of ever-larger branches and trees with which to assault them, ‘Do you ever wonder if this is all worth it? For a bird?’ The two of them snickered darkly. Just moments before, a chunk of wood had cracked off an oxen-beating club as it broke over the animal’s hide and shot past the photographer’s head, missing him by maybe an inch. ‘One that almost definitely doesn’t exist?’”

THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE / The Amateur Cloud Society That (Sort of) Rattled the Scientific Community by Jon Mooallem

“To keep it all from feeling ephemeral or imaginary, he eventually decided that membership should cost $15 and that members would receive a badge and certificate in the mail. He recognized that joining an online Cloud Appreciation Society that only nominally existed might appear ridiculous, but it was important to him that it not feel meaningless.”

THE INTERCEPT / The Dark Side of VR by Janus Kopfstein

“The data that virtually reality headsets can collect will give corporations and governments unprecedented insight and power over our emotions and physical behavior.”

LONGREADS / STAT: My Daughter’s MS Diagnosis and the Question My Doctors Couldn’t Answer by Maria Bustillos

“Is there a dietary treatment for multiple sclerosis? And if so, why is the medical establishment ignoring published academic research that started in the 1950s proving it?”

LOVE + RADIO / Doing the No No by Britt Wray

“Adam Zaretsky is a bioartist who explores the manipulation of DNA, the fringes of genetic modification, and butts up against the ethical boundaries of science and beyond.”

BLOOMBERG BUSINESSWEEK / How to Hack an Election by Jordan Robertson, Michael Riley, and Andrew Willis

“Andrés Sepúlveda rigged elections throughout Latin America for almost a decade.”

NAUTILUS / How Necking Shaped the Giraffe by David P. Barash

“As notably long as are giraffe necks, these are actually outclassed by their legs, such that those monumental necks are—believe it or not—too short to comfortably reach a puddle; as a result, a drinking giraffe must splay its front feet wide apart. And, by the way, the same fluid sluice-way control mechanism in its lengthy neck works in reverse when a giraffe is done drinking and eventually raises its high head, allowing only a relative trickle of blood to flow back down so that its brain doesn’t suddenly become hypoxic.”

THE TEXAS TRIBUNE and PRO PUBLICA / Hell and High Water by Neena Satija, Kiah Collier, Al Shaw, and Jeff Larson

“Houston is the fourth-largest city in the country. It’s home to the nation’s largest refining and petrochemical complex, where billions of gallons of oil and dangerous chemicals are stored. And it’s a sitting duck for the next big hurricane. Why isn’t Texas ready?”

WIRED /A Swarm of Controversy by Hannah Nordhaus

“In their struggle for survival against killer mites, bees get an unlikely ally.”

NEW YORK / I Used to Be a Human Being by Andrew Sullivan

“Observe yourself in line for coffee, or driving, or even just going to the bathroom. Visit an airport and see the sea of craned necks and the dead eyes. We have gone from looking up and around to constantly looking down. If an alien had visited just five years ago, then returned today, wouldn’t this be its immediate observation? That this species has developed an extraordinary new habit—and, everywhere you look, lives constantly in its thrall?”

THE BOSTON GLOBE / Where Did ISIS Come From? The Story Starts Here. by Neil Swidey

“An attempt to pinpoint the moment when the American occupation of Iraq failed so catastrophically that it birthed a juggernaut in global terrorism. Paul Bremer is interviewed.”

RADIOLAB / From Tree to Shining Tree

“A forest can feel like a place of great stillness and quiet. But if you dig a little deeper, there’s a hidden world beneath your feet as busy and complicated as a city at rush hour.”

IDLE WORDS / Shuffleboard at McMurdo by Maciej Cegłowski

“The whole thing is like one of those Russian fairy tales, where the hero must cross seven seas and seven mountains, slay Koshchei the Deathless, find the giant oak, exhume an iron chest, open it to find a hare, cut the hare open to find a duck, dig through the duck to find an egg, and crack the egg open to reveal an enchanted golden needle, or in this case, Zippo lighter.”

Honorable mention to writer R. Scott Moxley and editor Gustavo Arellano for OC Weekly’s dogged coverage of misconduct in the Orange County, California, law enforcement community; and to National Review for standing on principles its more populist competitors lacked with its Against Trump issue and related commentary by David French, Kevin Williamson, Charles C.W. Cooke, Jonah Goldberg, and others.

President Donald Trump’s decision to retain ownership of his business while in office means that he can profit from government entities that are obligated to patronize his properties. For the Secret Service, which sets up a protective perimeter around the president and vice president’s non-White House residences, this means paying the president’s company, and by extension the president, to rent space in Trump Tower in New York. It also, apparently, makes it possible for the Secret Service to get into a dispute with the Trump Organization over the lease.

For the past few decades, setting up such details, and occasionally paying rent to the officeholder, has been common practice. Vice President Joe Biden, for example, reportedly received $2,200 per month when the agency rented a cottage he owned near his home in Delaware.

But Trump Tower, a hybrid residential and commercial building in the middle of Manhattan, is a unique case. Within days of the election, pedestrians and tourists were chafing at the increased security around the building, which Trump used as the headquarters for his transition team and where his wife Melania and youngest son Barron stayed for the first few months of his presidency. Though Trump himself has not yet stayed in the building since taking office, the Secret Service has, at a potentially unprecedented cost: The New York Post estimated in November 2016 that renting out two of the building’s floors, as the Secret Service intended to do, could cost as much as $3 million per year, meaning Trump could be profiting substantially off of the security detail. Meanwhile, according to Politico, just five days after the election, a prominent New York real-estate firm presented the heightened security as a selling point for a $2.1 million condominium in the building, illustrating yet another way the president could stand to profit from the security presence.

According to The Washington Post, the arrangement has also created tension between the Secret Service and the president’s company. In July, amid a dispute over the conditions of the lease, the Secret Service moved out of the building and into an adjacent trailer. Whether the Trump Organization and the Secret Service remain in negotiations over the lease is currently unclear.

The situation demonstrates how the president’s decision to retain his business interests conflicts with his duties as president. National-security experts have noted that even if Trump is not physically present, Trump-branded properties around the world are in increased danger precisely because of their association with the president. The Trump Organization and the Secret Service’s inability to work out a deal for Trump’s detail to stay in Trump Tower potentially puts not only the president but also the residents, employees, and customers of the business in increased danger. And if, as two anonymous sources said, price was one of the sticking points in the negotiation, that would mean the president’s business interest—that is, making as much money from renting out his properties as possible—has come into direct conflict with national security.

Another way Trump could profit from his protective detail is by having family members travel in his two planes and three helicopters. Over the course of the campaign, the Secret Service, which traditionally pays for its own travel during elections, spent $2.74 million to fly on a plane owned by one of Trump’s own companies. While in office, Trump flies on Air Force One, while Mike Pence rides Air Force Two. However, their families might still be flying on Trump’s private planes, along with their protective details, which would effectively direct even more money to Trump. (Previous first families have flown with a detail, whose legal purview covers “the immediate family members,” but none have done so on planes they themselves own.)

This system creates a set of conflicting interests for Trump regarding his own travel and residences. Though presidents as different as Dwight Eisenhower and Barack Obama have evoked partisan ire over time spent away from the White House, whether on golf courses or on vacation in Hawaii, only Donald Trump will actually have made money from his and his family’s travels. And if, while in office, Trump visits properties he owns other than Trump Tower—his buildings in other U.S. cities like Chicago and Miami, for example, or his golf course and resort in Scotland, or one of the many international hotels bearing his name—he stands to gain from the stays for which his security detail (and, by extension, taxpayers) may be paying. Moreover, the more his family members fly on his planes, whether they are running his business on his behalf or running interference with foreign leaders, the more the Secret Service will end up paying for seats alongside them.

The Background

President Donald Trump still has not taken the necessary steps to distance himself from his businesses while in office. In accordance with a plan that he and one of his lawyers, Sheri Dillon, laid out at a press conference on January 11, Trump has filed paperwork to remove himself from the day-to-day operation of his eponymous organization. However, numerous ethics experts have voiced strenuous objections to the plan, which they say does very little to resolve the issue: As long as Trump continues to profit from his business empire—which he does whether or not he is nominally in charge—they say, the possibility that outside actors will attempt to affect his policies by plumping up his pocketbook will remain very much in play.

Several of Trump’s critics have moved forward with legal action. The watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, or CREW, filed a lawsuit alleging that Trump’s business holdings violate the emoluments clause of the Constitution, which makes it illegal for government officials to “accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.” CREW’s bipartisan legal team includes, among others, Norm Eisen and Richard Painter, who served as ethics lawyers under Presidents Obama and George W. Bush, respectively; Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard University; and Zephyr Teachout, a professor at Fordham University (and former congressional candidate) who is considered an authority on the emoluments clause. All have been vocally critical of Trump’s continued refusal to sell off his business, and are now taking their case to court to argue that several of Trump’s businesses present avenues by which foreign governments could seek to influence the president by, for example, booking stays at one of his hotels or renting space at one of his properties. Additionally, the lawsuit seeks to force Trump to reveal his tax returns, something every president has done since Gerald Ford but which Trump has refused to do, significantly limiting the public’s ability to understand the president’s finances. When asked about the lawsuit, Trump described it as “totally without merit.” Eisen was quick to respond on Twitter, offering to “debate Trump (or his chosen champion) on the merits of our case anytime,” making it clear that CREW intends to continue to pursue its case. (CREW has also filed a separate complaint to the General Services Administration arguing that Trump has violated the lease on his Washington, D.C. hotel, which states that “no ... elected official of the Government of the United States … shall be admitted to any share or part of this Lease, or to any benefit that may arise therefrom.”)

Though CREW is the first group to bring a lawsuit against President Trump, it may soon have company. According to The New York Times, Anthony Romero, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, has said that his organization is looking for a plaintiff to sue Trump for violating the emoluments clause, although with a different claim to legal standing: While CREW intends to demonstrate that the group itself has suffered financial harm because the need to focus on the emoluments clause has diverted its resources away from other worthy causes, the ACLU is hoping to find a hotel or bed-and-breakfast owner that can prove he or she has lost business to one of Trump’s hotels during his presidency.

CREW’s lawsuit is just the latest development in what promises to be a continuing saga regarding Trump’s many conflicts of interest that began almost as soon as he won the presidency. Along with his unprecedented wealth, Trump brings to the office unique and gravely concerning entanglements that, whether he recognizes their effects or not, threaten to undermine his decision-making as president. The plan Trump and Dillon announced on January 11 would do very little to resolve the conflicts: It places control of his assets in the hands of his two adult sons and a longtime associate of their father’s with what so far amounts to a pinky-swear assurance that, despite their proximity to the president, they will not discuss any aspect of the business with him. On top of that, the plan supposedly would terminate several of the Trump Organization’s pending deals and place a ban on new foreign deals, two conditions undermined by the announcement that the organization would be moving forward with expanding its golf course in Aberdeen, Scotland.

Even before his most recent plan was laid out, Trump has attempted to deflect criticism by repeatedly asserting that the law barring executive-branch officials from maintaining financial holdings or business ties that overlap with their duties does not apply to the president or vice president. In this, he is correct; the law, passed in 1989, exempts the two chief executives from conflict-of-interest rules on the understanding that their purview is so broad that it would be impossible for them to completely disentangle themselves.

Regardless, legality does not imply propriety. Unless Trump acts to put actual distance between himself and his business ventures, these questions are likely to continue throughout his time in the Oval Office. On top of the aforementioned legal actions, the director of the Office of Government Ethics, Walter Shaub, has declared Trump’s efforts insufficient, remarking, “I don’t think divestiture is too high of a price to pay to be the president of the United States,” and a number of Senate Democrats have introduced legislation that would force Trump to divest or face impeachment. Below is an attempt to catalogue the more clear-cut examples of conflicts of interest that have emerged so far. The most recent entries appear at the top:

• That Golf Course in Aberdeen
• Those Pension Funds
• Those Republican Fundraisers
• That Estate in Palm Beach
• That Temporary-Visa Program
• Those State Department Expenses
• That Clean-Water Rule
• That Development Outside of New Delhi
• That Golf Course in Westchester
• Those Russian Trademarks
• That Trump Organization Event Planner
• That Saudi Arabian Lobbying Effort
• That Golf Course in New Jersey
• That Meeting in Brussels
• That Tower in Toronto
• That Caribbean Villa
• Those Condos for Sale
• Those Reelection-Campaign Funds
• That Second Hotel in Washington, D.C.
• That Property in Azerbaijan
• That Trump Tower Penthouse
• That Resort in the Dominican Republic
• That Chinese Trademark
• That Meeting at Mar-a-Lago
• That Defense Department Trump Tower Rental
• That Red Cross Ball
• That D.C. Labor Dispute
• Those Expansion Plans
• That Hotel in Vancouver
• That Reality-Television Show
• That Pipeline
• Those HUD Grants
• That Other Billionaire New York Real-Estate Developer
• Those Indonesian Politicians
• That Emirati Businessman
• That Virginia Vineyard
• That Las Vegas Labor Dispute
• That Kuwaiti Event
• Those Certificates of Divestiture
• That Carrier Deal
• That Blind-Trust Issue
• Those Fannie and Freddie Investments
• That Phone Call With Taiwan
• That Deutsche Bank Debt
• That Secret Service Detail
• That Property in Georgia (the Country)
• That Phone Call With Erdogan
• That Hotel in Washington, D.C.
• That Argentinian Office Building
• Those Companies in Saudi Arabia
• That British Wind Farm
• Those Indian Business Partners
• That Envoy From the Philippines

That Golf Course in Aberdeen

In January, The Guardian reported that President Donald Trump’s company, the Trump Organization, is looking to move forward with a multimillion dollar plan to expand its Aberdeen resort, including a new 450-room, five-star hotel and a second 18-hole golf course. Six months later, the project is creating an additional conflict of interest for the president as it puts his company at odds with Scottish regulators, who are concerned about the expansion’s impact on the surrounding environment.

When it was announced in January, the expansion drew criticism almost immediately, especially coming as it did only three days after the press conference at which Trump unveiled his half-hearted plan to resolve his conflicts of interest. At the conference, the president and one of his lawyers, Sheri Dillon, announced that the Trump Organization would cease pursuing new foreign investments. Additionally, though neither Trump nor Dillon articulated the promise at the event, a press release detailing the steps Trump would be taking also states that he has “directed the Trump Organization to terminate all pending deals—over 30 in number.”

A representative soon clarified the grounds on which the Trump Organization deemed the Aberdeen expansion permissible in light of these vows. She argued that “implementing future phasing of existing properties does not constitute a new transaction, so we intend to proceed.” In other words, plans for the expansion had been drawn up and agreed upon before Trump made his pledge; simply moving forward with the project does not, in their view, breach their commitments to avoid pursuing new foreign investments or moving forward on pending deals.

As with so many of the defenses of Trump’s behavior when it comes to conflicts of interest, the Trump Organization representative’s justification overlooks the actual concerns regarding conflicts of interest: that Trump’s relationship with the British government and other foreign-policy questions may be colored by his expectations of what a policy will do to his property values, for instance, or whether wealthy guests will pay for a stay in the interest of currying favor with him. Instead, the argument seems to hinge on revising the pledge to create a more vague, and therefore more permissive, stance. As Richard Painter, who served as the chief ethics adviser for President George W. Bush, put it, the policy “clearly illustrates that around the world, he will just simply expand around the various holdings and as they continue to expand, the conflicts of interest expand.”

The expansion plans also demonstrate how the Trump Organization’s properties create the potential for the president’s business to come into conflict with foreign governments. As of July 28, the Scottish Environmental Protection Agency has put the development of the Aberdeen property on hold due to concerns over how the golf course will handle groundwater conservation and sewage pollution. Scottish National Heritage, the government’s conservation agency,  has also warned the Aberdeen council, the planning authority with jurisdiction over the resort, that the Trump Organization’s proposal doesn’t provide sufficient protection for the region’s dunes.

Though the Scottish government’s concerns appear to be genuine and unrelated to the property’s owner, its action exacerbates yet another situation in which Trump’s business interests could influence his relationship with a foreign government while he is president. Though he is not involved in the Trump Organization’s day-to-day operations, he still owns, profits from, and, according to his son Eric, receives periodic updates about the company. The knowledge that the Scottish government is holding up one of his investments could impact his dealings with the country (especially considering that, according to his disclosure documents, Trump has been losing money on the properties for years). With Scotland considering a second referendum on independence from the United Kingdom in the near future, the relationship between Scotland and the United States could become significantly more complicated, making it even more important that the U.S. be able to approach diplomacy without unnecessary distractions from the president’s business.

Moreover, the Scottish regulators’ decision suggests a template for how a less scrupulous government could attempt to use the president’s business interests to influence his behavior. Large real-estate ventures like golf courses, hotels, and office buildings are subject to all kinds of regulations, ranging from environmental considerations to zoning laws to workplace-safety standards. Officials in countries where the Trump Organization operates, or has plans to operate in the near future, could easily use such rules to attempt to strike political deals, explicitly or implicitly, with the president in exchange for allowing his businesses to continue to profit. Though this may not become a problem with Scotland specifically—the United Kingdom typically scores well with international ethics-watchdog groups like Transparency International—the president also owns or has his name on properties in countries with longer track records of corruption; in some, such as Azerbaijan and Indonesia, the specific partners with which the Trump Organization has worked have questionable track records. If such a group tried to use one of Trump’s moneymaking endeavors as a bargaining chip, the president’s business interests would come into conflict with his political responsibilities.

Back to table of contents

Those Pension Funds

Though much of the focus on President Donald Trump’s conflicts of interest has gone to whether his hotels around the world violate the Constitution’s foreign emoluments clause, there is an additional clause that the president’s ownership of the Trump Organization may violate: the domestic emoluments clause, which holds that the president “shall not receive ... any other Emolument from the United States, or any of them,” aside from his official salary. Though Trump has renounced that official salary, there appear to be ways he could make money from sources through his business empire; for example, multiple federal agencies are renting space in Trump Tower in New York and other properties in order to keep the president and his family safe when they travel.

Now, two advocacy organizations, Free Speech for People and the Courage Campaign, are trying to bring attention to another potential violation of the domestic emoluments clause. The two groups are circulating petitions about public pension funds in several states, including California, New York, and Texas, that invest in CIM Fund III, a real-estate company that owns the Trump SoHo Hotel and Condominium in New York City. Though the details of most of the Trump Organization’s licensing agreements are private, the licensing deal for Trump SoHo, according to The New York Times, gives the Trump Organization equity in the property, meaning that the president’s company profits based on how well Trump SoHo performs. That means that the pension funds, which are drawn from mandatory deductions from the paychecks of more than 5 million public-sector employees across seven states, are therefore indirectly paying the Trump Organization to operate Trump SoHo.

These pension funds create a conflict of interest that corrupts the relationship between state and federal governments. Jed Shugerman, a law professor at Fordham University, says the domestic emoluments clause was written to avoid such a scenario:

The reason why the framers put the domestic emoluments clause in the Constitution is because they were concerned about the relationships of states vs. other states. Could big states, could rich states, wield more influence over the federal governments? One way that they worried rich states could wield more influence is by paying presidents directly. To avoid even the appearance of improper influence, they created a blanket rule: no emoluments from states.

So, the pension funds create exactly the possibility the framers feared. According to Reuters, California alone paid CIM $1,722,418 over the first three months of 2017, an unknown portion of which ended up in the pocket of the Trump Organization and, by extension, the president. Whether the states intend it or not, and whether Trump recognizes it or not, that financial relationship and the feelings of good will and reciprocity it may create could very well lead the president to favor one state or a collection of states over others—or to lash out if one of the states’ funds were to divest from a company linked to his business.

Back to table of contents

Those Republican Fundraisers

By now, the myriad ways President Donald Trump may have profited from his presidential campaign, and could further profit from a 2020 reelection bid, are well-established. Holding rallies, fundraisers, and other election-related events at his hotels generated both publicity and paying guests, flying around the country meant that the Secret Service paid the president’s company for seats on his private plane every time he traveled, and housing his campaign headquarters in Trump Tower—and nearly quintupling the rent after becoming the Republican Party’s official nominee—guaranteed that some portion of his campaign expenditures would go back into his own pocket.

Now that he’s taken office, Trump is profiting from other Republicans’ campaigns too. According to Buzzfeed, Republican Party financial-disclosure documents show at least $293,000 spent at Trump properties during the first half of 2017. While the majority of that sum came from Trump’s already-underway reelection bid, roughly $72,000 came from the Republican National Committee, the National Republican Congressional Committee, and fundraising groups affiliated with other elected GOP officials, including Republican congressmen. The overall spending represents a significant increase over the first half of 2016, during which the party and its affiliated committees spent roughly $100,000 at Trump-branded properties, almost all of which was related to Trump’s presidential bid.

The gap between last year and this one on individual expenditures is even more striking: According to Buzzfeed, only one member of Congress spent money at a Trump property in 2016, putting down $200 for food and drinks. In the first half of 2017, on the other hand, the fundraising committees for Congressmen Tom MacArthur, Dana Rohrabacher, and Bill Shuster spent $15,000, $11,000, and $7,000, respectively, for events held at golf clubs and hotels owned by the president and operated by his company. The Republican Governors Association (RGA), meanwhile, spent more than $400,000 to hold a two-day policy summit at the Trump National Doral Miami golf club in May of this year; in 2016, the RGA’s largest expense for an event venue was roughly $285,000 at the Ritz Carlton in Half Moon Bay, California.

The fact that Trump is making money from other politicians’ campaigns threatens to undermine the relationship between the president and the legislative branch. While factors other than policy and legislative acumen often color interactions between members of different branches—they probably wouldn’t play as much golf together if interpersonal relationships didn’t matter—there has never before been a situation in which legislators were openly paying the president. The added financial component creates the new possibility that a congressperson may attempt to pay the president to influence his decision on a topic the congressperson finds important—if not explicitly, then by implicitly inspiring goodwill and an obligation to reciprocate. The longer the situation persists, the more likely it becomes that such payments would affect the president’s approach to policy.

Trump’s unprecedented willingness to attack members of his own party and the willingness of pro-Trump media to pile on compound this problem. The president has responded harshly toward Republican congresspeople whom he considers insufficiently supportive of his agenda, even going so far as to meet with their primary challengers, while a pro-Trump political action committee at one point purchased, then withdrew, campaign ads against a senator who was wavering on the Senate GOP’s health-care bill. And the alt-right website Breitbart, which was formerly run by Trump’s chief strategist, Steve Bannon, and has associated itself with Trump since he began his campaign, continually ascribes political failures to congressional leaders like Speaker of the House Paul Ryan rather than to Trump.

Those tendencies, and the recognition that Trump supporters don’t necessarily go along with the Republican Party, only reinforce the notion that GOP elected officials must tread carefully to retain the president’s support. As long as patronizing Trump’s businesses remains a plausible means of currying favor with the commander-in-chief, there will remain the unprecedented incentive for Republican Party officials to turn their relationship with the president into a financial one in the hope of gaining his support.

Back to table of contents

That Estate in Palm Beach

To many of President Donald Trump’s critics, his decision to turn Mar-a-Lago, his Florida estate, into a “Southern White House” epitomizes the way he’s mixing his business interests with his duties as president. With each visit to the property, he boosts the resort’s visibility and may very well prompt more people to enroll as members in attempts to get a glimpse of the commander-in-chief. That the club doubled its initiation fees in January, from $100,000 to $200,000, only adds to the impression that Trump—or, at least his namesake company—is banking on his presidency as a means of boosting revenues. And without a publicly available guest list and no word on what security protocols are in place, the possibility that somebody could be using a club membership to gain access to the president has led Democratic members of Congress to draft a bill specifically to mandate better disclosure of the goings-on at the venue.

On Monday, July 18, the ethics watchdog organization Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, or CREW, won a major victory on that front when the Department of Homeland Security agreed to provide CREW with Mar-a-Lago’s guest logs, starting in early September. CREW, which counts among its leadership ethics counsellors from the administrations of both Barack Obama and George W. Bush and is currently suing the Trump administration over multiple issues related to the president’s conflicts of interest, announced that it would be publishing the lists as soon as it receives them. What exactly they will receive, however, remains unclear: The private club’s screening protocols appear to be significantly less strict than those at the White House, and Politico reported in March that the resort may not actually be keeping track of the comings and goings of its frequent guests.

The possibility that Mar-a-Lago may not even have visitor logs to provide comports with both the Trump administration and the Trump Organization’s poor records when it comes to transparency. The administration has, for instance, ceased to provide a guest list for the White House and challenged the Office of Government Ethics’s requests for information about Trump’s finances and those of the lobbyists he has brought into the government. The president’s company, meanwhile, has asserted that keeping track of foreign payments at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C., which Trump and his lawyer Sheri Dillon pledged the company would do in January, would be “impractical ... and diminish the guest experience of our brand.”

Since May, Trump has largely shifted his weekend trips from Mar-a-Lago to his company’s golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey. However, two stories from the months he spent frequenting his resort in Palm Beach, sometimes with high-profile diplomatic guests in tow, demonstrate the importance of making visitor logs public. In February, when Trump brought Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to Florida, the trip made news in part because it resulted in an apparent breach of security protocol: When their dinner was interrupted by news of a North Korean nuclear-missile test, the two heads of state read over briefing materials by the light of cellphones, in full view of paying dinner guests, at least one of whom took pictures.

Besides the guest who posted his pictures on Facebook, it remains unknown who was in attendance that night and may have had access to the two leaders and their meeting. Indeed, posts to social media have served as the public’s best window into the president’s interactions with the public during his weekends at his property. Pictures and videos taken by paying guests showing the president golfing, hobnobbing with attendees at meals, and crashing parties have proven vital to attempts to keep track of Trump’s comings and goings. That footage reinforces the suggestion that paying to attend a Trump property offers a good chance to meet the president, in turn suggesting that doing so could create an opportunity to speak with him and influence his decisions.

Then, in April, as Trump prepared to return to Palm Beach with Chinese President Xi Jinping, The New York Times reported on a frequent Mar-a-Lago guest who could have created friction between Trump and Xi: the billionaire real-estate mogul Guo Wengui, an outspoken critic who has accused China’s ruling Communist Party of rampant corruption. Guo himself is no stranger to charges of corruption: He left China in 2008 amid allegations that he had exploited his ties with one of the country’s top security officials to enhance his businesses. Guo maintains that the reporter who implicated him in the scandal was the tool of a government plot to undermine him, and has in turn pointed the finger at multiple party officials he says have engaged in various forms of graft, although he’s pointedly stopped short of criticizing Xi. He also claims that the Chinese government has seized more than $17 billion of his assets since he left the country.

And, the Times says, Guo is a frequent attendee at Mar-a-Lago. In March, he tweeted a picture of himself with the resort’s managing director. It is unknown whether Guo attended Mar-a-Lago, or even was in Palm Beach, at the time of Trump’s meeting with Xi. Indeed, without a guest list, it may be hard to ever know who’s there at the same time as the president except via social-media posts. But Guo’s possible presence, and even the fact that Trump is—via the membership fees Guo is paying to his company—profiting from Guo, would have cast a shadow over the president’s meeting there with Xi. Trump’s relationship with his Chinese counterpart got off to a rocky start when, about a month after the election, Trump broke decades of protocol by calling the president of Taiwan, something no president has done since the 1970s. Given China’s harsh treatment of dissidents in the past, Trump’s holding a meeting with Xi at a club with Guo in attendance could be interpreted as another slight, intentional or not, toward the Chinese government and further undermine one of the world’s most important bilateral relationships.

The problem, then, is twofold: First, it’s that Trump directly profits from spending his weekends at Mar-a-Lago and bringing high-profile guests with him, although only he knows for certain the extent to which his visits to Florida are motivated by this. Second, by paying the president to be a member at the resort, Guo gains a chance at brushing shoulders with and possibly even influencing the president, although, again, only he knows if that’s his reason for doing so.

Guo is also far from the only Mar-a-Lago member who might have a stake in rubbing elbows with the president, nor is he the only controversial foreign oligarch with whom Trump has financial ties of some kind. As such, Guo is indicative of the larger problem with the president’s maintenance of his business interests, both in general and with regard to his estate in Palm Beach.

Back to table of contents

That Temporary-Visa Program

On Monday, the federal government announced that it would be expanding its H-2B temporary-visa program. Citing a lack of Americans willing and qualified to do seasonal, non-agricultural jobs, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) expanded the H-2B program to allow 15,000 additional foreign workers into the country for the summer to meet demand at such seasonal businesses as landscaping services, hotels, and amusement parks. The move roughly mirrors last year’s, when DHS allowed 13,382 workers to come in under the program, although it came later in the summer than usual because it took longer than usual for Congress to authorize the expansion.

Even though the decision came from the executive branch, it seems to be directly at odds with President Donald Trump’s well-known anti-immigrant stances. After spending the campaign arguing that immigrants were taking Americans’ jobs and calling for a wall along the border with Mexico, Trump’s anti-immigration rhetoric has continued during his time in office. Though many of his proposals have faced obstacles that may prove insurmountable, he has, for instance, restricted H-1B visas for low-skilled immigrant laborers, and under DHS Secretary John Kelly, the government has significantly stepped up enforcement actions against illegal immigrants, including those previously protected under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. Additionally, the expansion was announced on the first day of the White House’s “Made in America” Week, intended to promote American companies, workers, and products.

Though the allowance of more foreign workers may appear to conflict with Trump’s “America First” rhetoric, it clearly aligns with his business interests. The Trump Organization, which the president still owns, uses H-2B workers at many of its golf courses, hotels, and vineyards. According to CNN, the Trump Organization has received 1,024 H-2B visas since 2000 for workers at such properties as Mar-a-Lago and the Trump National Golf Club in Washington, D.C., along with other types of foreign visas. Mar-a-Lago in particular has benefited from temporary foreign labor: The property has requested at least 787 employment visas since 2006. The Trump Organization has continued to apply for temporary visas since Trump was elected president; for example, in December 2016, the Trump Vineyard Estates and Winery in Charlottesville, Virginia, applied for six additional H-2A visas to fit its seasonal demands, then added 23 more in February. And on July 20, only three days after the DHS announced it would be increasing the number of visas available, Mar-a-Lago and the nearby Trump National Golf Club together requested an additional 76 H-2B visas for cooks, servers, and housekeepers.

The Trump administration has justified the increase by asserting that many of the companies that will benefit “are at risk of suffering irreparable harm if they don’t get additional H-2B workers.” However, the Trump Organization’s own record seems to contradict this statement: Mar-a-Lago has requested hundreds of foreign visas, including 70 in 2015 alone, while reportedly rejecting 283 of 300 domestic applicants since 2010. This arguably affirms one of the major criticisms of the program, which holds that companies don’t always sufficiently attempt to fill open positions using domestic labor before applying for temporary foreign visas.

The Trump administration’s decision to expand the H-2B program is yet another example of a fairly conventional government action complicated by the president’s continued ownership of his real-estate empire. The debate about the role of immigrants in the U.S. economy means that the decision would likely have been controversial regardless of who was in office. However, that the president himself will likely financially benefit from the program means that it also raises the question of whether Trump and his administration are looking out for the needs of the country or the needs of the Trump Organization.

Back to table of contents

Those State Department Expenses

As the first (and, so far, only) Trump-branded property to open since the election, the Trump International Hotel and Tower in Vancouver has prompted significant scrutiny. When it opened just five days after President Donald Trump’s inauguration, ethics experts questioned whether the property presented an opportunity for anyone to attempt to influence the president by booking a stay there—a suspicion that seemed to be confirmed when a pro-business lobbying group relocated a meeting from a diplomat’s house to the new hotel the day after it opened.

As with all of Trump’s foreign properties, the property arguably violates the Constitution’s foreign emoluments clause, which says that federal officials can’t receive “any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.” But the first known government expenditure at the Vancouver hotel came not from a foreign entity—it came from the State Department. According to documents obtained by The Washington Post, the State Department spent more than $15,000 to book 19 rooms at the new hotel when the president’s adult sons, Donald Jr. and Eric, and his younger daughter, Tiffany, visited the property for its grand opening in February.

While the Trump Organization both owns and operates some of its flagship properties in the United States, such as Trump Tower in New York, the hotel in Vancouver is one of many licensing deals through which third-party companies pay to operate their hotels under the Trump brand. Though the president’s name appears in large gold letters on the building’s facade, the property is actually owned and managed by a Canadian company called The Holborn Group, which is in turn owned by the Malaysian billionaire Joo Kim Tiah. And, because the Trump Organization is a privately held company, the actual structure of the deal remains unknown: Though Trump declared more than $5 million in revenue from the property on his most recent financial-disclosure forms, it’s unclear whether that sum represents a flat fee or a percent of the hotel’s revenue. However, Slate noted that previous court filings show that some similar Trump properties operate on the latter model, suggesting that what Trump earns from the hotel hinges on its success.

If that is indeed the case, the State Department’s expenditures represent a conflict of interest for him. As I wrote in February, when the Secret Service spent more than $97,000 to accompany Eric Trump on a business trip to Uruguay, it’s first and foremost improper that the Trump Organization appears to be directly profiting from taxpayer money because of the increased security necessary when its leaders visit their holdings.

Moreover, the State Department’s expenditure arguably violates the Constitution’s domestic emoluments clause, which states that the president “shall not receive ... any other Emolument from the United States, or any of them” during his time in office aside from his official salary. Already, the Trump Organization is receiving taxpayer money from multiple federal agencies, including the Secret Service, which not only effectively subsidized Eric Trump’s business trip to Uruguay but also pays to accompany the president’s family on their private airplanes, and the Department of Defense, which CNN revealed in February would be renting space in Trump Tower. These expenditures raise the possibility that groups within the U.S. government as well as those outside of it may influence the president, intentionally or not, by patronizing his businesses. Because even small payments can change a person’s behavior, these payments may warm the president to one department over others, potentially shading his assessments of the advice and intelligence he receives from them.

Even if the Trump Organization doesn’t profit directly from the hotel’s success—that is, if the company makes a flat annual fee instead of a percentage of the property’s revenue—the State Department’s expenditure demonstrates the problems Trump’s continued intermingling of business and government continues to create. As of now, because Trump has disclosed only the minimum financial details he is required to by law, it's impossible to determine how exactly he makes money from properties like the hotel in Vancouver. That in turn makes it impossible to determine the precise nature of his conflict of interest—an epistemological problem that has arisen with several other business endeavors of his.

Back to table of contents

That Clean-Water Rule

In February, President Donald Trump signed an executive order directing the Environmental Protection Agency to review the Obama administration’s Waters of the United States, or WOTUS, rule. The regulation, which was created in 2015 but was put on hold by a court later that year, aims to expand the federal government’s ability to apply anti-pollution statutes to a variety of bodies of water. This week, the Environmental Protection Agency announced that it would be acting on the president’s order and rolling back the regulation.

When he first called upon the EPA to review WOTUS, Trump cited its economic cost, calling it “a disaster” and “a massive power grab” that was “putting people out of jobs by the hundreds of thousands” (a claim The Washington Post gave its lowest fact-checking rating). And while pro-business groups such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce lauded the EPA’s decision, environmental groups criticized the move, arguing that WOTUS represented a significant step forward in protecting the drinking water of more than one-third of Americans.

The decision also appears to represent a conflict of interest for the president. Along with increasing federal oversight of large bodies of water, WOTUS would have expanded the EPA’s authority to include regulation of smaller streams and ponds. As such, some of the business benefits of rolling back the rule will redound to the golf industry, which has been a major opponent of the regulation since before it was signed in the summer of 2015. The Golf Course Superintendents Association of America, a 17,000-member lobby, spent $30,000 to fight WOTUS in the quarter it was finalized, arguing that the rule would make it excessively costly to maintain golf courses without running afoul of new regulations on water use and polluted runoff. According to the association’s chief executive officer, Rhett Evans, under an earlier, somewhat more expansive, version of the rule, golf courses “would find themselves economically burdened, if not unable to operate profitably.”

Trump, of course, owns 12 golf courses in the United States, all of which would likely be impacted by WOTUS, meaning that he has a significant financial stake in ensuring that it does not ultimately go into effect. And though the decision to fully scrap the regulation was technically made by the EPA and its chairman Scott Pruitt, it was ultimately Trump who called for its review in his February Executive Order—not to mention that he was the one who appointed the notoriously anti-regulation Pruitt in the first place.

The executive branch’s decision to scale back enforcement of WOTUS specifically and clean-water regulation in general is also an example of how Trump’s broader anti-regulatory agenda often overlaps with his personal financial interests. Through his first few months in office, Trump’s domestic agenda has involved chipping away at the regulations his predecessor put in place, following a self-imposed rule that federal agencies must cut two regulations for each they implement. This will likely frequently result in policy decisions that will at least tangentially benefit Trump; for example, many of the tax cuts that Trump seems to favor, such as repealing the estate tax, would reduce his own tax burden as well as those of others in his income bracket. The result is that it’s often difficult to separate Trump’s conflicts of interest from what very well may be a genuine pro-business, anti-regulatory agenda.

Back to table of contents

That Development Outside of New Delhi

President Donald Trump’s international real-estate empire continues to grow. According to The Washington Post, two new Trump-branded buildings—one residential development and one office tower—will soon be going up in Gurgaon, a suburb of New Delhi, India, “known for rapacious development and poor planning.”

As with many of the company’s other international projects, the deals create new conflicts of interest as they bring the Trump Organization into contact with more investors, partners, and governments that may seek to influence the president’s decisions. The nature of the real-estate business means that the company and its international partners will have all sorts of interactions with local and national governments, ranging from acquiring permits for construction to health and safety inspections once a project is complete. That creates opportunities to attempt to curry favor withTrump, whether intentionally or not, by creating favorable conditions in which he can do business.

To complicate matters, these deals in India find Trump in partnerships with less-than-savory companies. The companies involved, IREO and M3M India, have both been frequent targets of anti-corruption actions by the Indian government, which is currently investigating the former for illegal land purchases and money laundering and the latter for bribing officials to speed along construction. And Gurgaon is widely seen as a hotbed of corruption, where poor citizens and small landowners are often pushed out by developers through bribery or bullying.

As has been the case with some of the Trump Organization’s other international projects—the tower in Baku, Azerbaijan, that The New Yorker deemed “Donald Trump’s Worst Deal” springs to mind, along with his ongoing developments in Indonesia—the company’s involvement with potentially corrupt officials and companies could create problems going forward. For instance, if someone found demonstrably illegal labor practices at the sites in Gurgaon, he or she could use that information to blackmail the president’s company and its owner (that is, the president himself) into pushing for a particular policy. And to reverse that example, Indian officials seeking a favorable outcome on an issue of international concern from the American government could, explicitly or implicitly, turn a blind eye to any ethical concerns in Gurgaon in return for the president’s good graces, which could end up creating unsafe conditions that hurt the laborers working on the building. Meanwhile, the developments’ investors—currently unknown for the deal with IREO, according to The Washington Post, as the money flowed through banks in Mauritius and Cyprus—have substantial leverage over the president that they could wield by cutting off the flow of funds to the projects.

On top of the concerns regarding the specific details of the projects, the developments in Gurgaon demonstrate how little the Trump Organization’s pledge not to pursue any new foreign deals, which the president announced shortly before taking office, actually means in practice. Technically speaking, the projects in Gurgaon aren’t new deals, as the Trump Organization agreed to the partnerships before Trump became president. However, at a press conference held in January, Trump and one of his lawyers, Sheri Dillon, announced not only that “no new foreign deals will be made whatsoever” but also that the Trump Organization had already terminated “all pending deals.” That these projects in India are moving forward regardless seems to demonstrate that the Trump Organization’s definition of “new foreign deals” is so narrow that the guidelines will do little to prevent the company from continuing to expand while Trump is in office, thus creating new conflicts of interest.

Back to table of contents  

That Golf Course in Westchester

According to a report by ABC News, the Trump Organization is looking for a tax break for the Trump National Golf Club Westchester in Briarcliff Manor, New York. The company is attempting to halve its tax bill on the golf course by arguing that the tax assessor’s $15 million valuation of the property is twice what the course is actually worth. If the appeal succeeds, the Trump Organization could see the property taxes it owes on the 143-acre club reduced by as much as a quarter of a million dollars.

Contesting a tax assessor’s valuation of a property in the hopes of getting a tax break is a fairly common move for large property owners generally and the Trump Organization specifically. In 2016, after the town’s tax assessor valued the property at $15 million, the Trump Organization tried to assert that the course was only worth $1.35 million, but ultimately relented and paid the bill.

The difference this year is, of course, that the property’s owner is now president, which means that suddenly, Briarcliff Manor is one of many local governments that must weigh the consequences of how they deal with Trump’s businesses. It must decide if giving the Trump Organization a sweet deal is worth the loss in tax revenues, whether because doing so will create a positive affinity that could spill over into preferential treatment from the federal government or because not doing so would mean crossing the famously temperamental president and potentially facing consequences down the line.

The situation demonstrates how the president’s decision to hold onto his business while in office could have ramifications for everyday Americans. While Briarcliff Manor isn’t exactly struggling—according to the latest figures from the U.S. Census Bureau, median household income for the town’s 6,300 adult residents is roughly $141,000, and the poverty rate of 4.3 percent is 10 points lower than the national level—the local government nevertheless relies in part on property taxes for funding. If the town does give the Trump National Golf Club the tax break it has requested, that would mean less money for the town’s schools, police department, and other civic services.

Back to table of contents  

Those Russian Trademarks

One of the questions underlying the ongoing investigation into the Trump campaign’s interactions with Russian officials is whether the president himself is in debt to the country’s government or state-run banks. Though Trump has insisted recently that he does not do business in Russia, that assertion conflicts with 20 years of his (and his sons’) statements to the contrary.

This weekend, The New York Times reported on details that underline his past dealings in the country: On the night of the 2016 presidential election, the Russian government granted extensions to six expiring trademarks that Trump had received between 1996 and 2007. The trademarks cover branding for a variety of products, including one for Trump Vodka, which debuted in 2007 and folded shortly thereafter, and one for the name “Trump Tower,” for a real-estate deal that the president began exploring in 1996 but that ultimately fell through.

By all appearances, the renewals in November were fairly routine and don’t indicate that the Trump Organization has any actual plans for pursuing business opportunities in Russia in the near future. As was the case with the trademarks the company received in China in February, it’s likely that registering the Trump name is more defensive than anything else, a means of securing the name to ward off potential knockoffs or patent trolls, who in some cases register well-known brand names so that, should a corporation try to expand overseas, they will have to pay to wrest the trademark back.

Even if the renewals were a mere formality, they point to the ongoing complications the president’s decision to retain his business while in office creates. Trademarks certainly aren’t direct financial compensation, but they have distinct monetary value as a means of protecting a company’s business interests, especially for a corporation like the Trump Organization, which relies so heavily on its brand appeal that the Trump name is arguably among the family’s most valuable assets. That leaves open the possibility that the president may be inclined to think more highly of a country because it has recently helped his company by approving a trademark request—which in turn opens the possibility that a foreign government seeking to influence the president might seek to curry favor with him by expediting the process or granting trademarks they wouldn’t for a less important person.

Other trademarks that Trump has received in foreign countries since taking office are not only ethically questionable but arguably violate the Constitution. Though part of the ethics arrangement the president and his lawyer laid out before the inauguration was that the Trump Organization would cease pursuing new deals in foreign countries during Trump’s presidency, the company has continued to register trademarks around the world. China granted him not only the trademark on his name in February but also 38 others in March, on everything from hotels to insurance to escort services, followed by six more last week; his eldest daughter Ivanka, who serves as an adviser within the administration, has also received trademarks there since her father took office. Mexico, too, approved Trump trademarks in March. These developments, which all came about after Trump took office, arguably violate the Constitution’s foreign emoluments clause, which bars federal officials from “accept[ing] of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.”

Moreover, as has frequently been the case with the Trump Organization’s dealings in recent months, the timing of the renewals The New York Times reported on raises additional questions about whether Russia may have been trying to influence the president. Since November 8, the Trump Organization has seen unexpected progress on projects in multiple countries, including not only China but also Argentina and Georgia, where long-stalled developments both began moving forward in November. Though it remains unclear whether any of these actions were specifically meant to influence Trump, the cumulative effect suggests that international offshoots of the Trump brand are benefiting from the Trump presidency.

Back to table of contents  

That Trump Organization Event Planner

Much has been written about how few high-level government positions President Donald Trump has filled compared to his predecessors; still more has been written about the unusual qualifications of those he has appointed. This week, the president named another appointee whose background doesn’t really comport with her new position: Lynne Patton, who will head the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Region II, which comprises New York and New Jersey.

Like Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson, to whom she will soon report, Patton has little-to-no directly relevant background in urban planning or housing. According to the New York Daily News, which first reported Patton’s nomination on Thursday, though, Patton has plenty of experience with the Trumps. Patton’s LinkedIn account indicates that since 2009, she has planned and run events for the Trump Organization, including “various marketing projects, philanthropic events & golf tournaments.” From 2011 until January of this year, she was also the vice president of the now-defunct Eric Trump Foundation, which is currently under investigation by the attorney general of New York after a report in Forbes alleged that the family had used the foundation to siphon more than $1.2 billion in charitable donations to the Trump Organization.

Patton’s appointment once again demonstrates how Trump continues to mix his presidency with his business interests. In her new office, Patton will oversee the disbursement of billions of dollars in federal housing funds to the states in which the president’s company owns the most property. Though the Trump brand and federal housing would seem to occupy significantly different sectors, there’s actually significant overlap between the two. As was documented by The American Prospect in April, the Trump Organization has repeatedly benefited from federal funding; for example, Trump owns part of a low-income housing development in Brooklyn that has received numerous grants from HUD (and that the president once called “one of the best investments I ever made”). Trump even came into conflict with the agency over the property in 2007 when he attempted to sell his stake, only to have the transaction blocked. That he has chosen a loyal business associate to administer a position that will have oversight over his own company seems to indicate how, rather than putting the best interests of the American people above all else, the president can make decisions that stack the regulatory deck in his own favor.

Back to table of contents  

That Saudi Arabian Lobbying Effort

Less than five months into President Donald Trump’s administration, Saudi Arabia has created a template for foreign governments looking to influence the president through his businesses. On Monday, The Daily Caller reported that the country’s government spent nearly $270,000 on lodgings and catering at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C., between November 2016 and February 2017. The expenditures were part of a lobbying campaign in which the Saudi government paid for U.S. veterans to travel to D.C. to advocate against the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act. The law, which passed in September despite a veto from President Barack Obama, allows American citizens to sue foreign governments that allegedly sponsor terrorist attacks and organizations.

The payment clearly demonstrates the problems with the arrangements Trump has made to prevent ethics violations, which he and his lawyer Sheri Dillon described in January before he took office. Among other steps meant to resolve the president’s conflicts of interest, one measure was specifically designed to address concerns that foreign governments might attempt to influence Trump by paying to stay at his hotel in Washington, D.C. To head off such a possibility, Dillon said in January, the Trump Organization would “voluntarily donate all profits from foreign government payments to his hotels to the United States Treasury.”

In the four months since the inauguration, the Trump Organization itself has demonstrated the insufficiency of this pledge on multiple occasions. First, in March, the company admitted that it hadn’t yet made the payments it had promised, and said it would not be doing so until the end of the calendar year. Then, in May, the organization sent Congress a pamphlet outlining the relatively meager steps it would take to uphold its commitment, stating that it wouldn’t actively attempt to identify foreign agents staying at the hotel because doing so would be “impractical.” Instead, the document suggested, the company would be relying on the foreign governments to identify themselves. After The Daily Caller’s report, the Trump Organization announced that it would indeed be transferring profits from the Saudi payments to the Treasury at the end of the calendar year.

However, it’s unclear whether, under the Trump Organization’s guidelines, they would have done so if not for the attention the story received from the media. The Saudi government didn’t technically pay for the hotel rooms; instead, they paid the American lobbying firm Qorvis MSLGroup, which hired a subcontractor. Qorvis was then required to disclose the source of the funds to the Justice Department under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, and a Daily Caller reporter then reported the story based on those disclosures. Given that the Trump Organization has effectively abdicated the responsibility of tracking payments that aren’t “direct billings from the Property to a foreign government,” it’s entirely possible that the company would not have done the due diligence required to follow the money; as it is, the story didn’t emerge for several months. Moreover, the Trump Organization still hasn’t answered the question of how it will determine what portion of the revenues constitute profits that it will pass along to the treasury.

Theoretically, the Trump Organization may have legitimately not been aware that the money Qorvis spent at the hotel came from the Saudi government, in which case Trump himself also wouldn’t have known about it, either. However, Saudi Arabia has hired Qorvis to carry out PR campaigns twice in the past, once shortly after 9/11 and once after the country invaded Yemen in 2015; both efforts were highly controversial, with the former resulting in a probe by the Justice Department in 2004. Besides, given that the Saudi government would likely have been spending that money on the campaign regardless, the mere possibility that the president would know where the payments came from and think more favorably of the country may very well have been enough of an incentive to make bookings at Trump’s hotel over its competition. Finally, even without the Saudi connection, the situation still constitutes an organization effectively paying the president while lobbying on a controversial issue.

It’s hardly hyperbolic to say that Saudi Arabia’s payment at the Trump International Hotel is exactly what ethics experts worried about when they first raised concerns about the president’s decision to retain ownership of his businesses while in office. As part of an active campaign to lobby the U.S. government, the Saudi government was effectively paying the president, who very well could end up significantly influencing how the policy plays out. In doing so, they demonstrated the inadequacy of Trump’s plan to avoid conflicts of interest: If the disclosure paperwork hadn’t surfaced, all it would have taken to skirt the rules Trump and his company set up was to funnel money through a lobbying firm.

Back to table of contents  

That Golf Course in New Jersey

During his first few months in office, President Donald Trump spent many of his weekends at Mar-a-Lago, which some have called his “Winter White House,” in Palm Beach, Florida. His trips there were subject to criticism on the grounds of both symbolism and substance. Symbolically, his visits both conflicted with his campaign promise to rarely leave Washington, D.C., and undermined his frequent criticisms of his predecessor for traveling while in office. Substantively, Trump’s trips to Mar-a-Lago make manifest one of the major problems with his decision to retain ownership of his businesses while in office: Anybody seeking to influence Trump could theoretically pay for a membership, putting money in his pocket while potentially gaining direct access to him. In this way, the president’s mere presence serves as an advertisement for the resort.

Many of the same concerns apply to Trump’s “Summer White House,” his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey. It’s historically been his summer getaway, and, given his penchant for visiting his own properties, it’s expected he will be spending more time there in coming months.

But whereas the problems with Mar-a-Lago have mainly been implicit—neither Trump nor his company, the Trump Organization, has acknowledged any link between the election and, say, the decision to double the club’s initiation fees in January—the intermingling of the presidency and the Trump Organization is on more explicit display in Bedminster. While there’s plenty of evidence (especially on social media) that visiting Mar-a-Lago could lead to an encounter with the president, Bedminster appears to have been actively advertising the possibility. According to Laura Holson of The New York Times, who toured the property with Trump’s son Eric,

Mr. Trump is a selling point for prospective brides and grooms considering holding their weddings at the club. When I was there, I was given a marketing brochure that made the following pledge: “If he is on-site for your big day, he will likely stop in & congratulate the happy couple. He may take some photos with you but we ask you and your guests to be respectful of his time & privacy.”

In a remarkable piece of advertising synergy, Trump made good on the promise in the brochure the weekend after Holson published her article. Between June 9 and June 11, Trump’s second weekend visiting the property since taking office, numerous photos posted on Instagram show the president posing for pictures with his paying guests at the resort, including not only a bride and groom but also a group of eighth-graders at their middle-school graduation party.

Though Holson notes that “a spokeswoman for the club said that the specific brochure has been discontinued,” the fact that it was present after Trump took office in the first place demonstrates the conflict of interest the resort creates. Trump himself has even acknowledged that his presence is a draw for the property: In November, shortly after the election, Trump told paying guests that he would be interviewing prospective members of his cabinet at the golf club and that members might be able to “come along” to the meetings.

Bedminster offers a prime opportunity for anybody with deep enough pockets—the initiation fee reportedly runs $350,000—to attempt to buy his or her way into a meeting with the president, a fact that marketers at the Trump Organization appear to have recognized. And scientific studies show that even minuscule financial transactions can be enough to significantly influence the recipient, meaning that, if and when such a meeting happens, the fact that such visitors are paying Trump to be there will almost certainly hang over the encounter—and make him more inclined to do something in return.

The situation demonstrates how Trump’s continual choice to shirk longstanding ethical procedures threatens to compromise his decisionmaking as president. As Trump himself has noted, the president is technically exempt from federal conflict-of-interest laws (although not, as has been frequently noted, the Constitution’s emoluments clause). But by retaining ownership of his businesses, Trump creates the exact situation those laws were designed to prevent: On issues both large and small, it’s an open question whether Trump is prioritizing the well-being of the country or whether he’s allowing his financial interests to dictate his behavior.

Back to table of contents  

That Meeting in Brussels

On the European leg of his first foreign trip, President Donald Trump elucidated the relationship between his business and his presidency, although in a way that only further complicates the already-difficult task of understanding how his financial interests might impact his decisions in office. According to the Belgian newspaper Le Soir, in a meeting with Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel, Trump discussed his skepticism toward the European Union through the lens of his experiences as a real-estate mogul. Per a translation in The Guardian, an anonymous source told the paper, “Every time we talk about a country, [Trump] remembered the things he had done. Scotland? He said he opened a club. Ireland? He said it took him two and a half years to get a license and that did not give him a very good image of the European Union.”

The meeting isn’t the first time the president has discussed the Trump Organization—which he still owns, but no longer operates—with other world leaders: In a phone call with Turkish President Recep Erdogan, one of the first Trump made after his election, he relayed praise from a business partner on the company’s towers in Istanbul; on the line with Mauricio Macri, the president of Argentina, Trump mentioned a long-stalled project in Buenos Aires (which suspiciously began moving forward after the exchange).

His conversation with Michel, though, is different, for one key reason: Trump has no hotels in Belgium—and, unless his company is willing to violate a pledge meant to mitigate conflicts of interest, it won’t be pursuing deals there until Trump is out of office. That doesn’t definitively preclude the possibility that he meant to boost his businesses by venting to Michel, but it certainly reduces its likelihood.

What the conversation does do, though, is demonstrate how inextricable Trump’s businesses are from his behavior as president. It’s not just that Trump has ample knowledge of his holdings to act in his own financial interests and little reason to fear that a Republican-controlled Congress might try to stop him. It’s also that Trump seems to approach every issue with a mind toward how it’s impacted his company in the past—and how it will impact his company in the future. As the aforementioned anonymous source in Le Soir described it, “One feels that he wants a system where everything can be realized very quickly and without formality”—a broad pro-business stance that would just so happen to make it significantly easier for the Trump Organization to operate in Europe as well.

As long as the president retains ownership of his company, it’s possible to impute the Trump Organization’s footprint in a variety of the administration’s policy stances. For instance, the notion that Trump favors leaders of countries where he has property is arguably the least concerning explanation for his affinity for noted authoritarians like Erdogan and Filipino President Rodrigo Duterte. On economic issues as well, the president has supported numerous policies over the years that would mainly help wealthy businesspeople in general and the Trump Organization in particular; for example, he’s in favor of weakening the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which would make it significantly easier for his company to move forward on deals in countries like Azerbaijan where bribery of public officials is more common than it is in the U.S. These questions of where genuine policy positions end and self-interest begins will continue—unless, of course, Trump does what ethics experts have urged him to do and actually sells his business.

Back to table of contents   

That Tower in Toronto

President Donald Trump’s properties around the world bring with them business partners from around the world. Several of these ties have already come under scrutiny: A Trump-branded tower in Baku, Azerbaijan, put him in business with allegedly corrupt officials who are themselves connected with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, for example, while two properties in Indonesia link him to officials implicated in a bribery scandal and a racially-motivated attempt to oust a sitting governor.

Now, The Wall Street Journal has reported an additional source of a conflict of interest along these lines: Trump International Tower and Hotel in Toronto. According to the Journal, one of Trump’s partners in the project, Alexander Shnaider, received millions of dollars from the Russian bank Vnesheconombank, or VEB, shortly before investing in the project. Shnaider, who is Russian American and was the main developer on the Trump-branded property, sold his own company’s share in a Ukrainian steelmaker to VEB for $850 million in 2010. Shnaider’s lawyer said in April that $15 million from the sale went into the Toronto tower, although he walked back his statement the next day, writing that he is “not able to confirm that any funds” from the sale went into the project.

VEB is owned by the Russian government; according to its website, its mandate is “to enhance [the] competitiveness of the Russian economy, diversify it, and stimulate investment activity,” and the bank’s supervisory board is chaired by the country’s prime minister, Dmitry Medvedev. At the time of the deal with Shnaider’s company, though, its chairman was the current Russian President Vladimir Putin, who, according to a Russian government official and multiple experts, would have had to sign off on such an exchange.

As with many of Trump’s business holdings, the property represents a conflict of interest because it brings him revenue that’s made possible by money from a bank owned and operated by a foreign government. Though Trump doesn’t own the tower—he merely licenses his name to Shnaider, who owns the building through his company Talon International Development Inc.—the Trump Organization nevertheless profits off of the building and, by extension, from VEB’s deal with Shnaider. This potentially gives the Russian government leverage that it could use should it want to influence Trump’s policies. That means that the Trump Organization’s continued involvement with the tower may represent a violation of the Constitution’s emoluments clause, which precludes elected officials from “accept[ing] of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.”

The Journal’s report highlights the inadequacy of the financial disclosures the president has so far offered. Last week, Trump insisted that his company does not have business ties to Russian “persons or entities.” As my colleague David Graham wrote, the letter from Trump’s lawyers that Trump proffered on the subject last week “doesn’t define several key terms,” leaving open the possibility that one of Trump’s projects benefited from Russian funding through a pass-through corporation or another intermediary. VEB’s role in the financing of the Trump-branded property in Toronto is a perfect example: Because money from VEB went toward enriching Trump (through Shnaider), one can reasonably argue that Trump didn’t do enough to eliminate the conflict of interest that the hotel creates for him in office.

Back to table of contents  ​

That Caribbean Villa

President Donald Trump has another property on the market: Le Château des Palmiers, his estate on the Caribbean island of St. Maarten. The president’s company bought the 11-bedroom beachfront compound in 2013, and the Trump Organization has been using it as a rental property ever since. It’s listed at $6,000 per night on TripAdvisor; according to specialty sites such as Luxury Retreats, which lists the price as between $6,000 and $20,000, and Mansion Global, which places the upper limit at $28,000, the price increases substantially during the winter, when the Caribbean offers an escape from cold weather. According to the disclosure forms Trump submitted to the Federal Election Commission (which remain the only public documentation of his finances), he derived between $100,001 and $1 million from the property in the year leading up to May 2016.

The asking price for Le Château des Palmiers remains unknown. The Trump Organization is selling the property through the real-estate agency and auction house Sotheby’s; according to the listing for the complex, the price is available only upon request. However, there are some clues available. On his FEC disclosure forms, Trump lists the property as worth between $5 million and $25 million, which does correspond with the $19.7 million he paid for it four years ago. According to Mansion Global, 7th Heaven, a real-estate brokerage in St. Maarten, has identified the asking price as $28 million, although 7th Heaven’s current page for the property lists the price as “PoA,” or Price on Application.

Though Trump no longer runs the Trump Organization, he still owns the company and, by extension, the property, meaning that he will profit from its sale. That means that Le Château des Palmiers offers yet another avenue by which somebody could attempt to influence the president’s decisions by putting a large sum of money in his pocket. It would even be possible for somebody to make an offer well above the currently unknown asking price to curry favor with him (and, possibly, through the artful use of a shell company, hide their identity).

As NPR noted, the Trump Organization’s decision to sell Le Château des Palmiers is “the first known major divestiture of a Trump property since he became president.” As such, it demonstrates the insufficiency of the steps the president has taken to eliminate his conflicts of interest. Trump has put the leadership of his company in the hands of his adult sons and a longtime Trump Organization executive with relatively few—and, based on Donald Jr. and Eric’s frequent presence at administration events and Eric’s statement that he will share some business-related data with his father, relatively permeable—barriers blinding him from knowledge of his financial interests.

Had Trump taken the measures suggested repeatedly by ethics experts on both sides of the political aisle, he would by now have put his assets in what’s called a blind trust, which would entail turning over his empire to a third party with whom he will have no contact, who would sell off the properties and reinvest the resulting money in other assets without providing the president any information about the sales or the purchases. Instead, Trump has set up a system under which, even if he does proceed to sell off his business, one property at a time, he will simply create new conflicts of interest as he takes payments from those who are purchasing the Trump Organization’s real estate.

Back to table of contents  

Those Condos for Sale

President Donald Trump’s finances are infamously opaque. Since he has not followed the long-standing presidential custom of releasing his tax returns to the public, the only publicly available records of where he derives his income are his two filings with the Federal Elections Commission. Even those are difficult to parse: Much of his business empire comprises limited-liability companies (or LLCs), which face very few disclosure requirements, and shell and pass-through corporations, which can obscure ownership and make money trails harder to follow.

Much the same can be said for whoever has been buying up Trump Organization condominiums. A lengthy investigation published in USA Today found that, “since launching his White House bid, Trump’s companies have sold at least 58 units nationwide”—out of a total of more than 400 currently on the market—”for about $90 million. Almost half of those sold to LLCs.” One of those LLCs, a financial firm created shortly before the Republican National Convention named Milan Investment Limited, spent $3.1 million to buy 11 condominiums in the building the president co-owns in Las Vegas.

Normally, such a story would then identify who is behind the purchase and whether they may have some ulterior motive in buying something from the president. In this case, though, repeated efforts by the USA Today to ascertain who exactly is behind Milan apparently came up empty. The company’s headquarters in a strip mall the outskirts of Las Vegas are registered to two individuals named Jun Xu and Qi Huang; however, the reporters were unable to reach Xu and Huang through either their listed addresses and phone numbers or through business associates. A third individual associated with Milan, Chen Huang, also apparently could not be reached for comment, nor did the Trump Organization respond to inquiries about the identities of the buyers. The newspaper’s attempts to find the buyers of other Trump Organization condos met with mixed results: Though reporters were able to track down the real people behind some of the purchases, including a couple who said they bought the property because they’re fans of Trump’s, others proved just as elusive as whoever is behind Milan.

As the USA Today notes, the story highlights one of the major problems underlying Trump’s decision to retain his businesses while in office. There is no law requiring a shell company like Milan to disclose the identities of its owner(s) or the source of its money while purchasing real estate. The Trump Organization still owns hundreds of condominiums, the sales of which will directly profit it and, by extension, the president; this offers plenty of chances for any individual or corporation to purchase a unit to attempt to curry favor with Trump without having to disclose their own identity to the public.

So far, the Republican-controlled Congress has shown little interest in investigating the constitutionality of Trump’s decision to hold onto his businesses. That means that the only real disincentive for those attempting to influence the president by patronizing his businesses is the bad publicity that might ensue. But Milan Investment Limited’s secretive investment in Trump’s properties shows how easy it would be for an individual or a corporation to stay anonymous and avoid that scrutiny.

Back to table of contents  

Those Reelection-Campaign Funds

For President Donald Trump, it pays to be in constant campaign mode.

Metaphorically, at least, this isn’t unusual; the idea of the “permanent campaign,” a reference to how politicians consider their reelection chances from almost the moment they take office, has been around for decades. Such is the case for Trump, who filed a letter with the Federal Election Commission establishing his eligibility to run for a second term in 2020 just hours after taking the oath of office. Though the letter declares only that he can run, not necessarily that he will run, it gives broad coverage for the president to begin fundraising and holding campaign events, and to do so far earlier in his first term than have previous presidents.

Since doing so, Trump has held several events that, while officially presented as part of his “thank-you tour,” have seemed an awful lot like his campaign rallies. Meanwhile, between merchandise sales and an already-active fundraising effort, he has raised more than $7.1 million, and the Republican National Committee has raised an additional $23 million. That’s not necessarily noteworthy by itself; by this time, President Obama and the Democratic National Committee had raised $15 million. (Obama had not yet filed for eligibility in 2012 three months into his first term, although he had held events to promote his economic-stimulus package.) What does make Trump unusual is that he has already spent $6.3 million of his reelection campaign funds—and, according to reports he recently filed with the FEC, he is paying some of that money to his own personal businesses—for instance, renting space at his hotels or golfing on his courses—thereby literally profiting off of his permanent campaign.

This practice is nothing new for Trump. As early as 2000, he was speculating that he “could be the first presidential candidate to run and make money on it” by patronizing his own businesses and running the campaign out of one of his properties. During his 2016 bid, he did exactly that, establishing his political headquarters in Trump Tower (and quintupling the rent as soon as he became the Republican nominee and began drawing funds from the party rather than his personal war chest). Shortly before his victory, The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump’s campaign had paid out the unprecedented sum of more than $14 million to his family and companies for such services as flights on his personal airplanes, rent at Trump Tower, and meals and hotel rooms at other Trump buildings.

Similarly, since taking office, Trump has profited off of the federal government’s newfound need to patronize his properties. Both the Secret Service and Department of Defense are renting out space in Trump Tower, for example, with the former believed to be paying at least $3 million per year to do so. This has led to rumblings that Trump may be violating the Constitution’s domestic emoluments clause, which holds that the president “shall not receive ... any other Emolument from the United States, or any of them,” beyond his official salary.

The amount Trump’s reelection campaign has spent at his businesses is comparatively small: According to The Wall Street Journal, more than 6 percent of the $6.3 million it’s spent so far, or almost $500,000, went to Trump’s hotels, golf courses, and restaurants. But that’s a higher rate than when his campaign money was going to his own businesses for the 2016 campaign ($14 million out of a total of $322 million, or about 4.3 percent). At his current rate, if he spends a similar amount over the next election cycle—and given that he’s already started spending, he could easily far outdo himself—he would be directing nearly $20 million to his own businesses.

On top of the arguable impropriety of personally profiting off of his donors’ and his party’s largesse, the situation presents perverse incentives for Trump. Already, elected officials, up to and including the president, to an extent base their behavior in office on what they believe will play well with voters rather than (or, in the best-case scenario, on top of) what is best for America. This is certainly true of Trump, whose every decision seems to prompt discussion of how it plays into the tension between his nationalist base and traditional Republican voters.

The personal financial benefits of campaigning mean that Trump has a little more motivation to delve into his reelection efforts than most politicians in his position. Because he is personally profiting, he has another reason to aim his politics toward his base so that they will continue donating to him and buying his merchandise in the downtime between election years. Moreover, rather than stockpile for 2020, he has an incentive to keep up the campaign rallies—and keep charging for them, as he did in 2016—so that he can continue funneling money from his donors and voters into his personal businesses.

Moreover, that the president is redirecting donors’ money into his own businesses only further highlights the inadequacy of the trust arrangement he has set up to supposedly prevent him from conflicts of interest. Trump and his lawyers have claimed that, by resigning from his positions within the Trump Organization and handing over control to his two adult sons and a long-time business associate, the president has distanced himself from his businesses enough that he will no longer be tempted to act in his own financial interests. Ethics experts (and common sense) immediately disagreed: Unless the president actually sells his businesses, many have said, and has the funds reinvested without his knowledge, he still knows more than enough about his sources of profit to put his own personal gain above that of the country. The almost $500,000 he’s channeled into the Trump Organization via his reelection campaign demonstrates this: Trump doesn’t need to be in charge of his businesses to know how to direct money their way; all he needs to know is where they are.

Back to table of contents  

That Second Hotel in Washington, D.C.

There may soon be more than one Trump Hotel in Washington D.C. According to The Washington Post, the Trump Organization is considering purchasing another property in the nation’s capital to develop for its recently created Scion brand, which aims to offer a more affordable alternative to the upscale properties bearing the president’s name.

Unlike the Trump International Hotel—the upscale property that opened in September 2016 and has become something of a synecdoche for the president’s conflicts of interest—a new Scion hotel in D.C. would likely be a licensing deal. That means that, rather than the Trump Organization owning and operating the property itself, a third-party hotelier will be paying the president’s company for the right to use the Scion name; candidates identified by the Post include Foxhall Partners, which has two properties in the city and a third under development, and the Beacon Hotel in downtown D.C.

But even if it isn’t actually owned or operated by the Trump Organization, the new hotel would likely attract scrutiny along the same lines as the Trump International. A licensing agreement means that the president will not be profiting off of the building directly; payments from individuals or organizations booking rooms or events there will not go straight to the Trump Organization, but to the hotelier. But Trump will still have a financial stake in the hotel’s viability: The longer it stays in business and the more successful it is, the more (and longer) the licensee will pay to use the Scion name, and the more likely other owners may be to commit to similar partnerships with the fledgling brand. Trump has resigned from his positions with the Trump Organization and transferred control of his assets to his two adult sons and a long-time business partner. But he still owns the company, which means he will still profit from his properties. According to his son Eric, the president will even continue to receive quarterly reports on how his real-estate empire is faring financially. The pathway to Trump’s pocketbook may be slightly more complicated, but it still exists.

The proposed new property also engenders some of the same concerns as the broader round of expansions the Trump Organization announced in February. Developing a hotel, even in an existing building, means working with local government bureaucracies, such as zoning offices that sign off on structural changes or licensing boards. In any city, this would create  conflicting incentives for government officials who are suddenly being asked to rule on the president’s businesses. On the one hand, Washington, D.C., like many of the cities into which the Trump Organization is looking to expand, voted strongly against the president in the 2016 election; city officials, especially those elected by D.C.’s denizens, may feel a need to factor his unpopularity into their decisions with regard to the newly proposed hotel. On the other hand, the federal government still controls D.C.’s budget, placing additional pressure to green-light a proposal from the infamously mercurial commander-in-chief.

Back to table of contents

That Property in Azerbaijan

When it comes to President Donald Trump’s constellation of foreign investments, properties, and companies, much of the attention so far has been on his business’s apparent violation of the Constitution’s emoluments clause, which bars officeholders from taking gifts from foreign leaders. According to numerous ethics experts, the clause takes an expansive definition of gifts, encompassing everything from a direct bribe to a foreign official’s approval of construction of a new Trump property. But some of the Trump Organization’s properties raise additional red flags due to the specific partners involved. That’s true in Indonesia, for example, where Trump’s affiliates have been involved in bribery scandals and radical Islamic nationalist parties, and Brazil, where the company pulled out of a branding agreement amid a criminal investigation of a local business partner.

Such is the case in Azerbaijan, which Transparency International ranks as among the most corrupt countries in the world, where the Trump International Hotel and Tower in Baku remains unopened. Though the long-stalled development has generated a steady drip of news and rumors for years, an overview by Adam Davidson in The New Yorker, entitled “Donald Trump’s Worst Deal,” puts into perspective just how convoluted the situation is, and just how much the project has led Trump and his company into a partnership with numerous corrupt officials in the Middle East. The details suggest that, on top of the continual underlying breach of the emoluments clause, the Trump Organization’s involvement may also violate the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, or FCPA, which forbids American companies from participating, even unknowingly, in bribery schemes in other countries, with a penalty of up to $2 million and up to five years in jail.

According to Davidson, though the project originated in 2008 as a high-end apartment building, the Trump Organization has had a licensing deal with the building’s Azerbaijani developers to turn the property into a hotel since 2012. Though the Trump Organization presented the deal as a straightforward licensing agreement, it was in fact a much more involved agreement granting the company—specifically, Trump’s daughter Ivanka—extensive oversight over the project. Based on his FEC disclosures in 2016, which as of this moment remain the only official record of Trump’s finances, the president has so far made $2.8 million from the partnership.

But what makes this story unique among the dozens of ethical questions surrounding the president is the Trump Organization’s partners on the project. Ostensibly, the main developer behind the property is Anar Mammadov. He is in turn the son of Azerbaijan’s transportation minister Ziya Mammadov, who was once described in a leaked diplomatic cable as “notoriously corrupt even for Azerbaijan.” Also in on the deal, though not initially publicly disclosed, is Ziya’s brother Elton, who founded the company that currently owns the property in Baku while serving in Azerbaijan’s parliament. Then there’s the Mammadovs’ relationships with Iranian oligarchs. For years, the Mammadovs have been closely linked with the Darvishis, whose members include the head of a  construction firm implicated in the Iranian Revolutionary Guard’s possibly illicit financial operations and the former leader of a company that was sanctioned by the United States for its role in Iran’s attempts to develop an arsenal of nuclear missiles. As the Mammadovs’ influence within Azerbaijan has begun to weaken in recent years, they have  increased both their wealth and their mutually profitable relationship with the Darvishis, green-lighting a number of deals that will prove lucrative for both families.

Alan Garten, the chief legal officer for the Trump Organization, asserted to The New Yorker that, as the company has never worked directly with Ziya or Elton Mammadov, it has not engaged in any behavior that should trip ethical alarms. He has additionally claimed that the company did “extensive due diligence” in making the deal, which did not raise “any red flags,” although the actual employees who carried out the process are no longer with the company.

Still, merely by partnering with the Mammadov family, the Trump Organization may have violated the FCPA. The law explicitly covers cases in which an American company claims not to have known it was working with corrupt officials; jurisprudence since its 1977 passage has further expanded the law’s definition to include “conscious avoidance,” or active efforts by an American company to not learn of a foreign partner’s corruption. So though Garten claims that, since the Trump Organization did not have enough control over the project and has not itself engaged in bribery, its hands are essentially clean, experts on the law say that the Trump Organization may be legally liable if its foreign partners engaged in corrupt practices.

Adding to all this is the fact that Trump is on the record as opposing the FCPA in May 2012, right when it would have become relevant to his company’s engagement in Azerbaijan. Trump called the law “absolutely horrible” and argued that, since other countries do not have the same provision, American corporations are at a major disadvantage in which bribery is the norm. Trump’s appointee to the Securities and Exchange Commission (which enforces the statute), Jay Clayton, similarly considers the FCPA an obstacle to U.S. companies seeking to expand abroad. A dissenting voice on the topic is Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who stated in his confirmation hearings that he intends to continue enforcing the statute. Which of these voices will end up winning out on the topic remains an open question.

This, then, is the situation in which the Trump Organization—and, by extension, the president, who has stepped down from his position within the business but who retains ownership—finds itself in Azerbaijan: The company’s direct partner on Trump Tower Baku is the scion of a wealthy and notoriously corrupt family that appears to have only stepped up its self-dealing as its political power wanes. That family is engaged in what appears to be a relationship of mutual graft with Iranian oligarchs with deep connections to their country’s Revolutionary Guard, the ideological militia widely suspected by the international community of gross corruption and sponsoring terror at home and abroad.

These families can be added to the ever-growing list of international partners whose relationships with the Trump Organization could create conflicts of interest for the president. The Mammadovs’ arrangement with Trump’s company may not only violate the emoluments clause but could also feasibly put the president and his family in legal trouble should the SEC choose to actively pursue enforcement of the FCPA in Azerbaijan. And the Darvishis could in turn use their relationship to influence the Mammadovs, which could have significant implications should Trump attempt, as he has said he will, to take hard-line stances that could affect the Iranian Revolutionary Guard’s activities. And if Trump so chooses, he could direct the Justice Department to curtail its enforcement of the FCPA or even use his bully pulpit to lead a legislative push to undo it, essentially condoning unethical behavior that in many countries enables leaders to personally profit at the expense of their own citizens—which, of course, could be a fair way to characterize the current situation with Trump’s business holdings.

Back to table of contents

That Trump Tower Penthouse

With President Trump in office and still refusing to distance himself from his businesses, every new tenant in one of his buildings creates another possibility of a conflict of interest. Such is the case with Xiao Yan Chen, who also goes by Angela Chen, a business executive who, according to documents filed with the New York City Department of Finance, purchased a $15.8 million penthouse apartment at Trump Tower in New York on February 21. Chen’s transaction is the first notable real-estate deal involving one of Trump’s properties since the election, although it should be noted that she has lived in a different unit in Trump Tower since 2004. And though Trump has officially removed himself from the board of directors of Trump Park Avenue LLC, the corporation that runs Trump Tower, he remains the company’s owner, meaning that he profits from its dealings.

Chen’s purchase represents the exact kind of entanglement that has fueled concerns that Trump’s financial interests could influence his decision-making as president. Chen is the founder and managing director of Global Alliance Associates, a consulting firm that, according to its website, “facilitates the right strategic relationships with the most prominent public and private decision makers in China.” The firm is explicit about what it sells: access. Though the page listing its partnerships is currently empty, the firm’s “affiliates” page includes a number of international organizations promoting relationships between private corporations and the governments of the United States and China, including the USA-China Chamber of Commerce, the Asia Society, and the China Institute. Notably, Global Alliance Associates also consults for the U.S. Department of Commerce and the U.S. Trade & Development Agency, meaning that Trump is accepting money from the founder and managing director of a firm that works with the U.S. government.

Because Trump is holding onto his businesses, he has created a situation in which some of his earnings include money from the leader of a company whose sole goal is to help its clients curry favor with the Chinese government; it’s no stretch to believe that her move to Trump Tower and the money it puts in Trump’s pocket may help her gain access to the United States government. (Reached for comment by the New York Post, Chen said she was “not comfortable” discussing the purchase and its possible ramifications for her company.) Even if it wasn’t Chen’s intention, the transaction still could influence the president. As the president’s conflicts of interest continually accumulate, the likelihood that one or more will eventually impact his decision-making continually grows—as does the appearance that he is ethically compromised by the many people, organizations, and governments from which he is receiving money while in office.

Back to table of contents

That Resort in the Dominican Republic

The Trump Organization’s January 11 pledge that it would no longer be pursuing new deals in foreign countries is looking increasingly toothless. Shortly after President Donald Trump took office, The Guardian reported that the president’s business would be moving forward with a planned expansion of its golf course in Aberdeen. Now, the Associated Press has reported that the company is working on a licensing deal in the Dominican Republic.

As was true with the Aberdeen plans, the Trump Organization has provided a narrow justification under which it argues that the news does not violate its promise. Technically, it argues, the deal is not new: The Trump Organization has had a contract with Ricardo and Fernando Hazoury, the brothers who own the Cap Cana Resort in the Dominican Republic, since 2007. But the financial crisis and disagreements between the Trump family and the Hazoury brothers, which climaxed with Eric Trump accusing the pair of “textbook fraud” in a 2012 lawsuit, had stalled the arrangement for nearly a decade, and the two parties haven’t written a new contract since the 2007 deal was struck. Even other real-estate developers have said that the resumption of the relationship between the Trumps and Hazourys caught them by surprise. For their part, the Hazourys have said that the relationship with the Trumps “remains incredibly strong, especially with Eric, who has led this project since its conception.”

The development in the Dominican Republic epitomizes the way the Trump Organization seems intent to violate the spirit of their “no new foreign deals” pledge, and arguably even the letter. Asked about the Organization’s justification for the deal, Richard Painter, who served as the ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush, noted that the company “can take the tiniest little past involvement in something and then extend it into an enormous new deal” and hasn’t presented a meaningful way “to distinguish between new business and old business.” Already, the Trump Organization has provided excuses for moving forward with two projects based on an interpretation of its own pledge that seems predicated on the idea that a deal can only be described as “new” if there had never been any relationship whatsoever between the Trump family and the property in question. As the company finds more explanations to broaden what initially seemed to be a clear-cut policy to reduce conflicts of interest—arguably, the only step in Trump’s plan that actually would have helped him do so—the pledge will likely become increasingly meaningless.

The Cap Cana story is yet another conflict of interest that only became public because of reporting from local media—and because of the nonchalance with which the Trump family handles the relationship between their business and the presidency. The first outlet to report on Eric’s trip was the Dominican newspaper Diario Libre, shortly after Cap Cana posted a picture of the Hazourys with Eric on its website. This follows stories like the president’s phone call with the president of Argentina and his company’s plans to expand into Taiwan, both of which were similarly broken by local newspapers before getting picked up by American press outlets. Further, like the president’s post-election meeting with business partners from India and Eric’s trip to Uruguay, the Trump family’s propensity for photo ops played a role: Even amid intensifying scrutiny of the Trump Organization’s actions, Eric seems unworried about having not only taken the trip but also taken pictures with his business partners.

The president’s putative pick for his ambassador to the Dominican Republic only adds to the perception that Trump will intermingle business and politics in the country. Trump has picked Robin Bernstein, a campaign donor, business partner, and founding member of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club, to be his administration’s representative in the country. Bernstein and her husband Richard have been in business with the president and his company for decades through The Americas Group, a consulting and marketing firm focused on construction projects in Latin America and the Caribbean. Choosing personal friends and supporters to be ambassadors is relatively common, especially in countries with which the United States has relatively uncomplicated relations. However, Trump’s decision to appoint somebody with whom he has long maintained a financial relationship—his second such appointment, after having named fellow billionaire real-estate developer and business partner Steven Roth to head his infrastructure program—suggests a continued willingness to blur the lines between his endeavors as a businessman and his duties as president, all while contributing to the perception that the president is willing to reward those who have done business with him in the past.

Back to table of contents

That Chinese Trademark

On February 15, President Trump scored a long-sought-after victory when a Chinese court ruled in his favor in a trademark dispute. In the case, which dragged on for more than a decade, the Trump Organization won sole rights to use the president’s name on products in the country, which would help prevent a bevy of unrelated entrepreneurs from applying it to a wide range of products, from toilets to clothing to condoms to explosives.

Almost immediately, Trump’s critics pointed out that the ruling poses a clear conflict of interest. Senator Dianne Feinstein of California called the trademark decision “deeply troubling,” adding, “If this isn’t a violation of the emoluments clause, I don’t know what is.” Some, including Feinstein, went further in their assertions: Only days before, Trump had apparently reversed one of his stances toward China by offering a full-throated endorsement of the “One China Policy” (under which countries officially recognize the mainland Chinese government but not Taiwan), leading to the suggestion that the court’s decision was part of a quid-pro-quo deal between the two governments.

Additional context, though, complicates this picture. The case, it turns out, was largely resolved in November 2016, before there was any indication that the president would waffle on the One China Policy by calling the president of Taiwan, and was the culmination of more than a decade of litigation that largely predates Trump’s involvement in politics. Conflicts of this kind over trademarks are fairly common in China, and, though resolving such cases often costs companies significant time and money, the Trump Organization’s victory is one of several that have gone in favor of American corporations in recent years. None of this rules out the possibility of a quid-pro-quo arrangement, but in sum it suggests that there is more to the case than what Feinstein alleges.

Whether or not the Chinese government tried to curry favor with the president by seeing to it that the court ruled in his favor, Trump’s newly awarded trademark poses a conflict of interest that could impact his future interactions with China. On top of the questions around his adherence, or lack thereof, to the One China Policy, Trump has taken a number of controversial stands when it comes to China, from accusing the country of currency manipulation to threatening to take hard-line trade positions that experts worry could lead to a trade war. Over all of these questions will loom the president’s knowledge that, with its trademark now secured, his company has an ongoing profitable relationship with the Chinese government—which, even if Trump does not proactively consider it in approaching the negotiating table, could provide his Chinese counterparts with leverage to influence the president’s decisions.

Back to table of contents

That Meeting at Mar-a-Lago

Of his first three weekends in office, President Donald Trump spent two of them away from Washington, D.C., at his Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Florida. On his first trip to the resort, which he has dubbed his “Winter White House,” Trump spent time on the golf course, attended a ball held by the Red Cross—a federally chartered organization over which he will likely be tasked to wield authority while in office—and held a Super Bowl party at which he hobnobbed with wealthy patrons.

His third weekend in office, Trump brought a guest of honor along with him: the prime minister of Japan, Shinzo Abe. After first meeting with Abe at the real White House, Trump took his Japanese counterpart to Florida for a weekend on the links. The biggest controversy out of the weekend was over the president’s handling of a situation that developed on Saturday, February 11: As news of a North Korean missile test broke during dinner, Trump and Abe discussed the situation in public, using light from phones of gathered onlookers to read briefing documents, an incredibly lax approach to information security, particularly ironic given that Trump won in part because of his opponent’s own lapses in information security.

The situation perfectly encapsulates the way the president’s business interests are coming up against those of the country. Already, the Trump Organization’s decision to double Mar-a-Lago’s initiation fees led to accusations of profiteering, premised on the notion that people would be willing to pony up in the hopes of earning an audience with the commander-in-chief.

The events of Saturday, February 11 took the problem to a whole new level. By discussing the recently obtained intelligence with Abe without leaving the table, the president committed a breach of international-security protocol in a very public setting. Even had the meeting been taking place in the White House, Trump’s lackadaisical approach to information security would have been cause for concern; for self-evident reasons, briefings on urgent security situations do not typically happen in somewhat open settings around civilians. But on the patio at Mar-a-Lago, the situation becomes much more dangerous, because the patio is not a secure setting, and the administration does not appear to have taken measures to make it one. This is a perfect example of a conflict of interest in practice: Trump has an incentive to host an event at Mar-a-Lago (personal financial gain) that runs directly counter to what would be best for the country’s security (hosting the event at the White House or an otherwise secure location). Not only that, part of the appeal of Mar-a-Lago is that guests will have a front-row ticket to see Trump at work. Previous presidents like Barack Obama, meanwhile, took a more conventional, and far more secure, approach, setting up a mobile security perimeter known as a sensitive compartmented information facility, or SCIF, to ensure that nobody in the area could look in on or overhear the president’s dealings.

According to the president’s Press Secretary Sean Spicer, Mar-a-Lago does, in fact, have a SCIF on site that they used for the remainder of the Trump’s conversation about North Korea with Abe. That they apparently began their discussion at the dinner table before deploying the SCIF underscores the problem of the situation at Mar-a-Lago: Trump has a financial incentive to hold an open-air meeting like Saturday night’s to keep up the appearance that, by paying to be a member of his exclusive club, anyone can have access to the most powerful man in the world.

Who could have been present? The club’s membership list is private, meaning that the American public has no way of knowing who was around to overhear the conversation. (Two Democratic senators, Tom Udall and Sheldon Whitehouse, have introduced a bill to change this fact, but there is little evidence suggesting it has any hopes of passing through the Republican-held Congress.) Nor have the Trump Organization and White House been forthcoming as to how they intend to screen club members and employees for security clearance; though Udall and Whitehouse reached out to the administration to ask how Mar-a-Lago vets guests for security risks, but received no response. In such a public place, and without protective measures like a SCIF, there may not be anything to stop an agent of a foreign government or other malicious actor from paying the $200,000 initiation fee to stay at the club, effectively paying to be near to the president when he receives sensitive information. Unless Trump takes significant steps either to erect barriers between himself and the guests at Mar-a-Lago—which he certainly didn’t do this time, and which could reduce his ability to profit from the property—there is a real possibility that he will continue to compromise his country’s interests when he travels to his resort in Palm Beach.

One patron of the club, Richard DeAgazio, demonstrated just how much of a breakdown the situation represents. DeAgazio, who, according to a photo he posted on Facebook, joined the club in December after Trump’s election, snapped several pictures of the president and prime minister’s conversation, which helped corroborate a CNN report on the public nature of the ad-hoc meeting and details such as the use of cellphone flashlights to illuminate documents; he also took pictures with Trump’s chief strategist Steve Bannon and the president’s “body man,” whose job is in part to carry the “nuclear football” containing missile-launch codes (and who was initially identified by name in the photo’s caption). As if to reinforce impression that Mar-a-Lago members gain unprecedented access to the the president, even in the middle of a crisis situation, another patron was able to film Trump giving a toast at a wedding shortly after his press conference with Abe.

There is no reason to believe that DeAgazio had any intention of compromising international security with his pictures; he appears to simply be a wealthy Trump supporter who was excited at the chance to see his commander-in-chief in action and wanted photographs with which to remember the occasion. (He has since apparently either deleted his Facebook profile or increased his privacy settings so that it is no longer publicly accessible.) Nevertheless, he demonstrated just how Trump’s continued commingling of his business interests and his presidency places not just Americans but the entire global community in jeopardy.

In a way, the sheer enormity of the situation at Mar-a-Lago briefly crowded out the fact that merely bringing Abe to Mar-a-Lago demonstrates Trump’s conflicts of interest neatly. Though diplomatic meetings outside the White House are not unprecedented, Trump’s trip with Abe is likely the first instance of the president actually making money from such a meeting. Though Trump said that he was footing Abe’s bill, with both increased Secret Service presence and Abe’s retinue on hand, there’s a distinct possibility that, at some point in the weekend, somebody from the U.S. or Japanese government made a payment that ended up in Trump’s pocket. On top of that, the visit generated an inordinate amount of free publicity for Mar-a-Lago, which Trump repeatedly mentioned (and posted photos of) on his social media accounts and was continually noted in coverage of the weekend.

Back to table of contents

That Defense Department Trump Tower Rental

President Donald Trump’s most iconic property is about to get a new tenant: the Department of Defense. According to CNN, the Pentagon, hewing to a longstanding policy of establishing an offshoot headquarters near the president’s private, non-White House residence, is planning to lease space in Trump Tower in New York City to maintain close proximity to Trump should he choose to spend time there instead of Washington, D.C..

The Department of Defense’s decision is yet another example of how Trump’s decision to hold onto his business interests is rewriting norms surrounding the presidency and creating problems in what were once uncontroversial procedures. As mentioned above, the Department of Defense’s decision is not unique to Trump’s presidency: They took up residence in Chicago, for example, during Barack Obama’s two terms for the exact same reason.

The difference, as is true in so many of the stories surrounding Trump and his family’s conflicts of interest—the Red Cross’s decision to hold its annual ball at Mar-a-Lago, for example, or Eric Trump’s business trip to Uruguay—is that the president himself is now making money off of routine governmental functions. According to The Wall Street Journal, the Department of Defense is spending roughly $130,000 per month to stay at the property, although, according to the Journal, “a Pentagon official wrote in a letter seen by the Journal that the space is owned privately by someone unaffiliated with the Trump Organization and that the department sees no way in which Mr. Trump can benefit from the rent money.”

Nevertheless, the situation points to one of the possible ramifications of the president’s decision to hold onto his real-estate empire while in office. Trump’s protestations to the contrary aside, scientific evidence shows that the mere knowledge that one has profited from a relationship in the past often leads to preferential behavior. As a result, the fact that government agencies—if not the Department of Defense, then the Secret Service and the State Department—may be paying the president himself large sums of money to stay in Trump properties could have significant ramifications for how Trump’s White House operates.

Back to table of contents

That Red Cross Ball

The web of President Donald Trump’s conflicts of interest has grown to encompass the American Red Cross, which held its annual ball on Saturday, February 4, at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Florida. By hosting the ball, the Trump Organization accepted money from an organization that, while not a federal agency per se, is subject to federal oversight that at some point in the next four years will likely involve President Trump.

Unlike a number of the events at Trump properties that have been featured in this list of Trump’s conflicts of interest, the Red Cross Ball, which celebrated the organization’s centennial anniversary, appears to have been scheduled before Trump even received the Republican nomination for president; a calendar listing on the website of the Coastal Star, a local newspaper covering events in the Palm Beach area, is recorded as having been placed in April 2016. Additionally, though the event has been held elsewhere in the past, this was not the first time it has taken place at Mar-a-Lago: Not only was last year’s ball held there, but the very first Red Cross Ball was hosted there by the property’s prior owner, the famous socialite Marjorie Merriweather Post.

Given all that, there is no indication that the decision to hold the event at Mar-a-Lago had anything to do with Trump’s election, and the fact that Trump will likely be attending the event is not unusual—President Barack Obama also attended as the honorary chairman of the organization while in office. Nevertheless, the ball perfectly encapsulates why Trump’s continued refusal to relinquish his business interests complicates even situations that would have taken place had he not become president.

Thanks in part to the makeup of the Red Cross’s leadership and its unique relationship with the federal government, the ball creates a particularly complicated situation. According to its website, the Red Cross “is not a federal agency, nor [does it] receive federal funding on a regular basis to carry out our services and programs,” instead relying on donations and fees for services like health-and-safety training courses. However, the organization operates under a federal charter as a “federal instrumentality … to carry out responsibilities delegated to [it] by the federal government.” The best-known of these duties include overseeing blood-donation drives and disaster-relief efforts; according to its website, it is also the Red Cross’s duty “to fulfill the provisions of the Geneva Convention” and “provide family communications and other forms of support to the U.S. military.” Further, the organization has a chairperson appointed by the president; currently, the chairwoman is Bonnie McElveen-Hunter, who was appointed by President George W. Bush in 2004. The charter also periodically comes before Congress for review and amendments to be signed into effect by the president.

On multiple occasions in recent years, the Red Cross has come under scrutiny for how it handles its multi-billion-dollar budget, most of which comprises donations from the American public. Prompted in part by reporting on the organization’s inadequate response to Hurricane Sandy, misleading statements about how it uses its money, and a September 2015 report by the Governmental Accountability Office, two congresspeople—one Democrat and one Republican—have independently introduced measures to increase the organization’s transparency. Neither has been enacted, but there will likely be another push to improve the relationship between the federal government and the Red Cross during Trump’s presidency, whether via a review of the Red Cross’s charter, the need to appoint a new chairperson, or the introduction of reform-minded legislation. If and when Trump is called upon to weigh in on these decisions, he will be asked to do so having directly profited from the organization while in office, which could limit his ability to act in the best interests of the American people.

Back to table of contents

That D.C. Labor Dispute

One month before he took office, President Donald Trump managed to sidestep a potential conflict of interest at his hotel in Las Vegas. In the fall of 2015, several hundred employees at the city’s Trump International Hotel had voted to join the local branch of the Culinary Workers Union, only to find their efforts stalled by Trump and the hotel’s co-owner, Phil Ruffin. The case languished for more than a year until, after the National Labor Relations Board found Trump and Ruffin in violation of federal law, the workers successfully negotiated their first collectively-bargained contract. If this hadn’t been resolved, a conflict of interest would have arisen: The case would have gone to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, to which Trump will soon be able to appoint members.

Now, the same issue is cropping up at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C. Already a centerpiece of the controversy over the likely violation of the Constitution’s emoluments clause, the property may soon be the site of another legal tussle: According to The Washington Post, 40 workers at the hotel have also voted to unionize, the first group to do so at a Trump-owned establishment since his election.

As was true in Las Vegas, the push for unionization in D.C., if it’s met with resistance from the hotel, would create an opportunity for the president to place his own financial interests above those of the hotel’s workers. In Las Vegas, the dispute appears to have been resolved partly because of the NLRB’s intercession; if the Trump Organization similarly contests the case in D.C., the NLRB may once again be asked to weigh in. And now that Trump is president, he will be appointing new board members to fill two vacancies on the agency’s five-seat panel, which could very well tip it from its current left-leaning, labor-friendly composition to a more conservative, pro-owner bent. If, as in Las Vegas, the NLRB finds in favor of the workers, but the Trump Organization chooses to continue its opposition, there is a possibility that the case could come before a federal appeals court, where judges who Trump himself may have appointed will be asked to review the NLRB’s decision. And if the conflict continues even beyond the Court of Appeals, it will fall to the Supreme Court, to which Trump recently nominated Judge Neil Gorsuch, to render a final verdict. (It should be added that each appointee will be faced with the possibility of ruling against the financial interests of the infamously vindictive man to whom they owe their position.)

Appointing labor-unfriendly officials and justices might fairly be said to be in keeping with Trump’s long history of questionable labor practices, but this does not mean that the conflict-of-interest question will dissipate. It’s difficult, if not impossible, to determine how much his pro-business stances are dictated by a sincere belief in their efficacy rather than an understanding that he himself has benefited from them in the past and will likely continue to do so in the future. As such, Trump’s motivations will continue to occupy an ethical and legal gray area until he eliminates the overlap between his roles as a businessman and as president.

Back to table of contents

Those Expansion Plans

Of the measures that President Donald Trump and his lawyer Sheri Dillon laid out at his January 11 press conference to address conflicts of interest, only two actually ameliorate any of the concerns critics have raised: the cancellation of all of the Trump Organization’s pending deals and the promise not to pursue expansion in other countries (although developments since the announcement suggest that those pledges leave plenty of wiggle room). Conveniently left out of the plan, however, is any prohibition on expanding holdings within the United States—which is apparently something that Trump Hotels plans on doing while Trump is in office.

On January 25, Bloomberg reported that Eric Danziger, the CEO of Trump Hotels, said after a panel discussion in Los Angeles that the company is considering tripling the number of Trump-branded properties within the U.S. According to Danziger, “There are 26 major metropolitan areas in the U.S., and we’re in five. I don’t see any reason that we couldn’t be in all of them eventually.” Danziger listed Dallas, Seattle, Denver, and San Francisco as among the cities where the Trump Organization is looking to build in the near future.

As the Trump Organization’s holdings expand, so too does the potential that business considerations will have undue effects on the president’s behavior in office, or at least appear to. Each location presents another opportunity for businesspeople or foreign dignitaries to choose to stay in a hotel in an attempt to burnish Trump’s opinion of them, their company, and/or their country. Each location increases the number of municipal governments with whom Trump will be interacting both as president and as the owner of a real-estate empire.

Trump Hotels’ expansion plans could put not only Trump but also the cities where new properties may be built in a difficult situation. San Francisco, for example, is currently experiencing a housing crisis, one possible solution to which would be to increase the pace of new home-construction projects, some of which could be funded by federal grants. On the one hand, it is almost certain that the residents of San Francisco, a city that voted against the president by roughly a 9-to-1 margin in November, would strenuously object to a new Trump-branded property in the city. But there is also an incentive for the city government to work with the Trump Organization in finding a suitable expansion plan. With plenty of evidence to suggest that collaborating with Trump’s businesses could influence the president, there’s added pressure for city officials to pursue a potentially costly project residents may otherwise not want in hopes of reaping the benefits down the road. Meanwhile, the officials in charge of doling out federal largesse such as housing grants may similarly feel pressure based on the knowledge that Trump’s feelings toward particular cities may change based on how receptive the locale was of his business’s expansion plans.

Finally, the Trump Organization’s announcement that it would be pursuing expansion further attests to just how little the president’s plan to mitigate his conflicts of interest actually accomplishes its goal. For the Trump Organization to not just expand but do so on such a large scale violates the professed spirit of the measures laid out on January 11 and defies any argument that the company will cease to act in a way that jeopardizes the president’s ability to do his job.

Back to table of contents

That Hotel in Vancouver

Less than a week into his administration, President Trump has a new property opening for business: the Trump International Hotel & Tower in Vancouver. According to The Washington Post, construction on the hotel finished shortly before Trump assumed office, with the building’s finishing touch—the president’s name spelled out in giant letters—revealed on January 19 (the day before the inauguration), and the first guests and permanent residents checking in on January 25.

As with many buildings bearing the president’s name, the new hotel in Vancouver is a licensing deal, with the Trump Organization leasing its branding to a third party—in this case, a real-estate company called the Holborn Group, which operates several luxury hotels throughout Canada. The Holborn Group is run by Joo Kim Tiah, the eldest son of one of the wealthiest families in Malaysia; several members of Tiah’s family are expected to fly in from Kuala Lumpur to attend the opening with the president’s two adult sons, Donald Jr. and Eric.

The building is yet another manifestation of the running problem posed by Trump’s extensive foreign real-estate holdings. Unless the president actually rids himself of his financial stake in his company, every Trump property influences his incentives when it comes to making policy, foreign or domestic: Should he act in the manner that best serves the country, or the one that will protect his profits? Every building provides the opportunity for third parties to curry favor with the infamously capricious president: If he knows that he has taken money from somebody, be it a company, a private individual, or agents of a foreign government, that knowledge, and the goodwill it creates, is likely to color Trump’s decision-making. Moreover, every businessperson who has a licensing deal with Trump now has leverage: If Tiah, or any of the other businesspeople around the world with a Trump-branded property, disagrees with a decision the president makes, he can threaten to pull out of the partnership and jeopardize some of Trump’s cash-flow in an attempt to change his mind.

Hardly a day had passed between the new hotel in Vancouver opening for business and the first report of an organization choosing to host an event at the site, possibly for political reasons. On January 26, The Washington Post reported that The American Chamber of Commerce in Canada, a business organization affiliated with the conservative U.S. Chamber of Commerce, had scrapped longstanding plans to hold a meeting about trade relations at the home of a diplomatic official and would instead be booking space in the new Trump Hotel for the equivalent of roughly $1,900—a relatively small sum, to be sure, but even small sums have been shown to substantially influence decision making. The change initially prompted at least one planned speaker, the University of British Columbia professor Matilde Bombardini, to back out of the event; however, according to the Vancouver Sun, she has since changed her mind after being told that the change of location was due to a leak at the previous site.

As with so many of the instances chronicled here, the venue change demonstrates how Trump’s conflicts of interest often operate in shades of grey. If the Chamber of Commerce did make its decision solely based on logistics, booking a spot in a Trump-branded building still makes possible the appearance of paying for play. In a marked departure from the Chamber’s copacetic relationship with the Republican nominee Mitt Romney in 2012, the aggressively free-market, pro-trade group clashed with the president on multiple occasions during the 2016 campaign over Trump’s protectionist trade policies, but has already made public overtures since the election to reconcile with the president. If it did, in fact, choose to move the event even in part because of the giant name on the new location’s facade, the decision represents another chapter in the ongoing saga of the business community’s desire to both please and sway a president whose ideology is not that of a typical Republican. Additionally, though nearly all of Trump’s rhetoric about NAFTA centers on Mexico, Canada actually trades more with the U.S. than not just Mexico but any other country in the world. As such, there is plenty incentive for the Canadian branch of the American Chamber of Commerce to do whatever it can to reach out to Trump.

Back to table of contents

That Reality-Television Show

Though President Donald Trump has been a well-known figure in American public life for decades, perhaps the single biggest contributor to his stardom has been NBC’s The Apprentice. Trump himself is no longer the star of the show—former California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has taken over as host in 2017—but the president remains an executive producer on the series for at least the coming year, including receiving a low five-figure salary for the position, according to Variety. Shortly after the news of that income broke, Kellyanne Conway, a counselor to Trump, clarified that he would be taking on his producing duties in his spare time, comparing the situation to previous presidents playing golf or pursuing other leisure activities.

Norm Eisen and Richard Painter, who served as the chief ethics lawyers under Presidents Obama and George W. Bush, respectively, pointed out on NPR’s Fresh Air that Trump’s ongoing involvement with The Apprentice presents yet another conflict of interest. According to AdWeek, 11 companies, including the television-shopping network QVC and Carnival Company (which operates the eponymous cruise line), are providing on-air sponsorships for the newest season of The Apprentice; a twelfth, the Japanese motorcycle company Kawasaki, withdrew from a previously reported deal after customers threatened a boycott because of its sponsorship of the show. All of these companies—plus the numerous companies that run ads during the show’s commercial breaks—are effectively putting money into the pockets of the president, not to mention supporting one of his products.

Trump apparently believes himself immune to such conflicts of interest, both in terms of legal impunity and his ability to ignore them, despite a good deal of research indicating that even minuscule financial incentives (minuscule for a billionaire, that is) can be enough to significantly influence behavior. Additionally, there is little doubt that Trump cares deeply about the ongoing success of The Apprentice: The weekend after the new Schwarzenegger-led season debuted, the then president-elect took to Twitter to voice his thoughts on the new season’s ratings. So when one of the companies that sponsors the show interacts with the executive branch—as when Carnival reached a $40 million settlement with the U.S. government over pollution in the Atlantic Ocean, for example, or when QVC settled a $7.5 million suit regarding deceptive advertising in 2009—the question will necessarily arise how their contributions to Trump’s pocketbook and beloved TV show will affect the outcome.

Even if Trump were able to fully blind himself to the conflicts described above, the president’s role would remain a problem because it provides an unprecedented bargaining chip for both the companies currently sponsoring in the show and those that could seek to use it to attempt to manipulate the president. Consider, for a moment, the potential negotiations between one of Trump’s sponsors and a government agency that finds it in violation of federal regulations. That company, though, has a trump card the likes of which has never been seen in American politics: Should it become apparent that the case is going awry, they can threaten to pull their support of the president’s television show. The move would inevitably make waves on cable news of the kind that Trump has repeatedly demonstrated himself to be susceptible to. Any decision, whether in favor of the company or against it, immediately loses credibility: If the company is found guilty, the decision is easily framed as retaliatory, a vindictive manifestation of the president’s ego and narcissism; if the company is let off the hook, it will appear that the company has manipulated his venality for its own gain. A formerly uninvolved company facing federal investigation could essentially pull the same gambit in reverse: By publicly committing to sponsor The Apprentice, a company could create a situation in which any decision appears to reflect not the facts of the case but the sticky situation created by its involvement with the show. In this sense, then, Trump’s decision to stay on as executive producer, and the conflicts of interest the position creates, jeopardizes not only the president’s ability to carry out his job but also the fundamental legitimacy of the rule of law for any company that currently is or in the future may become involved with the show.

Additionally, the president’s continued involvement with the show creates a strange and tricky situation for NBC. Trump’s reputation is inextricably intertwined with that of the show, meaning that NBC will to some extent be caught between promoting Trump as a successful businessman and doing its journalistic work. The network will likely also be advertising The Apprentice during its other programs, not only through commercials but also possibly in-studio promotions on other shows, creating conflicting incentives for NBC journalists who will be trying simultaneously to talk about the Trump administration fairly while their own network markets one of his products.

Back to table of contents

That Pipeline

The Dakota Access Pipeline, or DAPL, was the subject of continual controversy during the presidential campaign, drawing months of protests because of the perceived environmental impact it would create by crossing the Missouri River in close proximity to a Standing Rock Sioux reservation. Shortly before the election, the Army Corps of Engineers announced that it would be halting progress on the pipeline for further environmental review and to study potential routes that might avoid crossing both the river and Native American territory. On January 24, however, only four days after President Trump took office, he decided to move forward with both DAPL and the Keystone XL pipeline, which the Obama administration likewise blocked because of environmental and tribal-sovereignty concerns; the Army Corps of Engineers finalized the easement on the project on February 7. Trump has been vocally supportive of the pipelines for months, claiming that they would create new jobs in construction and the oil industry.

Trump’s FEC filings, which remain the only public record of his finances, suggest that he may have had an additional incentive to greenlight the projects: According to financial-disclosure forms he filed in June 2015 and May 2016, Trump has owned stock in Energy Transfer Partners, the company seeking to build DAPL. The stock was worth between $500,001 and $1,000,000 in 2015 and between $15,001 and $50,000 in 2016.

The president and one of his spokesmen, Jason Miller, have both stated, without offering evidence, that Trump’s stock-related conflicts of interest have been resolved. According to Trump and Miller, the president sold off his stocks in June of last year specifically to head off concerns that they may influence his decision-making in office. However, they have offered no meaningful evidence to back up their claims—evidence which, in this case, would likely be fairly easy to provide. They could, for example, offer more details on when exactly the stocks were sold beyond simply “back in June,” or explain why they did not mention the sale until December, just after the election, if the intention was to proactively address conflict-of-interest questions.

Given Trump’s penchant for dissembling about his personal finances and the lack of evidence that he has sold off his stocks, Trump’s decision to push ahead on DAPL and Keystone XL simply underscores the need for him to take larger, and more public, steps to distance himself from his financial interests. Moving forward with the pipelines is not the first instance of Trump making a significant decision that benefits a company whose stock is listed in his financial disclosures. For example, when Trump announced his intention to intervene at the factory of the air-conditioner manufacturer Carrier in Indianapolis, the Indianapolis Star noted that Trump’s filings list stock in Carrier’s parent company, United Technologies.

Back to table of contents

Those HUD Grants

As has been noted on several previous occasions, one of the overarching questions about America’s first businessman presidency is just how President Trump’s vast empire will interact with federal agencies that answer to him. One of these potentially sticky situations became something of a flashpoint at the hearing for Dr. Ben Carson, Trump’s appointee to lead the Department of Housing and Urban Development. At the hearing, Senator Elizabeth Warren pressed Carson over the fact that, as the head of the department, he would be in charge of numerous programs that the president could manipulate to profit his real estate empire, asking Carson, “Can you assure me that not a single taxpayer dollar that you give out will financially benefit the president-elect or his family?” Though Carson did not respond to the question with regard to Trump specifically, he responded that he “will absolutely not play favorites for anyone” or act with an “intention to do anything to benefit any American, particularly.” (Warren went on to expound on how Trump’s lack of financial transparency makes it borderline impossible to know if a policy will benefit him.)

Warrens’s line of questioning was not entirely hypothetical: Trump does, in fact, own properties the maintenance of which falls under HUD’s purview. Thanks to an inheritance from his father, the president holds an ownership stake in—and has made millions from—Starrett City, a 153-acre, 5,881-unit low-income housing development in Brooklyn. The development, according to ABC News, receives substantial federal funding via HUD’s many programs designed to support low-income renters and homeowners. Trump could easily press for policies that would increase his profits from Starrett, most notably allowing for the sale of the complex, an action HUD blocked in 2007—and, potentially, to other properties from which he may profit in ways that, without more complete financial information, the American public may not even know.

The potential for a profitable relationship with HUD underscores a central problem with Trump’s refusal to fully divest from his holdings before entering office. It’s not just high-ranking officials who will possess the ability to act in a manner that benefits the president’s pocketbook—it’s ordinary civil servants as well. Shortly before his inauguration, The Washington Post noted several additional ways employees in Trump’s executive branch could do so: Trademark disputes, for instance, will be adjudicated by judges appointed by his Commerce secretary, while the EPA could roll back environmental regulations that reduce profits at his golf courses.

Meanwhile, lower-level officials tasked with the day-to-day work of regulating Trump’s properties are likely to face pressure as well—if not explicit from superiors, then from the implicit, inescapable knowledge that enforcement decisions will impact the president personally. Federal Aviation Administration inspectors, for instance, are in charge of on-the-spot, random inspections of aircraft, including Trump’s, and at one point during the campaign grounded one of his planes after its registration expired; the Occupational Safety and Health Administration oversees construction sites, and has fined the Trump Organization on multiple occasions for workplace-safety violations. Only 10 years ago, politically motivated firings within the Justice Department became one of the many enduring scandals of George W. Bush’s administration; with so many executive-branch employees interacting with the president’s properties in so many different ways, some will inevitably face difficult decisions between proper enforcement at his expense or looking the other way to stay in the boss’s good graces.

Back to table of contents

That Other Billionaire New York Real-Estate Developer

President Trump’s promise to erect a big, beautiful wall between himself and his business lasted slightly more than 48 hours.

Almost exactly two days after the January 11 press conference at which Trump announced plans purported to disentangle himself from his namesake business, the Huffington Post reported that the president had scheduled a meeting with Steven Roth. Roth, a fellow New York-based billionaire real-estate developer, is in charge of Vornado Realty Trust, an investment firm that co-owns two of Trump’s most valuable properties, one in Manhattan and one in San Francisco, and served as an economic adviser during the campaign. What Trump and Roth discussed at their meeting remains unknown, nor is it clear when exactly the meeting was scheduled. Regardless, that the meeting came directly on the heels of the press conference at which Trump and his lawyer laid out a plan supposedly meant to resolve conflicts of interest, throws the reality of the problems that come from having a businessman as president—and one who seems completely uninterested in taking steps that would actually distance him from his business—into sharp relief.

Shortly thereafter, The Wall Street Journal reported that Roth may soon become involved with the Trump administration beyond just his pre-existing friendship and partnership with the president. Trump, it seems, will soon be naming Roth and Richard LeFrak, yet another New York-based billionaire real-estate developer, to oversee a council of 15 to 20 builders and engineers who will be carrying out the president’s $1 trillion infrastructure proposal, a situation which itself provides ripe opportunities for the pair to direct federal dollars toward projects from which they will financially benefit. This news comes on top of a December report in The Washington Post that Roth’s firm had put in a bid to rebuild the FBI’s headquarters, a deal that could be worth as much as $2 billion. In other words, Trump, mere days after promising to remove himself from his businesses, is instead ushering a longtime partner into his administration.

The move could also end up providing yet another avenue by which Trump could enrich himself in office and by which others could attempt to curry favor. Whether or not he intended to do so, the president’s decision to place Roth at the head of such a large pool of money sends a signal to other companies about the continued intermingling of his business and his presidency: that working with the Trump Organization can be a path to increased influence or even appointment. And though Trump claims that he will no longer be in involved in day-to-day operations, he will be actively profiting off from the company, meaning that he will be personally making money off of the attempts of others to gain influence over American public policy.

Back to table of contents

Those Indonesian Politicians

Despite President Trump’s assurance that he has stopped pursuing deals since the election, his namesake organization apparently moved forward with a pair of projects in Indonesia. According to The New York Times, the two properties that will bear the Trump name, one overlooking a Hindu temple in Bali and the other abutting a theme park in West Java, presented ethical problems even before the election.

To begin with, through his Indonesian partner on the projects, the billionaire media mogul Hary Tanoesoedibjo (known in Indonesia as Hary Tanoe), Trump has forged relationships with several top Indonesian politicians. One such leader is Setya Novanto, the speaker of the country’s House of Representatives who temporarily lost his post for trying to extort $4 billion from the American mining company Freeport-McMoRan (a company which counts Carl Icahn, who will be serving as a special adviser in Trump’s administration, among its largest shareholders, and which has been frequently criticized by labor advocates and environmentalists). Trump had lunch with Novanto and several other Indonesian politicians during the campaign in September 2015 to discuss the Trump Organization’s planned expansion into Indonesia. At a post-luncheon press conference, Trump pulled Novanto in front of the cameras, calling him “an amazing man” and “one of the most powerful men” and asserting, “we will do great things for the United States.” (It is unclear exactly whom Trump meant when he used the word “we.”) Trump then asked Novanto to confirm that “they like me in Indonesia,” which Novanto did.

Another of the politicians who attended the lunch with Trump is Fadli Zon, the vice chairman of Indonesia’s House of Representatives, whose district includes one of the cities in which one of the Trump-branded properties will be built. According to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Zon is associated with a political movement seeking to unseat and jail the current governor of Jakarta, Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, also known by his nickname, Ahok, and has spoken at rallies against Ahok. The anti-Ahok movement is rooted partly in centuries of ethnic tension within the country: Ahok is both Christian, which has made him the target of attacks by hardline clerics claiming to represent Indonesia’s Muslim majority, and a member of the country’s historically oppressed Chinese minority, which was the target of a massacre in 1998. Aside from an interim governor appointed half a century ago, Ahok is the first governor of Jakarta to fall into either category, and is currently on trial for blasphemy for allegedly insulting the Koran, although Ahok’s supporters claim that it is Ahok’s accusers who are guilty of blasphemy for denigrating Ahok’s Christianity.

Both Trump’s question to Novanto and Zon’s presence at the meeting underscore another difficulty the president introduces into the United States’ relations with Indonesia. Indonesia is both the largest predominantly Muslim country in the world and the nation with the largest population of Muslims. Novanto received significant blowback for his statement that, yes, Indonesians do like Trump, because it turns out that, no, many Indonesians don’t like Trump, in large part because of his on-again, off-again proposal to ban Muslims from immigrating to the U.S.; in fact, faced with mounting criticism, Novanto’s party apologized not only for Novanto’s statement but also for his mere attendance at the luncheon. Since Trump’s victory, both Novanto and Zon have stood up for the president, arguing that Trump’s hardline stance toward Muslim immigration was merely campaign rhetoric and not actually reflective of the president’s own beliefs, something Novanto claimed Trump personally assured him was the case. Regardless, it is clear that the Trump Organization’s planned expansion into Indonesia—which, again, is the reason Trump met with Novanto and Zon in the first place—could introduce major complications into the relationship between the president and the political leaders of the world’s largest Muslim country, not to mention a significant trade partner and an important ally in the South China Sea region.

As if that weren’t enough, Tanoe himself has shown increasing interest in becoming involved in Indonesian politics. In 2014, Tanoe publicly supported the retired general Prabowo Subianto in the nation’s presidential election; Subianto lost to the country’s current leader, Joko Widodo. Then, in 2015, he helped found a new political party, the United Indonesia Party, or Partai Perindo, which intends to field candidates for national office in the near future, including Tanoe himself: Shortly after The New York Times reported on the project, Tanoe told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation that, “If there is no one I can believe who can fix the problems of the country, I may try to run for president.”

If Tanoe does so, it will create the possibility that Trump will be dealing with a head of state with whom he has shared business interests, which, as the ethics lawyer Richard Painter told The New York Times, “makes it impossible to conduct diplomacy in an evenhanded manner”—especially considering that, after Trump’s election, stock in Tanoe’s company rose significantly. Moreover, Tanoe, like Ahok, is both Christian and ethnically Chinese, which some insiders consider an obstacle to his electoral chances, although Tanoe argues that it is not Ahok’s religion but his lack of firm leadership that has led to the large-scale protests against the governor. Nevertheless, if Tanoe does choose to run for office, it is difficult to see how his race, religion, and business partnership with a president many see as blatantly Islamophobic could do anything other than create further difficulties both within Indonesia and in the country’s relationship with the U.S..

Tanoe remains close to Trump. He attended the inauguration as a guest of the Trump Organization; he and his wife posted several photos commemorating the occasion on their Instagram accounts, including pictures with Donald Jr. and Eric Trump and a video taken out the window of a car driving along the inaugural parade route. Then, in a February 7 interview with the Indonesian news magazine Tempo, Tanoe bragged about his access to the president. In the interview, he claimed to have seen Trump as recently as January 4 in New York, though he demurred when asked what they discussed, saying, “It wouldn’t be ethical, especially now that he is the president.” Tanoe also confirmed that “nothing has changed” regarding the branding deals in Indonesia, which he says will be moving forward with Trump’s sons in charge, a statement that would seem to contradict Trump and his lawyer’s January 11 announcement that the company would be suspending unfinished development projects.

Back to table of contents

That Emirati Businessman

Though the biggest controversy over the New Year’s Eve celebration at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s Florida estate, was apparently whether or not Joe Scarborough could accurately be described as having “partied” there, video footage taken by a guest and obtained by CNN the next day brought renewed scrutiny to President Trump’s own presence at the event. During a 10-minute speech given in front of the party’s 800-odd attendees, Trump praised his Emirati business partner Hussain Sajwani and Sajwani’s family, saying, “The most beautiful people from Dubai are here tonight, and they’re seeing it and they love it.” CNN identifies Sajwani as a “billionaire developer in Dubai” who has “paid Trump millions of dollars to license the Trump name for golf courses in Dubai.” Trump’s spokeswoman, Hope Hicks, defended the remarks by clarifying that the president and Sajwani “had no formal meetings of professional discussions. Their interactions were social.”

Whether or not Hicks’s statement was true, Trump’s commendation of Sajwani is part of a pattern in which the president praises his business partners in ways that suggest he has little interest in extricating himself from his company’s interests. Previously, he has name-dropped business partners in Turkey and Argentina while on official calls with the countries’ leaders; he also met, and took photos, with associates from India shortly after the election. Moreover, as with several of the countries in which Trump-branded buildings are located, the United Arab Emirates has a questionable record on human rights; Human Rights Watch specifically states that the nation “uses its affluence to mask the government’s human-rights problems.”

By singling out Sajwani, Trump also runs headlong into accusations that he and his family are selling access to his administration through their organization and family foundations. According to Politico, tickets to celebrate with the president at Mar-a-Lago, went for upwards of $500; the stated attendance of at least 800 people means that the Trump Organization made at least $400,000 off of ticket sales for the event. (There is no indication that the party was a fundraiser for any outside organization, such as a charity or campaign fund, as is often the case when politicians attend such an event.) Whether or not the president sees it as such, the event offered attendees the opportunity to be in the same room as Trump and bend his ear for a price. This follows consternation regarding an auction for a face-to-face meeting with Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, and a charity event that offered a reception with the president and a hunting trip with his two sons, both of which have since been cancelled, as well as ongoing speculation that foreign entities will attempt to curry favor with Trump by booking rooms and events at his hotel in Washington, D.C. That Trump singled out Sajwani at the New Year’s Eve party lends credence to these concerns—it’s an instance of someone receiving the president’s attention simply by buying a ticket to one of his events.

Since footage of Trump’s shout-out emerged in early January, Sajwani has continued to feature in coverage of the president’s business entanglements. At the January press conference where Trump and his lawyer, Sheri Dillon, laid out the president’s plan to ostensibly avoid conflicts of interest, Trump said that after the election, Sajwani offered him a $2 billion deal, which Trump turned down. Rather than acknowledge that being offered billions of dollars from a foreign businessman constitutes a conflict of interest, Trump presented his decision not to accept as an example of his magnanimity, saying, “I didn’t have to turn it down, because as you know, I have a no-conflict situation because I’m president. It’s a nice thing to have, but I don’t want to take advantage of something.” Later, Sajwani attended Trump’s inauguration, although it’s unclear if he interacted with the president while there.

Then, on Tuesday, Sajwani posted a picture of himself eating with Donald Trump Jr. in Dubai on Instagram with a caption reading, “It was great having my dear friend and business partner Donald Trump Jr. over for lunch. Discussing new ideas and innovation always make [sic] our meetings even more interesting.”

Donald Jr.’s meeting with Sajwani prompts concerns about the president’s conflicts of interest, for two main reasons. First, the meeting offers a reminder of the insufficiency of the steps Trump has taken to distance himself from his businesses. Though Trump and Dillon claimed that their plan resolved questions about conflicts of interest, ethics experts disagree: Because Trump still knows what his assets are and the identities of those with whom he does business, they say, Trump still knows more than enough to favor his company. Moreover, in an actual blind trust, Trump would have turned his assets over to a trustee with whom he would have no contact. Instead, he turned it over to a long-time executive within the Trump Organization and his sons, who he has long counted as among his closest advisers and with whom he has remained in contact during his presidency so far. Donald Jr.’s meeting with Sajwani is a reminder of these inadequacies, especially because Sajwani posted the picture to Instagram, thus increasing the lunch’s visibility and, along with it, the likelihood that the president will know about the ongoing interactions between his company and Sajwani’s (that is, if Donald Jr. hasn’t already made his father aware of them).

Second, Sajwani’s caption further undermines one of the few parts of the arrangement that actually would have meaningfully reduced the president’s conflicts of interest. In January, Dillon said that the Trump Organization would be canceling all of its pending deals and would stop pursuing foreign deals during Trump’s presidency. Since then, numerous developments have called those intentions into question: Projects appear to be moving forward in both Scotland and the Dominican Republic, with the Trump Organization offering narrow, legalistic explanations as to why the progress didn’t violate the terms of the trust. Though a spokeswoman for the Trump Organization has said that Donald Jr. was not seeking new deals while in Dubai, the previous stories, coupled with Sajwani’s Instagram caption, undermine that account.

Back to table of contents

That Virginia Vineyard

Among the dozens of properties President Trump owns is Trump Vineyard Estates and Winery in Charlottesville, Virginia, the source of his namesake wine. On December 23, the property requested temporary H-2A visas for six foreign workers, according to The Washington Post; on February 17, BuzzFeed reported an additional request that upped the total to 29. The visas, which are administered by the Citizenship and Immigration Services wing of the Department of Homeland Security, allow businesses to temporarily hire foreign, unskilled workers provided that the employer proves that there are not enough domestic candidates to fulfill a one-time or seasonal shortage and that the hiring will not depress wages for U.S.-born employees. Trump, of course, appointed the current Secretary of Homeland Security, which gives Trump authority over the very department responsible for deciding whether to grant the visas that the vineyard has requested. His choice for the position, the retired general John Kelly has a relatively scant track record when it comes to immigration, leaving open the question of how much influence Trump himself will have over the DHS’s policy on the matter.

On top of the fact that Trump will soon be able to influence the outcome of the request, that his organization has continued to request visas after his election underscores a tension in the president’s stance on immigration. From the moment that he announced that he would be running for president, Trump made antagonism toward immigration the central aspect of his campaign, arguing that both legal and illegal immigrants are taking jobs that should be filled by native-born Americans and depressing wages for others. Though he did not specifically single out the H-2B visa, the president has on multiple occasions spoken critically about the H-1B program, which enables employers to temporarily hire foreign workers for skilled jobs like those in the tech industry.

But the Trump Organization has long been a beneficiary of immigrant labor. For example, according to a Reuters report from August 2015, nine companies of which Trump is the majority owner have requested at least 1,100 foreign visas since 2000. The majority of these requests were from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club in Florida, which has requested at least 787 foreign visas since 2006, including 70 applications in 2015. (Meanwhile, The New York Times reported that, since 2010, only 17 of the nearly 300 domestic applicants for positions at the Mar-a-Lago have been hired.) The Trump Organization also famously may have benefited from illegal immigration: There is significant evidence that many of the Polish construction workers at the Trump Tower construction site in New York in 1980 were in the country illegally. In other words, Trump’s track record includes not just taking advantage of the very visa process he claims to abhor but also actually subverting existing law for his own profit. Now, by applying for visas for his vineyard, Trump is signaling that he expects that his business will continue to be able to profit from one of the very immigration programs he continually denounces.

Back to table of contents

That Las Vegas Labor Dispute

On top of owning various properties and enterprises, Trump and his company employ roughly 34,000 people, according to an analysis by CNN. On December 21, several hundred of those workers resolved a labor dispute against the president—one in which, had it continued for even a few weeks more, Trump would have had the unprecedented power to make appointments to affect its outcome.

Here’s the situation: In October 2015, several hundred employees, primarily housekeeping staff, at the Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas voted to join the local branch of the Culinary Workers Union. Trump Ruffin Commercial LLC, which owns the hotel and is itself owned by Trump and the casino magnate Phil Ruffin, contested the vote, first by enlisting an anti-union consulting firm (for whose services it paid $500,000) and then by filing complaints with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). Shortly before the election, the NLRB not only rejected Trump and Ruffin’s complaints but also found that, because the pair had refused to negotiate with the nascent union, they had violated federal law and their hotel was operating illegally. Trump and Ruffin have since appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.

On December 21, more than a year after the hotel’s workers first voted to join the union, the workers announced that they arrived at their first collectively-bargained contract, achieved, according to an employee quoted in ThinkProgress, despite significant pressure from ownership that attempting to unionize would cost workers their jobs. According to the union, the new agreement “will provide the employees with annual wage increases, a pension, family health care, and job security” comparable to that of other Las Vegas hotels. Moreover, the Culinary Workers Union’s parent organization, UNITE HERE, has reached an agreement to represent workers at Trump’s recently-opened hotel in Washington, D.C..

Although this dispute has been resolved, it is included here because it exemplifies the type of situation in which Trump’s business interests are likely to overlap with his duties as president. Trump will be tasked with appointing members to fill current openings on the NLRB, the very body that ruled against him shortly before the election and will be tasked with resolving any future disputes between the hotel’s owners and its employees. Moreover, as Slate noted, the chief justice of the D.C. Court of Appeals is none other than Merrick Garland, whose nomination to the Supreme Court has spent months languishing in the Republican-controlled Congress and was withdrawn once Trump became president. Finally, if disputes of this nature go beyond the Court of Appeals, the case would go to the Supreme Court, to which Trump will be appointing a justice, which is expected to tip the balance decisively in a more conservative (and likely anti-union) direction. In other words, no matter how far up the chain future disputes of this nature go, Trump’s presidency will give him new power to influence the results.

Back to table of contents

That Kuwaiti Event

According to an anonymous source and documents obtained by ThinkProgress, representatives from the Trump Organization pressured the ambassador of Kuwait to hold its embassy’s annual celebration of the country’s independence at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C. The event, held annually on February 25, was originally scheduled to take place at the Four Seasons Hotel in Georgetown; the location was allegedly changed after members of the Trump Organization contacted the country’s ambassador. ThinkProgress’s source “described the decision as political,” suggesting that the embassy chose to relocate the event in an effort to curry favor with the president. The Kuwaiti ambassador has since disputed the report, telling The Washington Post that he had not been contacted by the Trump Organization and that the move “was solely done with the intention of providing our guests with a new venue.”

If ThinkProgress’s account is correct, Kuwait’s decision represents an escalation of a situation that has been developing since Trump’s election. The Trump International Hotel has been the subject of continual scrutiny for the conflict of interest it poses, in part because its lease explicitly bars elected officials from holding it, but mainly because Trump’s ownership of the hotel will almost definitely result in a violation of the emoluments clause, which prohibits the president from receiving payments from foreign powers—something that will arguably be happening any time a foreign government books a room at the hotel. Already, the hotel has begun advertising itself as a destination for diplomats and dignitaries, and the embassies of Azerbaijan and Bahrain have both scheduled events in the building. However, before the ThinkProgress report, there was no evidence that the Trump Organization had individually reached out to a foreign government in hopes of getting it to relocate an event to the hotel.

Back to table of contents

Those Certificates of Divestiture

In addition to the many possibilities for President Trump to pursue his financial interests in office, the unique makeup of his cabinet also creates a new set of financial motivations. While Trump’s own fortune automatically makes his administration the wealthiest in history, he has also surrounded himself with an unprecedented collection of billionaires and multi-millionaires whose investments are likely to also come under scrutiny.

Unlike the president himself, those who are up for Trump’s cabinet, such as his proposed Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin and Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, will be legally obligated to divest from any holdings which may pose a conflict of interest. However, as The Washington Post noted, even selling off their holdings offers an opportunity for Trump’s cabinet members to enhance their fortunes. A federal program known as a “certificate of divestiture” allows executive-branch appointees and employees to avoid capital-gains taxes when selling their assets. The program has existed since 1989, and most recently received attention when President George W. Bush appointed Hank Paulson, then the chief executive of Goldman Sachs as his Treasury Secretary in 2006. Paulson was forced to sell off $700 million in shares of the bank; the certificate of divestiture enabled him to avoid a potential $200 million in capital-gains tax liability. According to The Washington Post, the Office of Government Ethics is currently researching whether the president himself would qualify for the tax break; even if he doesn’t, the unprecedented wealth of Trump’s cabinet promises to push this provision, and the financial incentives it creates, to the limit.

Back to table of contents

That Carrier Deal

One of President Trump’s first major economic moves as president was the deal that he and Vice President Mike Pence struck with the air-conditioner manufacturer Carrier, which had planned to move 2,100 jobs from its Indiana plant to Mexico. Finalized on November 29, the compromise kept 730 of the plant’s jobs in Indiana in exchange for $7 million in tax breaks over 10 years. The deal immediately attracted praise and criticism on both sides of the aisle, with much of the scrutiny going toward the tradeoff between jobs and tax breaks and Trump’s idiosyncratic, ad-hoc negotiation techniques.

An additional detail soon emerged regarding the deal: According to his FEC filings (which, despite Trump and his spokesman Jason Miller’s unverified statements that the president sold off his stock in June, remain the most recent public record of the president’s finances), Trump holds stock in Carrier’s parent company, United Technologies. In 2014, his investment in the company was between $100,001 and $250,000, while in 2015, the stock is listed as worth less than $1,001, which could indicate that he sold some or most of the stock; each year, his holdings earned him between $2,500 and $5,000.

The paucity of information in the FEC filings makes it difficult to ascertain why his holdings appear to have decreased; regardless, the investment is not only one of several hundred but also a relatively minor one among Trump’s many holdings, some of which are worth over $5,000,000. As a result, it’s difficult to know how much, if at all, Trump may have considered the stock, particularly considering that he didn’t appear to remember his initial promise to save the Carrier plant. Additionally, Trump does not have stock in the next company he called out on Twitter, Rexnord Corporation (which is also based in Indiana), or its parent company, The Carlyle Group. Still, Trump’s deal with Carrier demonstrates the unprecedented challenge the president’s conflicts of interest create: Unless he either puts his holdings in a truly blind trust or divests completely, a significant number of the decisions he makes will involve some level of financial incentive for himself as well as for the country.

Back to table of contents

That Blind-Trust Issue

Almost as soon as Donald Trump and a lawyer from the Trump Organization unveiled their plans to distance the president from his businesses on January 11, many ethics experts argued that the proposal didn’t do nearly enough to ward off concerns that Trump’s business involvements would produce conflicts of interest during his presidency.

Under that plan, Trump resigned from the positions he held at the many companies that make up his real-estate empire, ceding control to his two adult sons and a longtime business associate, with his assets placed in a trust run by his two adult sons and Allen Weisselberg, a longtime Trump Organization executive, for the duration of his presidency. In unveiling the plan, the president vowed to refrain from talking about his financial interests with Donald Jr. and Eric Trump and said that all future business decisions would be reviewed by a newly appointed compliance officer to prevent even accidental impropriety. However, critics said, as long as Trump still profits from his businesses, these measures do almost nothing to mitigate worries about conflicts of interest. Besides, with so much of his fortune derived from highly visible real-estate and branding deals, some lawyers note that no trust would fully blind him from knowing where his financial interests lie; they say the only way to fully protect against conflicts of interest would have been for him to have sold off his businesses before taking office.

Events since the election demonstrate that these experts’ doubts are well-founded. Trump and his sons have shown little interest in maintaining the appearance of separation, with Eric and Donald Jr. showing up at numerous political events for their father. Roughly two weeks before the election, Donald Jr. met with a pro-Russian group in Paris to discuss his father’s policy toward Syria and, according to Politico, was involved in his father’s search for a Secretary of the Interior; he was also spotted hunting in Turkey shortly after his father’s phone call with Turkish President Recep Erdogan in which the president praised a Turkish business partner. Eric, meanwhile, appeared in photos with his father and a group of Indian businessmen mere days after the election.  And both were present for the president’s announcement of his nominee for the Supreme Court.

Then, when asked about the blind trust in a March 24 interview with Forbes, Eric gave answers that seemed to contradict not only the arrangement to which he supposedly agreed but also his own statements on the topic. “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,” he said, before telling the interviewer that he will be providing updates to his father “on the bottom line, profitability reports and stuff like that” on a quarterly basis. “My father and I are very close. I talk to him a lot. We’re pretty inseparable,” he concluded. If Trump is in constant contact with Eric and receiving updates on his businesses from his sons, it renders the trust they created effectively meaningless—and validates the concerns watchdog groups raised when Trump first unveiled his plan in January.

After Eric Trump made those comments to Forbes, other holes in Trump’s plan have come to light. On April 3, ProPublica discovered a previously unreported change to the trust arrangement that effectively allows the president to personally withdraw money from his businesses at virtually any time he chooses. On February 10, a clause was apparently added to a letter outlining the details of the trust stating that “the Trustees shall distribute net income or principal to Donald J. Trump at his request, as the Trustees deem necessary for his maintenance, support or uninsured medical expenses, or as the Trustees otherwise deem appropriate.” In other words, Trump will be able to draw profits from his businesses at any time during his presidency as long as he and the trustees—again, his two sons and his long-time business partner—agree that it is “appropriate,” and will not have to disclose when he does so. This goes directly against the purpose of a blind trust, which in this case would be to distance Trump from his sources of income in an attempt to get rid of his incentive—or even ability—to consciously act in his own financial interest. So far, the plan unveiled in January appears to be as inadequate as many ethics experts had feared.

Finally, removing himself from day-to-day operations will do little to change the fact that Trump will retain substantive knowledge of the illiquid assets involved in his business, such as the numerous buildings and other products that bear his name, especially if he remains in frequent contact with his children. Even assuming that Trump does separate himself from any consideration of his holdings, his children will still likely be major players in the family’s organization, which will still bear at least the Trump name—arguably one of their most valuable properties, as much of the family’s wealth derives from licensing the name to third-party companies. Given the family’s oft-touted brand-consciousness (Ivanka, for example, briefly appeared to be distancing herself from the campaign, and several properties considered rebranding under the name “Scion” when it appeared Trump would lose), the situation epitomizes the way Trump’s, and his family’s, business interests may very well prove inextricable from his actions as president.

Back to table of contents

Those Fannie and Freddie Investments

After railing against elites during the campaign, Trump has so far stocked his prospective cabinet with an array of billionaires whose policy positions seem likely to significantly benefit those who are also doing very well. Trump’s putative treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, is no exception: His resume includes stints as a banker at Goldman Sachs, a Hollywood producer, and the operator of a bank that has been described as a “foreclosure machine” and once foreclosed on a homeowner over a 27-cent discrepancy.

One of Mnuchin’s apparent beliefs is that the government should cede control of the mortgage guarantors Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which the government acquired during the 2008 financial crisis. The two financial institutions’ stocks rose by more than 40 percent after Mnuchin stated that he believes the Trump administration “will get it done reasonably fast.”

Doing so would be broadly compatible with Trump’s general antipathy toward regulation of the banking industry. However, The Wall Street Journal identified an additional wrinkle to the story: When Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s stocks rose, one major beneficiary was John Paulson, an adviser to the Trump campaign and a business partner of Mnuchin’s. Paulson’s hedge funds include significant investments in both Fannie and Freddie. Trump himself has invested between $3 million and $5 million across three of Paulson’s funds, according to his filings with the Federal Election Commission (which remain the only available window into the president’s financial holdings). In other words, as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s stock prices increase—and they have so far more than doubled since the election on the expectation that the incoming Trump administration will be more lenient toward the financial sector than Obama—Trump’s portfolio benefits.

Back to table of contents

That Phone Call With Taiwan

When news first emerged that the president spoke on the phone with Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen on December 2, the immediate reaction was uproar over his apparently impetuous breach of decades of U.S. protocol toward China and Taiwan. As my colleague David Graham explained, since 1979, the United States has participated in the “artful diplomatic fiction” of officially recognizing the mainland People’s Republic of China as the only legitimate Chinese government while maintaining loose, unofficial recognition of—and significant economic and military ties to—Taiwan. That Trump would speak to the president of Taiwan, especially before doing the same with Xi Jinping, the president of the PRC, flies in the face of a diplomatic tradition that has undergirded almost 40 years of U.S.-China relations.

Amid the days of dissembling that followed the phone call, an additional worrisome detail came out: At the time, the Trump Organization was apparently exploring expansion into Taiwan. Soon afterwards, the Trump Organization denied that it planned to do so; however, even before the controversy arose, the mayor of Taoyuan, Taiwan, the municipality in which the Trump Organization allegedly wants to build, described in a televised interview a meeting with a representative of the Trump Organization in September to discuss prospective real-estate projects, and at least one Trump employee was found to have posted on Facebook that she was in Taiwan at the time on a business trip. Based on the January 11 announcement that the Trump Organization will be suspending its development plans and will not pursue foreign deals in office, it would appear that any movement on development in Taiwan is no longer on the table.

The phone call, and the many statements that have followed, are of particular interest because of the extent to which they dovetail with some of the biggest concerns about Trump’s approach toward governance. In the ensuing 48 hours, Republican officials offered several, sometimes entirely contradictory, explanations of what initially appeared to be an impulsive move by Trump; depending on who was speaking, the phone call was actually initiated by Ing-wen (which, if technically true, ignores that it was Trump’s staff who arranged the conversation), was just “a courtesy,” or manifested a policy shift weeks in the making—although, regardless, it was made without first consulting the White House or State Department. The defense of the move, and the questions it creates regarding conflicts of interest, have largely hinged on the belief that, since voters apparently don’t mind, the reaction was overblown.

On this issue, though, whether or not voters care is immaterial to the central question. The president of the United States breached decades of international protocol created to preserve a precarious balance of power. That decision raised not only the possibility that Trump was blundering into a potential international incident but also that he may have done so in part out of consideration for his business prospects.

Back to table of contents

That Deutsche Bank Debt

Though he often brags about leveraging corporate-finance law to become “The King of Debt,” Trump’s numerous bankruptcy filings have left most large Wall Street banks reticent to lend to him, according to The Wall Street Journal. Among the few exceptions is Deutsche Bank, which “has led or participated in loans of at least $2.5 billion” to the president since 1996, with at least another $1 billion in loan commitments to Trump-affiliated companies; more than $300 million of those loans have come since 2012.

The president’s indebtedness does not itself pose a conflict of interest, but Deutsche Bank’s ongoing legal troubles very well might. The Justice Department is currently negotiating with Deutsche Bank regarding a preliminary settlement of $14 billion to resolve probes into allegedly misleading predatory lending practices in the leadup to the 2008 financial crisis; while it is believed that Deutsche Bank will push back against the sum, there has been no public news regarding negotiations since the initial figure was reported in September. Trump will soon be naming many of the officials with jurisdiction over this and other deals, prompting several House Democrats to send a letter to federal financial agencies calling for close scrutiny of how Trump may seek to influence the settlement through his appointments—although doing so would be just as in keeping with his general stance toward financial regulation as with active protection of his pocketbook. Other Democrats have called for the proactive appointment of independent prosecutors to avoid any appearance of conflict if the case is not resolved before Trump takes office.

Fears that Trump may unduly consider his indebtedness to Deutsche Bank in deciding his administration’s policy toward the financial sector go beyond general anxiety about deregulation. Deutsche Bank is undergoing a period of struggle that may have it on the verge of failure already. Its stock valuation has dropped by more than half since July 2015; in January, it posted its first full-year loss since 2008; and one of its many tranches of bonds—one specifically designed to be a high-risk, high-reward safety valve in times of trouble—has recently begun to crash. In June, the International Monetary Fund called Deutsche Bank “the most important net contributor to systemic risks” among globally important financial institutions. If the bank were to fail, it could have major consequences for not only Trump’s businesses, which would lose their sole remaining lender, but for the global economy as well.

Arguably, the $14 billion fine the Justice Department is seeking to impose has exacerbated rather than alleviated these struggles. Based the company’s market capitalization—the number of shares multiplied by their price— of roughly $16 billion, the sum would leave Deutsche Bank critically low in liquid assets with which to absorb future troubles, although the institution’s own self-valuation of $68 billion argues otherwise. But given the complexity and potential volatility of the situation, it is important for any decision to be free from outside influence, something Trump’s outstanding debt threatens to jeopardize.

Back to table of contents

That Secret Service Detail

During the election, the Trump campaign put no small portion of its funds toward paying for use of the candidate’s own properties; perhaps the most notable of these expenditures was the nearly $170,000 the campaign spent in July on rent for its headquarters in Trump Tower. These expenses raised the possibility that, as Trump predicted in 2000, he “could be the first presidential candidate to run and make money on it.” Now that he will be president, he may be able to profit off of the Secret Service by virtue of the fact that he and his family will live in Trump Tower and fly in his private jets—which requires the agents tasked with guarding them to pay him rent and airfare.

The first way Trump could monetize his own protective detail is by having family members travel in his two planes and three helicopters. This is not so much speculative as foregone: Over the course of the campaign, the Secret Service, which traditionally pays for its own travel during elections, spent $2.74 million to fly on a plane owned by one of Trump’s own companies. While in office, Trump will fly exclusively on Air Force One, while Mike Pence will be riding Air Force Two. However, their families may still be flying on Trump’s private planes—along with their protective details, which would effectively direct even more money to Trump. (Previous first families have flown with a detail, whose legal purview covers “the immediate family members,” but none have done so on planes they themselves own.)

A bigger question regards Trump Tower in New York, where the president appears likely to spend a significant amount of time. For the past few decades, it has been common practice for the Secret Service to provide protection for the president and vice president’s non-White House residences, which sometimes entails paying rent to the officeholder. (Joe Biden, for example, received $2,200 per month when the agency rented a cottage he owned near his home in Delaware.)

But Trump Tower is a unique case, as it’s not in Delaware but the middle of Manhattan. Already, pedestrians and tourists are chafing at the increased security around the building, Trump’s frequent use of which has required closing a block of 56th Street and multiple lanes of Fifth Avenue; with multiple outlets reporting that Trump’s wife Melania and 10-year-old son Barron are expected to stay at Trump Tower for at least part of his term, it appears that the consternation will continue, with an enormous price tag for taxpayers: According to the New York Post, it could cost as much as $3 million a year to rent out two of the building’s vacant floors, meaning that Trump will be making money off of his own security detail. Meanwhile, Reuters has reported that the city of New York is calling for federal funds to reimburse the costs of keeping up a security detail around Trump Tower.

This system creates an unusual set of conflicting interests for Trump regarding his own travel and residences. Though presidents as disparate as Dwight Eisenhower and Barack Obama have evoked partisan ire over time spent away from the White House, whether on the golf course or on vacation in Hawaii, only Donald Trump will actually have gained from his and his family’s travels. And if, while in office, Trump visits properties he owns other than Trump Tower—his buildings in other U.S. cities like Chicago and Miami, for example, or his golf course and resort in Scotland, or one of the many international hotels bearing his name—he stands to gain from the stays for which his security detail (and, by extension, taxpayers) may be paying. Moreover, the more his family members fly on his planes, whether they are running his business on his behalf or running interference with foreign leaders, the more the Secret Service will end up paying for seats alongside them.

In fact, there are already signs that the Trump Organization has no qualms about making money off of the New York tower’s new security arrangements in more ways than one. According to Politico, just five days after the election, a prominent New York real-estate firm invoked Trump Tower’s new secret-service detail as a selling point for a $2.1 million condominium, which it described as “The Best Value in the Most Secure Building in Manhattan.” Though the flier was issued by an outside agency, the president’s corporation still stands to benefit from increased traffic through processing and other service fees, making the advertisement a clear example of how Trump stands to benefit off of his new position.

Back to table of contents

That Property in Georgia (the Country)

Trump’s election has had the effect of speeding up development on a number of his branded properties, even when the president appears not to be pulling any strings himself. As occurred with Trump Tower Buenos Aires, the completion of an embattled Trump-branded building in the former Soviet republic of Georgia is no longer on hold now that Trump has won. The project, which has been in the works in the seaside resort city of Batumi since 2010, was initially scheduled to break ground in 2013, but has been in stasis for several reasons, possibly including the 2013 electoral defeat of President Mikheil Saakashvili, a friend of Trump’s and a supporter of the deal.

According to a report in The Washington Post, the green-lighting of the Trump property in Batumi has not been linked to a specific conversation with Georgian leaders, and a U.S.-based partner on the project has suggested that it has moved forward without any nudging from the government. However, numerous public statements in the days since suggest that Trump’s election was a major factor, including an interview with a real-estate entrepreneur who said, “Cutting the ribbon on a new Trump Tower in Georgia will be a symbol of victory for all of the free world.”

That the property seems to be moving forward solely because Trump was elected suggests his various business interests around the world may play a role not only in his foreign policy but in how other countries seek to deal with the U.S. as well. America’s relationship with Georgia is largely shaped by concerns about Russian influence and potential aggression in the region, most recently manifested in Russia’s 2008 seizure of two regions of Georgia, South Ossetia and Abkhazia. With controversy already swirling over Trump’s admiration for Putin and Russia’s alleged role in the U.S. election, some in the foreign-policy community have expressed trepidation that Trump’s potential deferential attitude toward Russia would prove deleterious for the continued independence of former satellite nations like Georgia. So, if Georgia has an ulterior motive behind the approval of Trump’s property in Batumi, it would be to keep Russia at bay and maintain the status quo in the region.

According to Trump and his lawyer, as of January 11, the Trump Organization has suspended ongoing development projects and will no longer pursue deals in foreign countries. As the project in Batumi falls under both categories, the statement suggests that progress on the president’s property in the city is no longer moving forward. Still, it’s alarming that a country like Georgia may be giving Trump’s businesses favorable treatment (whether he asked for it or not) in an attempt to influence his foreign policy.

Back to table of contents

That Phone Call With Erdogan

One of the worries regarding Trump’s many conflicts of interest is that they may influence policy towards countries whose relationships with the U.S. are currently strained. Such is the case with Turkey, whose president, Recep Erdogan, has been cracking down significantly on civil liberties and democratic institutions within the country after a failed coup last summer. Though Turkey has in the past been a vital U.S. ally as a bulwark against Islamic terror, Erdogan’s authoritarian turn and combative stance toward Europe have led to some reevaluation of that relationship.

Thus, it was troubling news that when Erdogan phoned Trump shortly after the election—it was one of the first calls Trump received after his victory—Trump used the opportunity to plug his business partners in Istanbul. According to the Huffington Post, while on the line with Erdogan, Trump relayed praise for the leader from Mehmet Ali Yalcindag, whose father-in-law, Aydin Dogan, owns the holding company that operates the Trump Towers in Istanbul. Dogan has previously drawn Erdogan’s ire by criticizing the leader; in recent years, however, Dogan’s companies, most notably CNN Turk, have shown support for Erdogan’s regime, including broadcasting his first message after the uprising in July.

Trump’s conversation with Erdogan is also worth noting because of a number of Trump’s previous statements regarding the Turkish president. Though Erdogan briefly called for Trump’s name to be removed from the Istanbul property due to his proposed ban on Muslim immigration, Erdogan dropped the demand when, after the overthrow attempt, Trump praised Erdogan for “turning it around” and essentially dismissed concerns over Erdogan’s crackdown on civil liberties by bringing up domestic problems. Michael Flynn, who was recently named Trump’s national security adviser, wrote an election-day op-ed in The Hill arguing against offering asylum to a Muslim cleric whom Erdogan has accused of orchestrating the uprising, which some have interpreted as a diplomatic overture. Erdogan has also bristled at post-election protests in the U.S. and the description of both himself and Trump as part of a “ring of autocrats.” That the two are now talking about their countries’ relationship as in the same conversation as Trump’s business interests further complicates Trump’s strangely effusive comments about Erdogan.

It’s worth noting that Trump himself considers his hotel in Istanbul a potential conflict of interest. In a December 2015 interview with Stephen Bannon, at the time the chairman of Breitbart News, Trump said as much, telling Bannon, “I have a little conflict of interest ‘cause I have a major, major building in Istanbul. It’s a tremendously successful job.” That he chose to discuss the towers with Erdogan, albeit obliquely, through his references to his business partners when he has already acknowledged the impropriety of doing so simply reinforces the perception that he may prove unable to separate his business from his official duties while in office.  

Back to table of contents

That Hotel in Washington, D.C.

The White House is not the only new Trump property in Washington, D.C.; there’s also the new Trump International Hotel, which opened in October and is located just a few blocks away in what was formerly known as the Old Post Office Pavilion. Previously, the hotel played a role in the campaign as the site of the event at which Trump recanted (sort of) his belief that Barack Obama was not born in the United States. Now, the hotel is at the center of speculation as a symbol of how inextricable Trump’s presidential role may be from his personal interests.

First and foremost, since his election, ethics groups and critics of the president have repeatedly alleged that, simply by taking office, Trump has been in continual violation of the lease he holds on the Old Post Office, the government-owned building the Trump International Hotel inhabits. At issue is a clause in the lease stating that “no ... elected official of the Government of the United States shall be admitted to any share or part of this Lease, or to any benefit that may arise therefrom.” As such, watchdog organizations such as Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington have repeatedly appealed to the Government Services Administration, the federal agency that administers the lease, to terminate the agreement with the Trump Organization.

On March 23, however, the GSA released a letter finding that Trump “is in full compliance” with the lease. According to Kevin Terry, the contract officer who oversaw the initial negotiations between the government and Trump, the president’s plan to turn over his businesses to his two adult sons and the long-time Trump Organization executive Alen Garten is sufficient to meet the terms of the agreement, as Trump is no longer “an officer, director, manager, employee, or other official in any of the entities” involved in operating the hotel. The letter immediately drew outcry from ethics organizations like CREW, which called the ruling “a disappointment” that failed to address the underlying problems of Trump’s businesses, and the left-leaning advocacy group Public Citizen, which described it as “an affront to the rule of law” based on “tortured and wholly uncompelling analysis” that “would get a first-year law student kicked out of law school.”

The GSA’s decision may also prove a blow to the more general argument that Trump has not done enough to distance himself from his namesake organization. Critics have strenuously objected to the plan Trump and his lawyer Sheri Dillon laid out on January 11 to mitigate conflicts of interest, under which the president has stepped down from, but retains ownership of, his numerous business interests, and placed his assets in a trust to be administered by his adult sons and Garten. His opponents maintain that, because Trump still has significant knowledge of his business interests and will still be benefiting from them, and because he has put in place few real barriers between himself and his sons, there is still ample opportunity for outside actors to seek to influence the president’s decisions by patronizing his companies. Though the letter from the GSA discusses only the Trump International Hotel and not the legality of the overall arrangement, it is nonetheless a decidedly favorable outcome for Trump in the first legal challenge over his conflicts of interest.

As if its location didn’t pose enough of an ethical question, the hotel has already hosted at least one promotional event specifically aimed at enticing foreign diplomats to stay at the establishment while in town on official state business. On the one hand, direct influence will likely be difficult to prove: The establishment is, after all, a five-star hotel that would have been likely to attract high-class clientele even if Trump had lost the election, a fact to which Trump and those who surround him may well point in order to maintain a patina of respectability around their dealings. Still, the meeting’s proximity to the election reinforces that it will be worth watching the comings and goings at the hotel closely for signs that Trump, who so often accused his opponent (often without evidence) of pay-for-play, may be using his position as president to promote his businesses.

Trump himself acknowledged that his presidency is likely to increase traffic to his Washington, D.C. property. Speaking to The New York Times, the president noted that the property is “probably a more valuable asset than it was before” and that his brand is “hotter” since the election. However, he went on to insist that there was nothing even potentially problematic about his unprecedented situation and that he sees no reason why he couldn’t run both the presidency and his business without conflict.

Multiple events since the election have made Trump’s lease on the hotel a central focus of discussions of his conflicts of interest, including among Democrats in the House. On November 29, Bahrain—a country whose donations to the Clinton Foundation Trump and his campaign decried during the campaign—announced that it would be celebrating the anniversary of its king’s ascension to the throne at the hotel. Other events announced since the election include a Hannukah celebration co-hosted by the Embassy of Azerbaijan and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations and a reception for the conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation featuring Vice President Mike Pence as its keynote speaker.

Nor did the string of bookings by international entities end after Trump’s inauguration: On February 9, Politico reported that a lobbying group with connections to the government of Saudi Arabia had booked a four-day stay at the hotel in Washington, D.C. And on March 13, The Daily Caller reported that the Turkish-American Business Council will be co-hosting its annual conference at the Trump International Hotel after a seven-year runat the Ritz-Carlton. The latter announcement is especially notable because the organization’s chairman, Ekim Alptekin, is involved in another of the Trump administration’s scandals: One of Alptekin’s companies, the apparent shell company Inovo BV, paid $530,000 to the former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn to lobby on behalf of the Turkish government, which prompted Flynn to register as a foreign agent shortly after he was ousted from the Trump administration for lying about his contacts with Russian agents while a member of the president’s transition team.

Back to table of contents

That Argentinian Office Building

According to a report by the prominent Argentine journalist Jorge Lanata, the president’s first phone call with his Argentine counterpart Mauricio Macri included a discussion of the permit issues currently holding up construction of a new Trump-branded office building in Buenos Aires. Both Macri and Trump quickly denied the report; according to a statement from the Embassy of Argentina, “The subject both leaders talked about was the institutional relationship, and they briefly mentioned the personal relationship they have had for years.”

As summarized in a tweetstorm here, Trump’s relationship with Argentina’s government and business elites—and the story so far on his property there—is already long and convoluted. The phone call with Macri was apparently set up through Felipe Yaryura, one of Trump’s longtime associates whose company, YY Development Group, is in charge of Trump Tower Buenos Aires. The day after the phone call, the PanAm Post reported that YY Development Group had been approved to break ground in June 2017; evidence has since emerged that the permitting process is not, in fact, finished, although Trump’s business associates are moving ahead as though it is.

Based on the information at the president’s January 11 press conference, it appears that the properties in Argentina, as both ongoing development projects and deals in a foreign country, is no longer moving forward. Nevertheless, the questionable circumstances under which it did so in the immediate aftermath of the election demonstrates just how many avenues there are for Trump’s conflicts of interest to interfere with governance around the world.  

Back to table of contents

Those Companies in Saudi Arabia

Even as Trump was running for president, his company was continuing to operate and open new properties. While the most memorable openings may have been that of his hotel in Washington, D.C., and his golf course in Turnberry, Scotland, the Trump Organization was continuing to work on projects in other countries, including, according to a report the Washington Post, registering eight new companies in Saudi Arabia during the 16-month campaign.

The organization’s endeavors in Saudi Arabia are notable not only because they may further complicate the shaky relationship between the U.S. and an oil-rich gulf state notorious for human-rights abuses but also because of how they relate to Trump’s campaign rhetoric. One of his criticisms of Hillary Clinton was that her charitable foundation had accepted donations from governments with questionable records on human rights, most notably Qatar and Saudi Arabia, always with the implication (or direct accusation) that they were doing so to curry favor with Clinton when she was secretary of state. That Trump was continuing to level this criticism while his namesake organization was actively pursuing new projects in Saudi Arabia not only bodes ill for his ability to separate his personal and presidential interests but also further calls into question the honesty and transparency of his campaign.

Back to table of contents

That British Wind Farm

As he indicated when he stopped there during the campaign, President Trump takes enormous pride in his recently opened golf course in Turnberry, Scotland. The day after the British public voted for Brexit—over intense Scottish opposition—Trump spoke at the property’s opening, proudly touting how the decision’s deflationary effect on the pound would benefit his business.

However, Trump also has a second golf course in Aberdeen, where it appears Trump has attempted to intercede in the interest of his own pocketbook.* According to The New York Times, Trump had a post-election meeting with Nigel Farage in which he “encouraged Mr. Farage and his entourage to oppose the kind of offshore wind farms that Mr. Trump believes will mar the pristine view from one of his two Scottish golf courses.” Hope Hicks, a spokeswoman for the president, denied that the two had discussed the subject, only for Trump to later confirm that the topic had, in fact, come up in their conversation.

* This entry originally misstated that Trump intervened at Turnberry, his other golf course in Scotland. We regret the error.

Back to table of contents

Those Indian Business Partners

It didn’t take long after the election for President Trump to be seen in public with international business partners. According to a November 19 article in The New York Times, Trump took a break from his transition schedule to meet with three Indian real-estate executives who are currently building a Trump-branded apartment complex in Mumbai. According to both Trump and the Indian businessmen, the meeting was essentially congratulatory in nature; a picture posted by one of the executives on Twitter shows the four men smiling broadly and giving a thumbs-up to the camera. However, that the meeting happened in the first place suggests that Trump does not currently have any qualms about forestalling official state business for personal business.

On top of that, the meeting raises questions in the blind-trust realm as well. The president himself was not the only member of his family there; two Facebook photos show that Ivanka and Eric Trump both attended the meeting as well. Their presence serves as a reminder that their father seems so far uninterested in maintaining even the nominal separation between himself and his assets that he repeatedly said he would create during the campaign.

Back to table of contents

That Envoy From the Philippines

One leader with whom Trump already has an advantage over President Obama is Rodrigo Duterte, the similarly brash president of the Philippines. Duterte, who has threatened to “break up with America,” told Obama to “go to hell,” and called the president a “son of a whore,” expressed admiration for Trump, noting that, among other similarities, they both enjoy swearing.

Duterte’s affinity for Trump apparently goes beyond vulgar word choice. Late in October, Duterte appointed a longtime business associate of Trump’s as a special envoy to the United States, an announcement that became public shortly after the election. This appointment in particular raises questions because it is just as open to exploitation by Duterte as it is to Trump, as the Filipino president could intend to use his new envoy’s relationship with Trump to strengthen the Philippines’ hand. Whichever side the appointment does eventually benefit, however, the situation is nevertheless fraught with conflicts between the three men’s personal and political interests.

Back to table of contents

From titans of industry to real estate moguls to tech insiders to heirs and heiresses and beyond, these men and women are the richest person in each of the 50 U.S. states. The people on this list are worth $747 billion combined. Almost 70% of them (36 piople) are richer than they were last year. Their average fortune is $14.4 billion, up from $12.6 last year. All but seven of them are billionaires. The most popular industries amongst them are finance and investment and fashion and retail followed by food and beverage, and then manufacturing, media and entertainment, and technology.

You may know who the richest person in the United States is (Bill Gates, though for a few hours last week Jeff Bezos took the title the richest person in the U.S. and world and the state of Washington, until Amazon's earning report came out and Gates took the title back ), or even who the wealthiest person in your state is. But do you know who wields the wealth in Iowa or Virginia or Hawaii? There have been a few changes on this list since last year, so let's take a look at the richest person in every state.

Alaska
Leonard Hyde, Jonathan Rubini & Families
$340 Million each
Jonathan Rubini and his partner Leonard Hyde are Alaska's biggest real estate developers. The two own and run JL Properties and control most of the skyline of Anchorage. Their largest project is a 3,600-unit residential project on a joint Army-Air Force base in Anchorage.

Vermont
John Abele
$625 million
John Abele co-founded the medical device company Boston Scientific in 1979. The company pioneered the use of of artery-opening stents, catheters and balloons. Boston Scientific went public in 1992 and three years later, Abele was a billionaire. He started donating large amounts of his fortune to charity in 1997. His goal is to end up with no money left at the end of his life.

Alabama
Jimmy Rane
$700 Million
Jimmy Rane founded the lumber business Great Southern Wood. He is better known for his cowboy alter ego Yella Fella that appears in his company's unique television commercials. Great Southern Wood now brings in more than $700 million in revenue a year.

New Mexico
Mack C. Chase
$700 Million
Mack Case is in the oil and natural gas business and made his fortune in Texas and New Mexico. He started out working on wells with his father and brother. He struck out on his own in 1968. He also owns the pecan farm Chase Farms and a Texas-based aircraft dealer and charter company called Deerhorn Aviation.

Delaware
Robert Gore and Elizabeth Snyder
$720 Million
Robert Gore and Elizbaeth Snyder made their fortune off a product we all know – Gore-Tex—the lightweight, waterproof fabric developed by their late mother and father Wilbur and Genevieve Gore. Today W.L. Gore & Associates brings in an estimated $3.1 billion in sales annually.

Mississippi
Leslie Lampton
$760 Million
In 1954, Leslie Lampton founded refining and chemicals conglomerate Ergon. The company company produces and transports crude oil, manufacuters asphalt, and has a real estate division that develops and manages both commercial and residential properties across the southeastern U.S.

North Dakota
Gary Tharaldson
$900 Million
Gary Tharaldson was a P.E. teacher and insurance salesman when he bought his first Super 8 motel in 1982. He built his nearly billion dollar fortune by acquiring and building hotels across the U.S. At his peak, he had roughly 350 hotels. In 2006, he sold 130 of them for $1.2 billion to Goldman Sachs.

New Hampshire
Andrea Reimann-Ciardelli
$1.1 Billion
Andrea Reimann-Ciardelli German born American heiress through her former 11.1% of JAB Holding Company, which has majority stakes in Coty, Inc., in Peet's Coffee & Tea, and Jimmy Choo Ltd, among others. In 2003, she sold her stake in JAB Holding Company for nearly $1 billion.

Utah
Gail Miller
$1.2 Billion
Gail Miller is the widow of Larry H. Miller. When he died in 2009, Gail assumed 100% ownership of their businesses, consisting of 54 car dealerships in Utah, Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, Idaho, Washington, and California, a movie theater chain and the NBA's Utah Jazz.

Maine
Susan Alfond
$1.4 Billion
Susan Alfond's father made a shrewd deal in 1993. He traded Warren Buffett his Dexter Shoe Company for a chunk of Berkshire Hathaway stock. The Alfonds have made a fortune off of the rising value of those stocks

West Virginia
Jim Justice II
$1.6 Billion
Jim Justice is West Virginia's only billionaire and ran for governor of his state in 2016 and won. The original source of his fortune is the coal business he inherited from his father.

Idaho
Frank Vandersloot
$1.9 billion
In 1985, Frank Vandersloot founded Melaleuca, Inc., a company that sells personal care and cleaning products, as well as nutritional supplements, via its own "Consumer Direct Marketing" plan.

Rhode Island
Jonathan Nelson
$2 billion
Jonathan Nelson founded Providence Equity Partners in the late 80s. The purpose of the company was to manage investments in media, information services, education, and communications initiatives. The company invested in development around the world, and has sold stakes in many successful companies over the years.

South Dakota
Denny Sanford
$2.1 Billion
Denny Sanford owns a bank and he's giving all of his money away. He wants to die broke! So far, he has donated $1.4 billion to health and children's causes but is no closer to broke than when he started. This is due to the huge dividends he receives from Sioux Falls based First Premier Bank. There are just 12 branches of the bank, however it is one of the largest issuers of Visa and Mastercards.

Lousiana
Tom Benson
$2.6 Billion
Tom Benson made his fortune in banking and car dealerships in New Orleans and San Antonio. He is the owner of the NFL's New Orleans Saints and the NBA's New Orleans Pelicans.

Kentucky
Wayne Hughes
$2.7 billion
Wayne Hughes is the founder and chairman of Public Storage, the largest self storage company in the United States. He started his business in 1972 with one unit. He served as President until 1991, and CEO until 2002. He is still Chairman of the Board.

South Carolina
Anita Zucker
$3 billion
Anita Zucker is CEO of The InterTech Group, a conglomerate focusing on specialty chemicals, commercial real estate, manufacturing and aerospace parts production. The group owned the department store Hudson's Bay from 2006 to 2008.

Iowa
Harry Stine
$3.3 billion
Harry Stine joined his father's soybean cleaning business in 1964. Stine is the founder and owner of The Stine Seed group of companies. He owns the largest private seed company in the United States. The seed crops are located in rural Adel, Iowa on 15,000 acres. Stine started out in the field of soybean genetics in the 1960s. He patented technology in the early 1990s and makes millions of dollars a year in royalties. His company also develops biotechnology and corn genetics.

Pennsylvania
Mary Alice Dorrance Malone
$3.8 Billion
Mary Alice Dorrance Malone is an heiress to the Campbell's Soup fortune. Her grandfather founded the company. She sits on the board of the world's largest soup maker.

Minnesota
Whitney MacMillan
$5.4 Billion
Whitney MacMillan is the heir to the Cargill fortune. He is the last descendent of the family to serve as CEO of the company.

Maryland
Ted Lerner
$5.8 billion
Ted Lerner founded Lerner Enterprises in 1952 with a $212 loan from his wife. Since then, the real estate firm has grown into the largest private land ownership in the D.C. area. The company owns 750 home lots, another 7000 apartments, and over 20 million square feet of space spread out over a wide range of commercial and retail properties.

Montana
Dennis Washington
$5.9 billion
Dennis Washington started his construction company, Washington Construction, in the early 60s, with a single bulldozer and $30,000. Just five years later, the company had grown to be the largest construction firm in Montana. He then began to diversify, expanding into mining and dam construction. His mid-1980s purchase of a Montana-based copper mine proved to be an incredibly successful choice, and with his profits from the mine, he was able to further expand into a wide range of areas, including shipping, real estate, aviation, and railroad construction.

Michigan
Daniel Gilbert
$5.9 Billion
Dan Gilbert is the founder and CEO of Quicken Loans. He is also the owner of the NBA's Cleveland Cavaliers. Quicken Loans was originally called Rock Financial. The company's name was changed after it was purchased by Intuit, Inc.

Arizona
Bruce Halle
$6 Billion
Bruce Halle is the billionaire founder of the Discount Tire retail chain. The company holds the Guinness World Record for the longest running commercial. Their primary television spot has remained the same since 1975.

Ohio
Leslie Wexner & Family
$6.2 Billion
Leslie Wexner is the billionaire founder of Limited Brands Corporation which owns The Limited, Express, Victoria's Secret, Bath & Body Works, and a slew of other retail giants that reside in nearly every mall and shopping center.

Missouri
Stan Kroenke
$7.5 billion
Stan Kroenke founded the Kroenke Group in the early 80s. The company, focused on developing shopping centers and apartment complexes. After he married Wal-Mart heiress Ann Walton, he also began developing Wal-Mart shopping centers. In the early 90s, he founded THF Realty, a development firm focused on suburban areas. In the mid-90s, he shifted his focus to sports team ownership, and launched Kroenke Sports Enterprises. He is the full owner of the Los Angeles Rams, the Denver Nuggets, and the Colorado Avalanche.

Illinois
Ken Griffin
$8 Billion
Ken Griffin was in Daytona Beach, Florida, and went on to graduate from Harvard University. He began trading while in college, and had made a million dollars by the time he graduated. He launched his own hedge fund company, Citadel LLC, in 1990.

Indiana
Carl Cook
$8 billion
Carl Cook took over as CEO of the Cook Group after his father passed away in 2011. Cook Group Incorporated is an American privately held company that is involved in the manufacturing of medical devices. The company was founded in 1963 by William "Bill" Cook. In 2008 it was listed at #324 on American's Largest Private Companies list. It includes Medical Manufacturing, Allied Manufacturing, and Cook Group Affiliates. Cook Group specializes in stents and catheters that contain pre-injected antibiotics.

Tennessee
Thomas Frist, Jr.
$8.8 BillionThomas Frist co-founder the Hospital Corporation of America in 1968 with his father. His fortune grew when shares of HCA Holding had huge gains during the 2014 healthcare overhaul.

Hawaii
Pierre Omidyar
$8.9 Billion
Pierre Omidyar is the founder of eBay. He earned the vast majority of his fortune when eBay went public in September 1998. He was 28 years old when he wrote the computer code that would eventually become eBay. At that time, the program went by the name of Auction Web. He stepped down as chairman of the company in July 2015 following its split from former subsidiary PayPal.

North Carolina
James Goodnight
$10.1 Billion
James Goodnight is the co-founder and CEO of business analytics software firm SAS Institute. He founded the company in 1976. Goodnight owns two-thirds of the company and has been the CEO for more than three decades.

Oklahoma
Harold Hamm
$10.2 Billion
Harold Hamm made his billions in the oil industry through his companies Hiland Partners and Hiland Holdings as well as the Oil-exploration Company Continental Resources.

Wisconsin
John Menard, Jr.
$10.9 Billion
John Menard, Jr. is the founder and owner of Menards, a major Midwestern home improvement chain. He is also a former IndyCar racing team owner. Menard is a partner in Robby Gordon Motorsports with NASCAR owner and driver Robby Gordon. He is also the father of NASCAR driver Paul Menard. Menard opened his first hardware store in 1972.

New Jersey
Donald Newhouse
$12 Billion
Donald Newhouse is the son of Samuel Irving Newhouse, Sr., the original founder of Advance Publications. The publications under the company umbrella include a huge amount of newspapers covering all parts of the United States, magazines like The New Yorker, Vogue, and GQ, Florida cable and internet company Bright House Networks, and the hugely popular website Reddit. They also own a sizable stake in Discovery Communications.

Georgia
Jim Kennedy
$12.6 billion
Jim Kennedy is the chairman of Cox Enterprises, a media conglomerate founded by his grandfather, James M. Cox. He began his career with Cox Enterprises in 1972, working a variety of media roles throughout his career within Cox Enterprises. He started out at Cox Newspapers where he worked as a production assistant, reporter, copy editor, advertising salesman, business manager and executive vice president/manager in Atlanta, Georgia. After a stint in Grand Junction, Colorado as president of Grand Junction Newspapers, Inc., he returned to Atlanta in 1986 and was named executive vice president of Cox Enterprises

Florida
Thomas Peterffy
$13.2 Billion
Thomas Peterffy began his professional career as a computer programmer, designing trading software. He bought a seat on the American Stock Exchange and began doing his own trading. In the early 90s, and Peterffy launched his own company, Interactive Brokers, an electronic brokerage firm.

Massachusetts
Abigail Johnson
$14.9 Billion
Abigail Johnson is the CEO of Fidelity Investments, an asset management and finance services giant that was started by her father Edward "Ned" Johnson III. Abigail got her start in the family empire before even starting college. Initially, Abigail served as a gopher, with her duties limited to taking orders from customers by phone.

Connecticut
Ray Dalio
$16.8 Billion
Ray Dalio is the founder of Bridgewater Associates, the world's biggest hedge fund firm, which manages $154 billion in assets. Dalio's funds had mixed results in 2015. His Pure Alpha fund returned 4.7% and Pure Alpha Major Markets returned 10.6%. However, the $70 billion All Weather fund posted a 7% loss, significant because a big chunk of Dalio's net worth is invested in this fund.

Colorado
Charles Ergen
$18.8 Billion
Charles Ergen is one of the founders and chairman of EchoStar Communications Corporation, the parent company of Dish Network.

Oregon
Phil Knight
Net Worth: $25.1 Billion
Phil Knight is the co-founder of Nike. Knight and legendary University of Oregon track and field coach Bill Bowerman founded Blue Ribbon Sports in 1964. That company changed its name to Nike and grew into a global leader in athletic shoes and apparel.

Wyoming
John Mars
$27.6 Billion
John Mars is the son of Forrest Mars, Jr. and grandson of Frank C. Mars. H is the Chairman of the Mars, Incorporated. John and his siblings inherited the candy empire when their father died.

Virginia
Jacqueline Mars
$27.6 Billion
Jacqueline Mars is the daughter of Forrest Mars, Sr., and granddaughter of Frank C. Mars, founders of the world's largest candy company Mars, Incorporated. Mars is the 15th richest American and fourth richest woman in the world. Jacqueline and her two brothers inherited the candy empire when their father died.

Nevada
Sheldon Adelson
$35.6 Billion
Sheldon Adelson hit the big time when he created the COMDEX trade show for the computer industry in the early 1980s. He is the CEO and Chairman of the Las Vegas Sands Corp., which owns and operates the Sands Expo and Convention Center and The Venetian in Las Vegas. He is also the owner of the Las Vegas Review Journal newspaper.

Texas
Alice Walton
$38.2 Billion
The heiress to Wal-Mart is the third-richest woman in the world, behind her sister-in-law, Christy Walton. Alice is the Walton family's biggest philanthropist, giving more than $2 million in 2012 to support charter school initiatives.

Arkansas
$38.5 Billion
Jim Walton
Jim Walton is Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton's youngest child. In April 2016, Walton announced he will step down from Wal-Martt's board after more than a decade as a member. Walton replaced his deceased brother, John, on the Walmart Board of Directors in 2005. He is currently on the Strategic Planning and Finance committees and serves as CEO of his family owned Arvest Bank.

Kansas
Charles Koch
$47.5 Billion
Charles Koch is co-owner of Koch Industries, along with his younger brother David. He is the chairman of the board and CEO of the company. Originally engaged solely in oil refining and chemicals, Koch Industries now deals also in process and pollution control equipment and technologies; polymers and fibers; minerals; fertilizers; commodity trading and services; forest and consumer products.

New York
Michael Bloomberg
$50.7 Billion
David Koch is the co-owner of Koch Industries, along with older brother Charles Koch, and serves as executive vice president. Originally engaged solely in oil refining and chemicals, Koch Industries now deals also in process and pollution control equipment and technologies; polymers and fibers; minerals; fertilizers; commodity trading and services; forest and consumer products.

California
Mark Zuckerberg
$62.4 Billion
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has added nearly more than $20 billion to his fortune in the past year, thanks to the rising cost of Facebook's stock price.

Nebraska
Warren Buffett
$76.2 Billion
Warren Buffett, also known as the "Oracle of Omaha", is noted for his adherence to the value investing philosophy and for his personal frugality despite his immense wealth. Warren Buffett is notorious for investing in products he actually uses. For example, he owns Fruit of the Loom because he enjoyed their shirts and underwear. He is a founder and member, alongside Bill and Melinda Gates, of The Giving Pledge.

Washington
Bill Gates
$88.9 Billion
Bill Gates is the co-founder of Microsoft and one of the architects of The Giving Pledge. He and his wife founded the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to issues like improving health care and the use of vaccines in developing countries.

Read more: The Richest Person In Every State

Steven Mnuchin is miffed as heck, and he’s not going to take it anymore. "I take great offense to anybody who calls me the foreclosure king," the Treasury Secretary and former Goldman Sachs banker told a Congressional hearing late last week.

At issue is the role of Mnuchin’s banking adventure at OneWest, a bank that like many others used questionable practices to foreclose on thousands of American families. Mnuchin argues OneWest was simply following standard industry practices, even if these came to be widely viewed as reprehensible.

His critics, including community leaders and Democratic politicians, say the bank, began the practice of pushing homeowners out of their homes en masse late in the game, when many Wall Street firms had already been reprimanded for similar practices. OneWest spawned from the failure of mortgage lender IndyMac in July 2008 and was active in states ranging from California to Ohio.

Like Trump, Mnuchin got an early leg up in business from his father, who was a Goldman executive himself and scored his son a job there. Mnuchin worked at the investment bank for 17 years, leaving the firm at the age of 39, with a reported $46 million stake. 

Mnuchin then applied his Goldman resume to what amounted to the post-subprime mortgage vulture finance industry. Bankers who were sufficiently flush to make it through the crisis were able to purchase highly discounted mortgages in bulk, often with government subsidies and guarantees.

In order to make money from these distressed properties, sometimes banks had to work overtime to foreclose on homeowners and they pushed the edges of legality in the process, sometimes actively crossing the line. No major Wall Street bankers were charged or convicted with any crimes following the historic crisis, a huge source of popular discontent that helped propel Trump, who ran for office on an anti-Wall Street fat-cat platform.  

Mnuchin’s nomination faced stiff opposition from some Democrats, including the influential Elizabeth Warren, a member of the Senate Banking Committee. "OneWest was notorious for its belligerence and for its cruelty," Warren said at the time, contending that OneWest, which was sold to CIT Group in 2015, gained a reputation as a "foreclosure machine." 

Given this background, Mnuchin’s professed outrage at the term "foreclosure king" is distinctly Trumpian: deny loudly until critics fall silent. What he was really trying to do was mince words, and Democratic lawmakers grilling him in testimony weren’t having it.

In particular, Mnuchin took issue with the notion that his firm had engaged in robo-signing, the fraudulent expediting of foreclosure documents without proper review, even though his bank settled with regulators for doing just that.

Democrat Keith Ellison asked him about robo-signing and Mnuchin replied, condescendingly: "I don't think you even know what the definition of robo-signing is." 

Ellison didn’t miss a beat: "You don't know what I know."

Mnuchin’s other argument was that he hadn’t made "one mortgage during or prior to the mortgage crisis." That might technically be true given the timing of his departure from Goldman and arrival at One West — but it doesn’t come close to absolving him from the sort of predatory practices that took place under his watch.

Mnuchin and other Goldman bankers essentially bought up and profited from assets bought at a steep discount following a financial crisis in which their bank was a key player. Under their watch, the bank foreclosed on 36,000 home loans, according to the California Reinvestment Coalition. This happened while OneWest was getting taxpayer bailouts in the form of payments from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation to the tune of $1 billion. 

OneWest’s Financial Freedom unit, which issued reverse mortgages aimed primarily at elderly homeowners looking for a source of income, foreclosed on over 16,000 of those loans since 2009, according to other data obtained by the California Reinvestment Coalition. 

Mnuchin worked at Goldman for 17 years, becoming a partner in 1994 and overseeing the firm's mortgage trading desk before climbing to chief information officer. He knew exactly what he was doing at OneWest. And that was foreclosing on vulnerable Americans, en masse. Almost like a king.

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Here’s what NASA could accomplish if it had the US military’s $600 billion budget

As the first (and, so far, only) Trump-branded property to open since the election, the Trump International Hotel and Tower in Vancouver has prompted significant scrutiny. When it opened just five days after President Donald Trump’s inauguration, ethics experts questioned whether the property presented an opportunity for anyone to attempt to influence the president by booking a stay there—a suspicion that seemed to be confirmed when a pro-business lobbying group relocated a meeting from a diplomat’s house to the new hotel the day after it opened.

As with all of Trump’s foreign properties, the property arguably violates the Constitution’s foreign emoluments clause, which says that federal officials can’t receive “any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.” But the first known government expenditure at the Vancouver hotel came not from a foreign entity—it came from the State Department. According to documents obtained by The Washington Post, the State Department spent more than $15,000 to book 19 rooms at the new hotel when the president’s adult sons, Donald Jr. and Eric, and his younger daughter, Tiffany, visited the property for its grand opening in February.

While the Trump Organization both owns and operates some of its flagship properties in the United States, such as Trump Tower in New York, the hotel in Vancouver is one of many licensing deals through which third-party companies pay to operate their hotels under the Trump brand. Though the president’s name appears in large gold letters on the building’s facade, the property is actually owned and managed by a Canadian company called The Holborn Group, which is in turn owned by the Malaysian billionaire Joo Kim Tiah. And, because the Trump Organization is a privately held company, the actual structure of the deal remains unknown: Though Trump declared more than $5 million in revenue from the property on his most recent financial-disclosure forms, it’s unclear whether that sum represents a flat fee or a percent of the hotel’s revenue. However, Slate noted that previous court filings show that some similar Trump properties operate on the latter model, suggesting that what Trump earns from the hotel hinges on its success.

If that is indeed the case, the State Department’s expenditures represent a conflict of interest for him. As I wrote in February, when the Secret Service spent more than $97,000 to accompany Eric Trump on a business trip to Uruguay, it’s first and foremost improper that the Trump Organization appears to be directly profiting from taxpayer money because of the increased security necessary when its leaders visit their holdings.

Moreover, the State Department’s expenditure arguably violates the Constitution’s domestic emoluments clause, which states that the president “shall not receive ... any other Emolument from the United States, or any of them” during his time in office aside from his official salary. Already, the Trump Organization is receiving taxpayer money from multiple federal agencies, including the Secret Service, which not only effectively subsidized Eric Trump’s business trip to Uruguay but also pays to accompany the president’s family on their private airplanes, and the Department of Defense, which CNN revealed in February would be renting space in Trump Tower. These expenditures raise the possibility that groups within the U.S. government as well as those outside of it may influence the president, intentionally or not, by patronizing his businesses. Because even small payments can change a person’s behavior, these payments may warm the president to one department over others, potentially shading his assessments of the advice and intelligence he receives from them.

Even if the Trump Organization doesn’t profit directly from the hotel’s success—that is, if the company makes a flat annual fee instead of a percentage of the property’s revenue—the State Department’s expenditure demonstrates the problems Trump’s continued intermingling of business and government continues to create. As of now, because Trump has disclosed only the minimum financial details he is required to by law, it's impossible to determine how exactly he makes money from properties like the hotel in Vancouver. That in turn makes it impossible to determine the precise nature of his conflict of interest—an epistemological problem that has arisen with several other business endeavors of his.

The Background

President Donald Trump still has not taken the necessary steps to distance himself from his businesses while in office. In accordance with a plan that he and one of his lawyers, Sheri Dillon, laid out at a press conference on January 11, Trump has filed paperwork to remove himself from the day-to-day operation of his eponymous organization. However, numerous ethics experts have voiced strenuous objections to the plan, which they say does very little to resolve the issue: As long as Trump continues to profit from his business empire—which he does whether or not he is nominally in charge—they say, the possibility that outside actors will attempt to affect his policies by plumping up his pocketbook will remain very much in play.

Several of Trump’s critics have moved forward with legal action. The watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, or CREW, filed a lawsuit alleging that Trump’s business holdings violate the emoluments clause of the Constitution, which makes it illegal for government officials to “accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.” CREW’s bipartisan legal team includes, among others, Norm Eisen and Richard Painter, who served as ethics lawyers under Presidents Obama and George W. Bush, respectively; Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard University; and Zephyr Teachout, a professor at Fordham University (and former congressional candidate) who is considered an authority on the emoluments clause. All have been vocally critical of Trump’s continued refusal to sell off his business, and are now taking their case to court to argue that several of Trump’s businesses present avenues by which foreign governments could seek to influence the president by, for example, booking stays at one of his hotels or renting space at one of his properties. Additionally, the lawsuit seeks to force Trump to reveal his tax returns, something every president has done since Gerald Ford but which Trump has refused to do, significantly limiting the public’s ability to understand the president’s finances. When asked about the lawsuit, Trump described it as “totally without merit.” Eisen was quick to respond on Twitter, offering to “debate Trump (or his chosen champion) on the merits of our case anytime,” making it clear that CREW intends to continue to pursue its case. (CREW has also filed a separate complaint to the General Services Administration arguing that Trump has violated the lease on his Washington, D.C. hotel, which states that “no ... elected official of the Government of the United States … shall be admitted to any share or part of this Lease, or to any benefit that may arise therefrom.”)

Though CREW is the first group to bring a lawsuit against President Trump, it may soon have company. According to The New York Times, Anthony Romero, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, has said that his organization is looking for a plaintiff to sue Trump for violating the emoluments clause, although with a different claim to legal standing: While CREW intends to demonstrate that the group itself has suffered financial harm because the need to focus on the emoluments clause has diverted its resources away from other worthy causes, the ACLU is hoping to find a hotel or bed-and-breakfast owner that can prove he or she has lost business to one of Trump’s hotels during his presidency.

CREW’s lawsuit is just the latest development in what promises to be a continuing saga regarding Trump’s many conflicts of interest that began almost as soon as he won the presidency. Along with his unprecedented wealth, Trump brings to the office unique and gravely concerning entanglements that, whether he recognizes their effects or not, threaten to undermine his decision-making as president. The plan Trump and Dillon announced on January 11 would do very little to resolve the conflicts: It places control of his assets in the hands of his two adult sons and a longtime associate of their father’s with what so far amounts to a pinky-swear assurance that, despite their proximity to the president, they will not discuss any aspect of the business with him. On top of that, the plan supposedly would terminate several of the Trump Organization’s pending deals and place a ban on new foreign deals, two conditions undermined by the announcement that the organization would be moving forward with expanding its golf course in Aberdeen, Scotland.

Even before his most recent plan was laid out, Trump has attempted to deflect criticism by repeatedly asserting that the law barring executive-branch officials from maintaining financial holdings or business ties that overlap with their duties does not apply to the president or vice president. In this, he is correct; the law, passed in 1989, exempts the two chief executives from conflict-of-interest rules on the understanding that their purview is so broad that it would be impossible for them to completely disentangle themselves.

Regardless, legality does not imply propriety. Unless Trump acts to put actual distance between himself and his business ventures, these questions are likely to continue throughout his time in the Oval Office. On top of the aforementioned legal actions, the director of the Office of Government Ethics, Walter Shaub, has declared Trump’s efforts insufficient, remarking, “I don’t think divestiture is too high of a price to pay to be the president of the United States,” and a number of Senate Democrats have introduced legislation that would force Trump to divest or face impeachment. Below is an attempt to catalogue the more clear-cut examples of conflicts of interest that have emerged so far. The most recent entries appear at the top:

• That Clean-Water Rule
• That Development Outside of New Delhi
• That Golf Course in Westchester
• Those Russian Trademarks
• That Trump Organization Event Planner
• That Saudi Arabian Lobbying Effort
• That Golf Course in New Jersey
• That Meeting in Brussels
• That Tower in Toronto
• That Caribbean Villa
• Those Condos for Sale
• Those Reelection-Campaign Funds
• That Second Hotel in Washington, D.C.
• That Property in Azerbaijan
• That Trump Tower Penthouse
• That Resort in the Dominican Republic
• That Chinese Trademark
• That Meeting at Mar-a-Lago
• That Defense Department Trump Tower Rental
• That Red Cross Ball
• That D.C. Labor Dispute
• That Estate in Palm Beach
• Those Expansion Plans
• That Hotel in Vancouver
• That Reality-Television Show
• That Pipeline
• Those HUD Grants
• That Golf Course in Aberdeen
• That Other Billionaire New York Real-Estate Developer
• Those Indonesian Politicians
• That Emirati Businessman
• That Virginia Vineyard
• That Las Vegas Labor Dispute
• That Kuwaiti Event
• Those Certificates of Divestiture
• That Carrier Deal
• That Blind-Trust Issue
• Those Fannie and Freddie Investments
• That Phone Call With Taiwan
• That Deutsche Bank Debt
• That Secret Service Detail
• That Property in Georgia (the Country)
• That Phone Call With Erdogan
• That Hotel in Washington, D.C.
• That Argentinian Office Building
• Those Companies in Saudi Arabia
• That British Wind Farm
• Those Indian Business Partners
• That Envoy From the Philippines

That Clean-Water Rule

In February, President Donald Trump signed an executive order directing the Environmental Protection Agency to review the Obama administration’s Waters of the United States, or WOTUS, rule. The regulation, which was created in 2015 but was put on hold by a court later that year, aims to expand the federal government’s ability to apply anti-pollution statutes to a variety of bodies of water. This week, the Environmental Protection Agency announced that it would be acting on the president’s order and rolling back the regulation.

When he first called upon the EPA to review WOTUS, Trump cited its economic cost, calling it “a disaster” and “a massive power grab” that was “putting people out of jobs by the hundreds of thousands” (a claim The Washington Post gave its lowest fact-checking rating). And while pro-business groups such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce lauded the EPA’s decision, environmental groups criticized the move, arguing that WOTUS represented a significant step forward in protecting the drinking water of more than one-third of Americans.

The decision also appears to represent a conflict of interest for the president. Along with increasing federal oversight of large bodies of water, WOTUS would have expanded the EPA’s authority to include regulation of smaller streams and ponds. As such, some of the business benefits of rolling back the rule will redound to the golf industry, which has been a major opponent of the regulation since before it was signed in the summer of 2015. The Golf Course Superintendents Association of America, a 17,000-member lobby, spent $30,000 to fight WOTUS in the quarter it was finalized, arguing that the rule would make it excessively costly to maintain golf courses without running afoul of new regulations on water use and polluted runoff. According to the association’s chief executive officer, Rhett Evans, under an earlier, somewhat more expansive, version of the rule, golf courses “would find themselves economically burdened, if not unable to operate profitably.”

Trump, of course, owns 12 golf courses in the United States, all of which would likely be impacted by WOTUS, meaning that he has a significant financial stake in ensuring that it does not ultimately go into effect. And though the decision to fully scrap the regulation was technically made by the EPA and its chairman Scott Pruitt, it was ultimately Trump who called for its review in his February Executive Order—not to mention that he was the one who appointed the notoriously anti-regulation Pruitt in the first place.

The executive branch’s decision to scale back enforcement of WOTUS specifically and clean-water regulation in general is also an example of how Trump’s broader anti-regulatory agenda often overlaps with his personal financial interests. Through his first few months in office, Trump’s domestic agenda has involved chipping away at the regulations his predecessor put in place, following a self-imposed rule that federal agencies must cut two regulations for each they implement. This will likely frequently result in policy decisions that will at least tangentially benefit Trump; for example, many of the tax cuts that Trump seems to favor, such as repealing the estate tax, would reduce his own tax burden as well as those of others in his income bracket. The result is that it’s often difficult to separate Trump’s conflicts of interest from what very well may be a genuine pro-business, anti-regulatory agenda.

Back to table of contents

That Development Outside of New Delhi

President Donald Trump’s international real-estate empire continues to grow. According to The Washington Post, two new Trump-branded buildings—one residential development and one office tower—will soon be going up in Gurgaon, a suburb of New Delhi, India, “known for rapacious development and poor planning.”

As with many of the company’s other international projects, the deals create new conflicts of interest as they bring the Trump Organization into contact with more investors, partners, and governments that may seek to influence the president’s decisions. The nature of the real-estate business means that the company and its international partners will have all sorts of interactions with local and national governments, ranging from acquiring permits for construction to health and safety inspections once a project is complete. That creates opportunities to attempt to curry favor withTrump, whether intentionally or not, by creating favorable conditions in which he can do business.

To complicate matters, these deals in India find Trump in partnerships with less-than-savory companies. The companies involved, IREO and M3M India, have both been frequent targets of anti-corruption actions by the Indian government, which is currently investigating the former for illegal land purchases and money laundering and the latter for bribing officials to speed along construction. And Gurgaon is widely seen as a hotbed of corruption, where poor citizens and small landowners are often pushed out by developers through bribery or bullying.

As has been the case with some of the Trump Organization’s other international projects—the tower in Baku, Azerbaijan, that The New Yorker deemed “Donald Trump’s Worst Deal” springs to mind, along with his ongoing developments in Indonesia—the company’s involvement with potentially corrupt officials and companies could create problems going forward. For instance, if someone found demonstrably illegal labor practices at the sites in Gurgaon, he or she could use that information to blackmail the president’s company and its owner (that is, the president himself) into pushing for a particular policy. And to reverse that example, Indian officials seeking a favorable outcome on an issue of international concern from the American government could, explicitly or implicitly, turn a blind eye to any ethical concerns in Gurgaon in return for the president’s good graces, which could end up creating unsafe conditions that hurt the laborers working on the building. Meanwhile, the developments’ investors—currently unknown for the deal with IREO, according to The Washington Post, as the money flowed through banks in Mauritius and Cyprus—have substantial leverage over the president that they could wield by cutting off the flow of funds to the projects.

On top of the concerns regarding the specific details of the projects, the developments in Gurgaon demonstrate how little the Trump Organization’s pledge not to pursue any new foreign deals, which the president announced shortly before taking office, actually means in practice. Technically speaking, the projects in Gurgaon aren’t new deals, as the Trump Organization agreed to the partnerships before Trump became president. However, at a press conference held in January, Trump and one of his lawyers, Sheri Dillon, announced not only that “no new foreign deals will be made whatsoever” but also that the Trump Organization had already terminated “all pending deals.” That these projects in India are moving forward regardless seems to demonstrate that the Trump Organization’s definition of “new foreign deals” is so narrow that the guidelines will do little to prevent the company from continuing to expand while Trump is in office, thus creating new conflicts of interest.

Back to table of contents  

That Golf Course in Westchester

According to a report by ABC News, the Trump Organization is looking for a tax break for the Trump National Golf Club Westchester in Briarcliff Manor, New York. The company is attempting to halve its tax bill on the golf course by arguing that the tax assessor’s $15 million valuation of the property is twice what the course is actually worth. If the appeal succeeds, the Trump Organization could see the property taxes it owes on the 143-acre club reduced by as much as a quarter of a million dollars.

Contesting a tax assessor’s valuation of a property in the hopes of getting a tax break is a fairly common move for large property owners generally and the Trump Organization specifically. In 2016, after the town’s tax assessor valued the property at $15 million, the Trump Organization tried to assert that the course was only worth $1.35 million, but ultimately relented and paid the bill.

The difference this year is, of course, that the property’s owner is now president, which means that suddenly, Briarcliff Manor is one of many local governments that must weigh the consequences of how they deal with Trump’s businesses. It must decide if giving the Trump Organization a sweet deal is worth the loss in tax revenues, whether because doing so will create a positive affinity that could spill over into preferential treatment from the federal government or because not doing so would mean crossing the famously temperamental president and potentially facing consequences down the line.

The situation demonstrates how the president’s decision to hold onto his business while in office could have ramifications for everyday Americans. While Briarcliff Manor isn’t exactly struggling—according to the latest figures from the U.S. Census Bureau, median household income for the town’s 6,300 adult residents is roughly $141,000, and the poverty rate of 4.3 percent is 10 points lower than the national level—the local government nevertheless relies in part on property taxes for funding. If the town does give the Trump National Golf Club the tax break it has requested, that would mean less money for the town’s schools, police department, and other civic services.

Back to table of contents  

Those Russian Trademarks

One of the questions underlying the ongoing investigation into the Trump campaign’s interactions with Russian officials is whether the president himself is in debt to the country’s government or state-run banks. Though Trump has insisted recently that he does not do business in Russia, that assertion conflicts with 20 years of his (and his sons’) statements to the contrary.

This weekend, The New York Times reported on details that underline his past dealings in the country: On the night of the 2016 presidential election, the Russian government granted extensions to six expiring trademarks that Trump had received between 1996 and 2007. The trademarks cover branding for a variety of products, including one for Trump Vodka, which debuted in 2007 and folded shortly thereafter, and one for the name “Trump Tower,” for a real-estate deal that the president began exploring in 1996 but that ultimately fell through.

By all appearances, the renewals in November were fairly routine and don’t indicate that the Trump Organization has any actual plans for pursuing business opportunities in Russia in the near future. As was the case with the trademarks the company received in China in February, it’s likely that registering the Trump name is more defensive than anything else, a means of securing the name to ward off potential knockoffs or patent trolls, who in some cases register well-known brand names so that, should a corporation try to expand overseas, they will have to pay to wrest the trademark back.

Even if the renewals were a mere formality, they point to the ongoing complications the president’s decision to retain his business while in office creates. Trademarks certainly aren’t direct financial compensation, but they have distinct monetary value as a means of protecting a company’s business interests, especially for a corporation like the Trump Organization, which relies so heavily on its brand appeal that the Trump name is arguably among the family’s most valuable assets. That leaves open the possibility that the president may be inclined to think more highly of a country because it has recently helped his company by approving a trademark request—which in turn opens the possibility that a foreign government seeking to influence the president might seek to curry favor with him by expediting the process or granting trademarks they wouldn’t for a less important person.

Other trademarks that Trump has received in foreign countries since taking office are not only ethically questionable but arguably violate the Constitution. Though part of the ethics arrangement the president and his lawyer laid out before the inauguration was that the Trump Organization would cease pursuing new deals in foreign countries during Trump’s presidency, the company has continued to register trademarks around the world. China granted him not only the trademark on his name in February but also 38 others in March, on everything from hotels to insurance to escort services, followed by six more last week; his eldest daughter Ivanka, who serves as an adviser within the administration, has also received trademarks there since her father took office. Mexico, too, approved Trump trademarks in March. These developments, which all came about after Trump took office, arguably violate the Constitution’s foreign emoluments clause, which bars federal officials from “accept[ing] of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.”

Moreover, as has frequently been the case with the Trump Organization’s dealings in recent months, the timing of the renewals The New York Times reported on raises additional questions about whether Russia may have been trying to influence the president. Since November 8, the Trump Organization has seen unexpected progress on projects in multiple countries, including not only China but also Argentina and Georgia, where long-stalled developments both began moving forward in November. Though it remains unclear whether any of these actions were specifically meant to influence Trump, the cumulative effect suggests that international offshoots of the Trump brand are benefiting from the Trump presidency.

Back to table of contents  

That Trump Organization Event Planner

Much has been written about how few high-level government positions President Donald Trump has filled compared to his predecessors; still more has been written about the unusual qualifications of those he has appointed. This week, the president named another appointee whose background doesn’t really comport with her new position: Lynne Patton, who will head the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Region II, which comprises New York and New Jersey.

Like Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson, to whom she will soon report, Patton has little-to-no directly relevant background in urban planning or housing. According to the New York Daily News, which first reported Patton’s nomination on Thursday, though, Patton has plenty of experience with the Trumps. Patton’s LinkedIn account indicates that since 2009, she has planned and run events for the Trump Organization, including “various marketing projects, philanthropic events & golf tournaments.” From 2011 until January of this year, she was also the vice president of the now-defunct Eric Trump Foundation, which is currently under investigation by the attorney general of New York after a report in Forbes alleged that the family had used the foundation to siphon more than $1.2 billion in charitable donations to the Trump Organization.

Patton’s appointment once again demonstrates how Trump continues to mix his presidency with his business interests. In her new office, Patton will oversee the disbursement of billions of dollars in federal housing funds to the states in which the president’s company owns the most property. Though the Trump brand and federal housing would seem to occupy significantly different sectors, there’s actually significant overlap between the two. As was documented by The American Prospect in April, the Trump Organization has repeatedly benefited from federal funding; for example, Trump owns part of a low-income housing development in Brooklyn that has received numerous grants from HUD (and that the president once called “one of the best investments I ever made”). Trump even came into conflict with the agency over the property in 2007 when he attempted to sell his stake, only to have the transaction blocked. That he has chosen a loyal business associate to administer a position that will have oversight over his own company seems to indicate how, rather than putting the best interests of the American people above all else, the president can make decisions that stack the regulatory deck in his own favor.

Back to table of contents  

That Saudi Arabian Lobbying Effort

Less than five months into President Donald Trump’s administration, Saudi Arabia has created a template for foreign governments looking to influence the president through his businesses. On Monday, The Daily Caller reported that the country’s government spent nearly $270,000 on lodgings and catering at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C., between November 2016 and February 2017. The expenditures were part of a lobbying campaign in which the Saudi government paid for U.S. veterans to travel to D.C. to advocate against the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act. The law, which passed in September despite a veto from President Barack Obama, allows American citizens to sue foreign governments that allegedly sponsor terrorist attacks and organizations.

The payment clearly demonstrates the problems with the arrangements Trump has made to prevent ethics violations, which he and his lawyer Sheri Dillon described in January before he took office. Among other steps meant to resolve the president’s conflicts of interest, one measure was specifically designed to address concerns that foreign governments might attempt to influence Trump by paying to stay at his hotel in Washington, D.C. To head off such a possibility, Dillon said in January, the Trump Organization would “voluntarily donate all profits from foreign government payments to his hotels to the United States Treasury.”

In the four months since the inauguration, the Trump Organization itself has demonstrated the insufficiency of this pledge on multiple occasions. First, in March, the company admitted that it hadn’t yet made the payments it had promised, and said it would not be doing so until the end of the calendar year. Then, in May, the organization sent Congress a pamphlet outlining the relatively meager steps it would take to uphold its commitment, stating that it wouldn’t actively attempt to identify foreign agents staying at the hotel because doing so would be “impractical.” Instead, the document suggested, the company would be relying on the foreign governments to identify themselves. After The Daily Caller’s report, the Trump Organization announced that it would indeed be transferring profits from the Saudi payments to the Treasury at the end of the calendar year.

However, it’s unclear whether, under the Trump Organization’s guidelines, they would have done so if not for the attention the story received from the media. The Saudi government didn’t technically pay for the hotel rooms; instead, they paid the American lobbying firm Qorvis MSLGroup, which hired a subcontractor. Qorvis was then required to disclose the source of the funds to the Justice Department under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, and a Daily Caller reporter then reported the story based on those disclosures. Given that the Trump Organization has effectively abdicated the responsibility of tracking payments that aren’t “direct billings from the Property to a foreign government,” it’s entirely possible that the company would not have done the due diligence required to follow the money; as it is, the story didn’t emerge for several months. Moreover, the Trump Organization still hasn’t answered the question of how it will determine what portion of the revenues constitute profits that it will pass along to the treasury.

Theoretically, the Trump Organization may have legitimately not been aware that the money Qorvis spent at the hotel came from the Saudi government, in which case Trump himself also wouldn’t have known about it, either. However, Saudi Arabia has hired Qorvis to carry out PR campaigns twice in the past, once shortly after 9/11 and once after the country invaded Yemen in 2015; both efforts were highly controversial, with the former resulting in a probe by the Justice Department in 2004. Besides, given that the Saudi government would likely have been spending that money on the campaign regardless, the mere possibility that the president would know where the payments came from and think more favorably of the country may very well have been enough of an incentive to make bookings at Trump’s hotel over its competition. Finally, even without the Saudi connection, the situation still constitutes an organization effectively paying the president while lobbying on a controversial issue.

It’s hardly hyperbolic to say that Saudi Arabia’s payment at the Trump International Hotel is exactly what ethics experts worried about when they first raised concerns about the president’s decision to retain ownership of his businesses while in office. As part of an active campaign to lobby the U.S. government, the Saudi government was effectively paying the president, who very well could end up significantly influencing how the policy plays out. In doing so, they demonstrated the inadequacy of Trump’s plan to avoid conflicts of interest: If the disclosure paperwork hadn’t surfaced, all it would have taken to skirt the rules Trump and his company set up was to funnel money through a lobbying firm.

Back to table of contents  

That Golf Course in New Jersey

During his first few months in office, President Donald Trump spent many of his weekends at Mar-a-Lago, which some have called his “Winter White House,” in Palm Beach, Florida. His trips there were subject to criticism on the grounds of both symbolism and substance. Symbolically, his visits both conflicted with his campaign promise to rarely leave Washington, D.C., and undermined his frequent criticisms of his predecessor for traveling while in office. Substantively, Trump’s trips to Mar-a-Lago make manifest one of the major problems with his decision to retain ownership of his businesses while in office: Anybody seeking to influence Trump could theoretically pay for a membership, putting money in his pocket while potentially gaining direct access to him. In this way, the president’s mere presence serves as an advertisement for the resort.

Many of the same concerns apply to Trump’s “Summer White House,” his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey. It’s historically been his summer getaway, and, given his penchant for visiting his own properties, it’s expected he will be spending more time there in coming months.

But whereas the problems with Mar-a-Lago have mainly been implicit—neither Trump nor his company, the Trump Organization, has acknowledged any link between the election and, say, the decision to double the club’s initiation fees in January—the intermingling of the presidency and the Trump Organization is on more explicit display in Bedminster. While there’s plenty of evidence (especially on social media) that visiting Mar-a-Lago could lead to an encounter with the president, Bedminster appears to have been actively advertising the possibility. According to Laura Holson of The New York Times, who toured the property with Trump’s son Eric,

Mr. Trump is a selling point for prospective brides and grooms considering holding their weddings at the club. When I was there, I was given a marketing brochure that made the following pledge: “If he is on-site for your big day, he will likely stop in & congratulate the happy couple. He may take some photos with you but we ask you and your guests to be respectful of his time & privacy.”

In a remarkable piece of advertising synergy, Trump made good on the promise in the brochure the weekend after Holson published her article. Between June 9 and June 11, Trump’s second weekend visiting the property since taking office, numerous photos posted on Instagram show the president posing for pictures with his paying guests at the resort, including not only a bride and groom but also a group of eighth-graders at their middle-school graduation party.

Though Holson notes that “a spokeswoman for the club said that the specific brochure has been discontinued,” the fact that it was present after Trump took office in the first place demonstrates the conflict of interest the resort creates. Trump himself has even acknowledged that his presence is a draw for the property: In November, shortly after the election, Trump told paying guests that he would be interviewing prospective members of his cabinet at the golf club and that members might be able to “come along” to the meetings.

Bedminster offers a prime opportunity for anybody with deep enough pockets—the initiation fee reportedly runs $350,000—to attempt to buy his or her way into a meeting with the president, a fact that marketers at the Trump Organization appear to have recognized. And scientific studies show that even minuscule financial transactions can be enough to significantly influence the recipient, meaning that, if and when such a meeting happens, the fact that such visitors are paying Trump to be there will almost certainly hang over the encounter—and make him more inclined to do something in return.

The situation demonstrates how Trump’s continual choice to shirk longstanding ethical procedures threatens to compromise his decisionmaking as president. As Trump himself has noted, the president is technically exempt from federal conflict-of-interest laws (although not, as has been frequently noted, the Constitution’s emoluments clause). But by retaining ownership of his businesses, Trump creates the exact situation those laws were designed to prevent: On issues both large and small, it’s an open question whether Trump is prioritizing the well-being of the country or whether he’s allowing his financial interests to dictate his behavior.

Back to table of contents  

That Meeting in Brussels

On the European leg of his first foreign trip, President Donald Trump elucidated the relationship between his business and his presidency, although in a way that only further complicates the already-difficult task of understanding how his financial interests might impact his decisions in office. According to the Belgian newspaper Le Soir, in a meeting with Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel, Trump discussed his skepticism toward the European Union through the lens of his experiences as a real-estate mogul. Per a translation in The Guardian, an anonymous source told the paper, “Every time we talk about a country, [Trump] remembered the things he had done. Scotland? He said he opened a club. Ireland? He said it took him two and a half years to get a license and that did not give him a very good image of the European Union.”

The meeting isn’t the first time the president has discussed the Trump Organization—which he still owns, but no longer operates—with other world leaders: In a phone call with Turkish President Recep Erdogan, one of the first Trump made after his election, he relayed praise from a business partner on the company’s towers in Istanbul; on the line with Mauricio Macri, the president of Argentina, Trump mentioned a long-stalled project in Buenos Aires (which suspiciously began moving forward after the exchange).

His conversation with Michel, though, is different, for one key reason: Trump has no hotels in Belgium—and, unless his company is willing to violate a pledge meant to mitigate conflicts of interest, it won’t be pursuing deals there until Trump is out of office. That doesn’t definitively preclude the possibility that he meant to boost his businesses by venting to Michel, but it certainly reduces its likelihood.

What the conversation does do, though, is demonstrate how inextricable Trump’s businesses are from his behavior as president. It’s not just that Trump has ample knowledge of his holdings to act in his own financial interests and little reason to fear that a Republican-controlled Congress might try to stop him. It’s also that Trump seems to approach every issue with a mind toward how it’s impacted his company in the past—and how it will impact his company in the future. As the aforementioned anonymous source in Le Soir described it, “One feels that he wants a system where everything can be realized very quickly and without formality”—a broad pro-business stance that would just so happen to make it significantly easier for the Trump Organization to operate in Europe as well.

As long as the president retains ownership of his company, it’s possible to impute the Trump Organization’s footprint in a variety of the administration’s policy stances. For instance, the notion that Trump favors leaders of countries where he has property is arguably the least concerning explanation for his affinity for noted authoritarians like Erdogan and Filipino President Rodrigo Duterte. On economic issues as well, the president has supported numerous policies over the years that would mainly help wealthy businesspeople in general and the Trump Organization in particular; for example, he’s in favor of weakening the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which would make it significantly easier for his company to move forward on deals in countries like Azerbaijan where bribery of public officials is more common than it is in the U.S. These questions of where genuine policy positions end and self-interest begins will continue—unless, of course, Trump does what ethics experts have urged him to do and actually sells his business.

Back to table of contents   

That Tower in Toronto

President Donald Trump’s properties around the world bring with them business partners from around the world. Several of these ties have already come under scrutiny: A Trump-branded tower in Baku, Azerbaijan, put him in business with allegedly corrupt officials who are themselves connected with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, for example, while two properties in Indonesia link him to officials implicated in a bribery scandal and a racially-motivated attempt to oust a sitting governor.

Now, The Wall Street Journal has reported an additional source of a conflict of interest along these lines: Trump International Tower and Hotel in Toronto. According to the Journal, one of Trump’s partners in the project, Alexander Shnaider, received millions of dollars from the Russian bank Vnesheconombank, or VEB, shortly before investing in the project. Shnaider, who is Russian American and was the main developer on the Trump-branded property, sold his own company’s share in a Ukrainian steelmaker to VEB for $850 million in 2010. Shnaider’s lawyer said in April that $15 million from the sale went into the Toronto tower, although he walked back his statement the next day, writing that he is “not able to confirm that any funds” from the sale went into the project.

VEB is owned by the Russian government; according to its website, its mandate is “to enhance [the] competitiveness of the Russian economy, diversify it, and stimulate investment activity,” and the bank’s supervisory board is chaired by the country’s prime minister, Dmitry Medvedev. At the time of the deal with Shnaider’s company, though, its chairman was the current Russian President Vladimir Putin, who, according to a Russian government official and multiple experts, would have had to sign off on such an exchange.

As with many of Trump’s business holdings, the property represents a conflict of interest because it brings him revenue that’s made possible by money from a bank owned and operated by a foreign government. Though Trump doesn’t own the tower—he merely licenses his name to Shnaider, who owns the building through his company Talon International Development Inc.—the Trump Organization nevertheless profits off of the building and, by extension, from VEB’s deal with Shnaider. This potentially gives the Russian government leverage that it could use should it want to influence Trump’s policies. That means that the Trump Organization’s continued involvement with the tower may represent a violation of the Constitution’s emoluments clause, which precludes elected officials from “accept[ing] of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.”

The Journal’s report highlights the inadequacy of the financial disclosures the president has so far offered. Last week, Trump insisted that his company does not have business ties to Russian “persons or entities.” As my colleague David Graham wrote, the letter from Trump’s lawyers that Trump proffered on the subject last week “doesn’t define several key terms,” leaving open the possibility that one of Trump’s projects benefited from Russian funding through a pass-through corporation or another intermediary. VEB’s role in the financing of the Trump-branded property in Toronto is a perfect example: Because money from VEB went toward enriching Trump (through Shnaider), one can reasonably argue that Trump didn’t do enough to eliminate the conflict of interest that the hotel creates for him in office.

Back to table of contents  ​

That Caribbean Villa

President Donald Trump has another property on the market: Le Château des Palmiers, his estate on the Caribbean island of St. Maarten. The president’s company bought the 11-bedroom beachfront compound in 2013, and the Trump Organization has been using it as a rental property ever since. It’s listed at $6,000 per night on TripAdvisor; according to specialty sites such as Luxury Retreats, which lists the price as between $6,000 and $20,000, and Mansion Global, which places the upper limit at $28,000, the price increases substantially during the winter, when the Caribbean offers an escape from cold weather. According to the disclosure forms Trump submitted to the Federal Election Commission (which remain the only public documentation of his finances), he derived between $100,001 and $1 million from the property in the year leading up to May 2016.

The asking price for Le Château des Palmiers remains unknown. The Trump Organization is selling the property through the real-estate agency and auction house Sotheby’s; according to the listing for the complex, the price is available only upon request. However, there are some clues available. On his FEC disclosure forms, Trump lists the property as worth between $5 million and $25 million, which does correspond with the $19.7 million he paid for it four years ago. According to Mansion Global, 7th Heaven, a real-estate brokerage in St. Maarten, has identified the asking price as $28 million, although 7th Heaven’s current page for the property lists the price as “PoA,” or Price on Application.

Though Trump no longer runs the Trump Organization, he still owns the company and, by extension, the property, meaning that he will profit from its sale. That means that Le Château des Palmiers offers yet another avenue by which somebody could attempt to influence the president’s decisions by putting a large sum of money in his pocket. It would even be possible for somebody to make an offer well above the currently unknown asking price to curry favor with him (and, possibly, through the artful use of a shell company, hide their identity).

As NPR noted, the Trump Organization’s decision to sell Le Château des Palmiers is “the first known major divestiture of a Trump property since he became president.” As such, it demonstrates the insufficiency of the steps the president has taken to eliminate his conflicts of interest. Trump has put the leadership of his company in the hands of his adult sons and a longtime Trump Organization executive with relatively few—and, based on Donald Jr. and Eric’s frequent presence at administration events and Eric’s statement that he will share some business-related data with his father, relatively permeable—barriers blinding him from knowledge of his financial interests.

Had Trump taken the measures suggested repeatedly by ethics experts on both sides of the political aisle, he would by now have put his assets in what’s called a blind trust, which would entail turning over his empire to a third party with whom he will have no contact, who would sell off the properties and reinvest the resulting money in other assets without providing the president any information about the sales or the purchases. Instead, Trump has set up a system under which, even if he does proceed to sell off his business, one property at a time, he will simply create new conflicts of interest as he takes payments from those who are purchasing the Trump Organization’s real estate.

Back to table of contents  

Those Condos for Sale

President Donald Trump’s finances are infamously opaque. Since he has not followed the long-standing presidential custom of releasing his tax returns to the public, the only publicly available records of where he derives his income are his two filings with the Federal Elections Commission. Even those are difficult to parse: Much of his business empire comprises limited-liability companies (or LLCs), which face very few disclosure requirements, and shell and pass-through corporations, which can obscure ownership and make money trails harder to follow.

Much the same can be said for whoever has been buying up Trump Organization condominiums. A lengthy investigation published in USA Today found that, “since launching his White House bid, Trump’s companies have sold at least 58 units nationwide”—out of a total of more than 400 currently on the market—”for about $90 million. Almost half of those sold to LLCs.” One of those LLCs, a financial firm created shortly before the Republican National Convention named Milan Investment Limited, spent $3.1 million to buy 11 condominiums in the building the president co-owns in Las Vegas.

Normally, such a story would then identify who is behind the purchase and whether they may have some ulterior motive in buying something from the president. In this case, though, repeated efforts by the USA Today to ascertain who exactly is behind Milan apparently came up empty. The company’s headquarters in a strip mall the outskirts of Las Vegas are registered to two individuals named Jun Xu and Qi Huang; however, the reporters were unable to reach Xu and Huang through either their listed addresses and phone numbers or through business associates. A third individual associated with Milan, Chen Huang, also apparently could not be reached for comment, nor did the Trump Organization respond to inquiries about the identities of the buyers. The newspaper’s attempts to find the buyers of other Trump Organization condos met with mixed results: Though reporters were able to track down the real people behind some of the purchases, including a couple who said they bought the property because they’re fans of Trump’s, others proved just as elusive as whoever is behind Milan.

As the USA Today notes, the story highlights one of the major problems underlying Trump’s decision to retain his businesses while in office. There is no law requiring a shell company like Milan to disclose the identities of its owner(s) or the source of its money while purchasing real estate. The Trump Organization still owns hundreds of condominiums, the sales of which will directly profit it and, by extension, the president; this offers plenty of chances for any individual or corporation to purchase a unit to attempt to curry favor with Trump without having to disclose their own identity to the public.

So far, the Republican-controlled Congress has shown little interest in investigating the constitutionality of Trump’s decision to hold onto his businesses. That means that the only real disincentive for those attempting to influence the president by patronizing his businesses is the bad publicity that might ensue. But Milan Investment Limited’s secretive investment in Trump’s properties shows how easy it would be for an individual or a corporation to stay anonymous and avoid that scrutiny.

Back to table of contents  

Those Reelection-Campaign Funds

For President Donald Trump, it pays to be in constant campaign mode.

Metaphorically, at least, this isn’t unusual; the idea of the “permanent campaign,” a reference to how politicians consider their reelection chances from almost the moment they take office, has been around for decades. Such is the case for Trump, who filed a letter with the Federal Election Commission establishing his eligibility to run for a second term in 2020 just hours after taking the oath of office. Though the letter declares only that he can run, not necessarily that he will run, it gives broad coverage for the president to begin fundraising and holding campaign events, and to do so far earlier in his first term than have previous presidents.

Since doing so, Trump has held several events that, while officially presented as part of his “thank-you tour,” have seemed an awful lot like his campaign rallies. Meanwhile, between merchandise sales and an already-active fundraising effort, he has raised more than $7.1 million, and the Republican National Committee has raised an additional $23 million. That’s not necessarily noteworthy by itself; by this time, President Obama and the Democratic National Committee had raised $15 million. (Obama had not yet filed for eligibility in 2012 three months into his first term, although he had held events to promote his economic-stimulus package.) What does make Trump unusual is that he has already spent $6.3 million of his reelection campaign funds—and, according to reports he recently filed with the FEC, he is paying some of that money to his own personal businesses—for instance, renting space at his hotels or golfing on his courses—thereby literally profiting off of his permanent campaign.

This practice is nothing new for Trump. As early as 2000, he was speculating that he “could be the first presidential candidate to run and make money on it” by patronizing his own businesses and running the campaign out of one of his properties. During his 2016 bid, he did exactly that, establishing his political headquarters in Trump Tower (and quintupling the rent as soon as he became the Republican nominee and began drawing funds from the party rather than his personal war chest). Shortly before his victory, The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump’s campaign had paid out the unprecedented sum of more than $14 million to his family and companies for such services as flights on his personal airplanes, rent at Trump Tower, and meals and hotel rooms at other Trump buildings.

Similarly, since taking office, Trump has profited off of the federal government’s newfound need to patronize his properties. Both the Secret Service and Department of Defense are renting out space in Trump Tower, for example, with the former believed to be paying at least $3 million per year to do so. This has led to rumblings that Trump may be violating the Constitution’s domestic emoluments clause, which holds that the president “shall not receive ... any other Emolument from the United States, or any of them,” beyond his official salary.

The amount Trump’s reelection campaign has spent at his businesses is comparatively small: According to The Wall Street Journal, more than 6 percent of the $6.3 million it’s spent so far, or almost $500,000, went to Trump’s hotels, golf courses, and restaurants. But that’s a higher rate than when his campaign money was going to his own businesses for the 2016 campaign ($14 million out of a total of $322 million, or about 4.3 percent). At his current rate, if he spends a similar amount over the next election cycle—and given that he’s already started spending, he could easily far outdo himself—he would be directing nearly $20 million to his own businesses.

On top of the arguable impropriety of personally profiting off of his donors’ and his party’s largesse, the situation presents perverse incentives for Trump. Already, elected officials, up to and including the president, to an extent base their behavior in office on what they believe will play well with voters rather than (or, in the best-case scenario, on top of) what is best for America. This is certainly true of Trump, whose every decision seems to prompt discussion of how it plays into the tension between his nationalist base and traditional Republican voters.

The personal financial benefits of campaigning mean that Trump has a little more motivation to delve into his reelection efforts than most politicians in his position. Because he is personally profiting, he has another reason to aim his politics toward his base so that they will continue donating to him and buying his merchandise in the downtime between election years. Moreover, rather than stockpile for 2020, he has an incentive to keep up the campaign rallies—and keep charging for them, as he did in 2016—so that he can continue funneling money from his donors and voters into his personal businesses.

Moreover, that the president is redirecting donors’ money into his own businesses only further highlights the inadequacy of the trust arrangement he has set up to supposedly prevent him from conflicts of interest. Trump and his lawyers have claimed that, by resigning from his positions within the Trump Organization and handing over control to his two adult sons and a long-time business associate, the president has distanced himself from his businesses enough that he will no longer be tempted to act in his own financial interests. Ethics experts (and common sense) immediately disagreed: Unless the president actually sells his businesses, many have said, and has the funds reinvested without his knowledge, he still knows more than enough about his sources of profit to put his own personal gain above that of the country. The almost $500,000 he’s channeled into the Trump Organization via his reelection campaign demonstrates this: Trump doesn’t need to be in charge of his businesses to know how to direct money their way; all he needs to know is where they are.

Back to table of contents  

That Second Hotel in Washington, D.C.

There may soon be more than one Trump Hotel in Washington D.C. According to The Washington Post, the Trump Organization is considering purchasing another property in the nation’s capital to develop for its recently created Scion brand, which aims to offer a more affordable alternative to the upscale properties bearing the president’s name.

Unlike the Trump International Hotel—the upscale property that opened in September 2016 and has become something of a synecdoche for the president’s conflicts of interest—a new Scion hotel in D.C. would likely be a licensing deal. That means that, rather than the Trump Organization owning and operating the property itself, a third-party hotelier will be paying the president’s company for the right to use the Scion name; candidates identified by the Post include Foxhall Partners, which has two properties in the city and a third under development, and the Beacon Hotel in downtown D.C.

But even if it isn’t actually owned or operated by the Trump Organization, the new hotel would likely attract scrutiny along the same lines as the Trump International. A licensing agreement means that the president will not be profiting off of the building directly; payments from individuals or organizations booking rooms or events there will not go straight to the Trump Organization, but to the hotelier. But Trump will still have a financial stake in the hotel’s viability: The longer it stays in business and the more successful it is, the more (and longer) the licensee will pay to use the Scion name, and the more likely other owners may be to commit to similar partnerships with the fledgling brand. Trump has resigned from his positions with the Trump Organization and transferred control of his assets to his two adult sons and a long-time business partner. But he still owns the company, which means he will still profit from his properties. According to his son Eric, the president will even continue to receive quarterly reports on how his real-estate empire is faring financially. The pathway to Trump’s pocketbook may be slightly more complicated, but it still exists.

The proposed new property also engenders some of the same concerns as the broader round of expansions the Trump Organization announced in February. Developing a hotel, even in an existing building, means working with local government bureaucracies, such as zoning offices that sign off on structural changes or licensing boards. In any city, this would create  conflicting incentives for government officials who are suddenly being asked to rule on the president’s businesses. On the one hand, Washington, D.C., like many of the cities into which the Trump Organization is looking to expand, voted strongly against the president in the 2016 election; city officials, especially those elected by D.C.’s denizens, may feel a need to factor his unpopularity into their decisions with regard to the newly proposed hotel. On the other hand, the federal government still controls D.C.’s budget, placing additional pressure to green-light a proposal from the infamously mercurial commander-in-chief.

Back to table of contents

That Property in Azerbaijan

When it comes to President Donald Trump’s constellation of foreign investments, properties, and companies, much of the attention so far has been on his business’s apparent violation of the Constitution’s emoluments clause, which bars officeholders from taking gifts from foreign leaders. According to numerous ethics experts, the clause takes an expansive definition of gifts, encompassing everything from a direct bribe to a foreign official’s approval of construction of a new Trump property. But some of the Trump Organization’s properties raise additional red flags due to the specific partners involved. That’s true in Indonesia, for example, where Trump’s affiliates have been involved in bribery scandals and radical Islamic nationalist parties, and Brazil, where the company pulled out of a branding agreement amid a criminal investigation of a local business partner.

Such is the case in Azerbaijan, which Transparency International ranks as among the most corrupt countries in the world, where the Trump International Hotel and Tower in Baku remains unopened. Though the long-stalled development has generated a steady drip of news and rumors for years, an overview by Adam Davidson in The New Yorker, entitled “Donald Trump’s Worst Deal,” puts into perspective just how convoluted the situation is, and just how much the project has led Trump and his company into a partnership with numerous corrupt officials in the Middle East. The details suggest that, on top of the continual underlying breach of the emoluments clause, the Trump Organization’s involvement may also violate the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, or FCPA, which forbids American companies from participating, even unknowingly, in bribery schemes in other countries, with a penalty of up to $2 million and up to five years in jail.

According to Davidson, though the project originated in 2008 as a high-end apartment building, the Trump Organization has had a licensing deal with the building’s Azerbaijani developers to turn the property into a hotel since 2012. Though the Trump Organization presented the deal as a straightforward licensing agreement, it was in fact a much more involved agreement granting the company—specifically, Trump’s daughter Ivanka—extensive oversight over the project. Based on his FEC disclosures in 2016, which as of this moment remain the only official record of Trump’s finances, the president has so far made $2.8 million from the partnership.

But what makes this story unique among the dozens of ethical questions surrounding the president is the Trump Organization’s partners on the project. Ostensibly, the main developer behind the property is Anar Mammadov. He is in turn the son of Azerbaijan’s transportation minister Ziya Mammadov, who was once described in a leaked diplomatic cable as “notoriously corrupt even for Azerbaijan.” Also in on the deal, though not initially publicly disclosed, is Ziya’s brother Elton, who founded the company that currently owns the property in Baku while serving in Azerbaijan’s parliament. Then there’s the Mammadovs’ relationships with Iranian oligarchs. For years, the Mammadovs have been closely linked with the Darvishis, whose members include the head of a  construction firm implicated in the Iranian Revolutionary Guard’s possibly illicit financial operations and the former leader of a company that was sanctioned by the United States for its role in Iran’s attempts to develop an arsenal of nuclear missiles. As the Mammadovs’ influence within Azerbaijan has begun to weaken in recent years, they have  increased both their wealth and their mutually profitable relationship with the Darvishis, green-lighting a number of deals that will prove lucrative for both families.

Alan Garten, the chief legal officer for the Trump Organization, asserted to The New Yorker that, as the company has never worked directly with Ziya or Elton Mammadov, it has not engaged in any behavior that should trip ethical alarms. He has additionally claimed that the company did “extensive due diligence” in making the deal, which did not raise “any red flags,” although the actual employees who carried out the process are no longer with the company.

Still, merely by partnering with the Mammadov family, the Trump Organization may have violated the FCPA. The law explicitly covers cases in which an American company claims not to have known it was working with corrupt officials; jurisprudence since its 1977 passage has further expanded the law’s definition to include “conscious avoidance,” or active efforts by an American company to not learn of a foreign partner’s corruption. So though Garten claims that, since the Trump Organization did not have enough control over the project and has not itself engaged in bribery, its hands are essentially clean, experts on the law say that the Trump Organization may be legally liable if its foreign partners engaged in corrupt practices.

Adding to all this is the fact that Trump is on the record as opposing the FCPA in May 2012, right when it would have become relevant to his company’s engagement in Azerbaijan. Trump called the law “absolutely horrible” and argued that, since other countries do not have the same provision, American corporations are at a major disadvantage in which bribery is the norm. Trump’s appointee to the Securities and Exchange Commission (which enforces the statute), Jay Clayton, similarly considers the FCPA an obstacle to U.S. companies seeking to expand abroad. A dissenting voice on the topic is Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who stated in his confirmation hearings that he intends to continue enforcing the statute. Which of these voices will end up winning out on the topic remains an open question.

This, then, is the situation in which the Trump Organization—and, by extension, the president, who has stepped down from his position within the business but who retains ownership—finds itself in Azerbaijan: The company’s direct partner on Trump Tower Baku is the scion of a wealthy and notoriously corrupt family that appears to have only stepped up its self-dealing as its political power wanes. That family is engaged in what appears to be a relationship of mutual graft with Iranian oligarchs with deep connections to their country’s Revolutionary Guard, the ideological militia widely suspected by the international community of gross corruption and sponsoring terror at home and abroad.

These families can be added to the ever-growing list of international partners whose relationships with the Trump Organization could create conflicts of interest for the president. The Mammadovs’ arrangement with Trump’s company may not only violate the emoluments clause but could also feasibly put the president and his family in legal trouble should the SEC choose to actively pursue enforcement of the FCPA in Azerbaijan. And the Darvishis could in turn use their relationship to influence the Mammadovs, which could have significant implications should Trump attempt, as he has said he will, to take hard-line stances that could affect the Iranian Revolutionary Guard’s activities. And if Trump so chooses, he could direct the Justice Department to curtail its enforcement of the FCPA or even use his bully pulpit to lead a legislative push to undo it, essentially condoning unethical behavior that in many countries enables leaders to personally profit at the expense of their own citizens—which, of course, could be a fair way to characterize the current situation with Trump’s business holdings.

Back to table of contents

That Trump Tower Penthouse

With President Trump in office and still refusing to distance himself from his businesses, every new tenant in one of his buildings creates another possibility of a conflict of interest. Such is the case with Xiao Yan Chen, who also goes by Angela Chen, a business executive who, according to documents filed with the New York City Department of Finance, purchased a $15.8 million penthouse apartment at Trump Tower in New York on February 21. Chen’s transaction is the first notable real-estate deal involving one of Trump’s properties since the election, although it should be noted that she has lived in a different unit in Trump Tower since 2004. And though Trump has officially removed himself from the board of directors of Trump Park Avenue LLC, the corporation that runs Trump Tower, he remains the company’s owner, meaning that he profits from its dealings.

Chen’s purchase represents the exact kind of entanglement that has fueled concerns that Trump’s financial interests could influence his decision-making as president. Chen is the founder and managing director of Global Alliance Associates, a consulting firm that, according to its website, “facilitates the right strategic relationships with the most prominent public and private decision makers in China.” The firm is explicit about what it sells: access. Though the page listing its partnerships is currently empty, the firm’s “affiliates” page includes a number of international organizations promoting relationships between private corporations and the governments of the United States and China, including the USA-China Chamber of Commerce, the Asia Society, and the China Institute. Notably, Global Alliance Associates also consults for the U.S. Department of Commerce and the U.S. Trade & Development Agency, meaning that Trump is accepting money from the founder and managing director of a firm that works with the U.S. government.

Because Trump is holding onto his businesses, he has created a situation in which some of his earnings include money from the leader of a company whose sole goal is to help its clients curry favor with the Chinese government; it’s no stretch to believe that her move to Trump Tower and the money it puts in Trump’s pocket may help her gain access to the United States government. (Reached for comment by the New York Post, Chen said she was “not comfortable” discussing the purchase and its possible ramifications for her company.) Even if it wasn’t Chen’s intention, the transaction still could influence the president. As the president’s conflicts of interest continually accumulate, the likelihood that one or more will eventually impact his decision-making continually grows—as does the appearance that he is ethically compromised by the many people, organizations, and governments from which he is receiving money while in office.

Back to table of contents

That Resort in the Dominican Republic

The Trump Organization’s January 11 pledge that it would no longer be pursuing new deals in foreign countries is looking increasingly toothless. Shortly after President Donald Trump took office, The Guardian reported that the president’s business would be moving forward with a planned expansion of its golf course in Aberdeen. Now, the Associated Press has reported that the company is working on a licensing deal in the Dominican Republic.

As was true with the Aberdeen plans, the Trump Organization has provided a narrow justification under which it argues that the news does not violate its promise. Technically, it argues, the deal is not new: The Trump Organization has had a contract with Ricardo and Fernando Hazoury, the brothers who own the Cap Cana Resort in the Dominican Republic, since 2007. But the financial crisis and disagreements between the Trump family and the Hazoury brothers, which climaxed with Eric Trump accusing the pair of “textbook fraud” in a 2012 lawsuit, had stalled the arrangement for nearly a decade, and the two parties haven’t written a new contract since the 2007 deal was struck. Even other real-estate developers have said that the resumption of the relationship between the Trumps and Hazourys caught them by surprise. For their part, the Hazourys have said that the relationship with the Trumps “remains incredibly strong, especially with Eric, who has led this project since its conception.”

The development in the Dominican Republic epitomizes the way the Trump Organization seems intent to violate the spirit of their “no new foreign deals” pledge, and arguably even the letter. Asked about the Organization’s justification for the deal, Richard Painter, who served as the ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush, noted that the company “can take the tiniest little past involvement in something and then extend it into an enormous new deal” and hasn’t presented a meaningful way “to distinguish between new business and old business.” Already, the Trump Organization has provided excuses for moving forward with two projects based on an interpretation of its own pledge that seems predicated on the idea that a deal can only be described as “new” if there had never been any relationship whatsoever between the Trump family and the property in question. As the company finds more explanations to broaden what initially seemed to be a clear-cut policy to reduce conflicts of interest—arguably, the only step in Trump’s plan that actually would have helped him do so—the pledge will likely become increasingly meaningless.

The Cap Cana story is yet another conflict of interest that only became public because of reporting from local media—and because of the nonchalance with which the Trump family handles the relationship between their business and the presidency. The first outlet to report on Eric’s trip was the Dominican newspaper Diario Libre, shortly after Cap Cana posted a picture of the Hazourys with Eric on its website. This follows stories like the president’s phone call with the president of Argentina and his company’s plans to expand into Taiwan, both of which were similarly broken by local newspapers before getting picked up by American press outlets. Further, like the president’s post-election meeting with business partners from India and Eric’s trip to Uruguay, the Trump family’s propensity for photo ops played a role: Even amid intensifying scrutiny of the Trump Organization’s actions, Eric seems unworried about having not only taken the trip but also taken pictures with his business partners.

The president’s putative pick for his ambassador to the Dominican Republic only adds to the perception that Trump will intermingle business and politics in the country. Trump has picked Robin Bernstein, a campaign donor, business partner, and founding member of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club, to be his administration’s representative in the country. Bernstein and her husband Richard have been in business with the president and his company for decades through The Americas Group, a consulting and marketing firm focused on construction projects in Latin America and the Caribbean. Choosing personal friends and supporters to be ambassadors is relatively common, especially in countries with which the United States has relatively uncomplicated relations. However, Trump’s decision to appoint somebody with whom he has long maintained a financial relationship—his second such appointment, after having named fellow billionaire real-estate developer and business partner Steven Roth to head his infrastructure program—suggests a continued willingness to blur the lines between his endeavors as a businessman and his duties as president, all while contributing to the perception that the president is willing to reward those who have done business with him in the past.

Back to table of contents

That Chinese Trademark

On February 15, President Trump scored a long-sought-after victory when a Chinese court ruled in his favor in a trademark dispute. In the case, which dragged on for more than a decade, the Trump Organization won sole rights to use the president’s name on products in the country, which would help prevent a bevy of unrelated entrepreneurs from applying it to a wide range of products, from toilets to clothing to condoms to explosives.

Almost immediately, Trump’s critics pointed out that the ruling poses a clear conflict of interest. Senator Dianne Feinstein of California called the trademark decision “deeply troubling,” adding, “If this isn’t a violation of the emoluments clause, I don’t know what is.” Some, including Feinstein, went further in their assertions: Only days before, Trump had apparently reversed one of his stances toward China by offering a full-throated endorsement of the “One China Policy” (under which countries officially recognize the mainland Chinese government but not Taiwan), leading to the suggestion that the court’s decision was part of a quid-pro-quo deal between the two governments.

Additional context, though, complicates this picture. The case, it turns out, was largely resolved in November 2016, before there was any indication that the president would waffle on the One China Policy by calling the president of Taiwan, and was the culmination of more than a decade of litigation that largely predates Trump’s involvement in politics. Conflicts of this kind over trademarks are fairly common in China, and, though resolving such cases often costs companies significant time and money, the Trump Organization’s victory is one of several that have gone in favor of American corporations in recent years. None of this rules out the possibility of a quid-pro-quo arrangement, but in sum it suggests that there is more to the case than what Feinstein alleges.

Whether or not the Chinese government tried to curry favor with the president by seeing to it that the court ruled in his favor, Trump’s newly awarded trademark poses a conflict of interest that could impact his future interactions with China. On top of the questions around his adherence, or lack thereof, to the One China Policy, Trump has taken a number of controversial stands when it comes to China, from accusing the country of currency manipulation to threatening to take hard-line trade positions that experts worry could lead to a trade war. Over all of these questions will loom the president’s knowledge that, with its trademark now secured, his company has an ongoing profitable relationship with the Chinese government—which, even if Trump does not proactively consider it in approaching the negotiating table, could provide his Chinese counterparts with leverage to influence the president’s decisions.

Back to table of contents

That Meeting at Mar-a-Lago

Of his first three weekends in office, President Donald Trump spent two of them away from Washington, D.C., at his Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Florida. On his first trip to the resort, which he has dubbed his “Winter White House,” Trump spent time on the golf course, attended a ball held by the Red Cross—a federally chartered organization over which he will likely be tasked to wield authority while in office—and held a Super Bowl party at which he hobnobbed with wealthy patrons.

His third weekend in office, Trump brought a guest of honor along with him: the prime minister of Japan, Shinzo Abe. After first meeting with Abe at the real White House, Trump took his Japanese counterpart to Florida for a weekend on the links. The biggest controversy out of the weekend was over the president’s handling of a situation that developed on Saturday, February 11: As news of a North Korean missile test broke during dinner, Trump and Abe discussed the situation in public, using light from phones of gathered onlookers to read briefing documents, an incredibly lax approach to information security, particularly ironic given that Trump won in part because of his opponent’s own lapses in information security.

The situation perfectly encapsulates the way the president’s business interests are coming up against those of the country. Already, the Trump Organization’s decision to double Mar-a-Lago’s initiation fees led to accusations of profiteering, premised on the notion that people would be willing to pony up in the hopes of earning an audience with the commander-in-chief.

The events of Saturday, February 11 took the problem to a whole new level. By discussing the recently obtained intelligence with Abe without leaving the table, the president committed a breach of international-security protocol in a very public setting. Even had the meeting been taking place in the White House, Trump’s lackadaisical approach to information security would have been cause for concern; for self-evident reasons, briefings on urgent security situations do not typically happen in somewhat open settings around civilians. But on the patio at Mar-a-Lago, the situation becomes much more dangerous, because the patio is not a secure setting, and the administration does not appear to have taken measures to make it one. This is a perfect example of a conflict of interest in practice: Trump has an incentive to host an event at Mar-a-Lago (personal financial gain) that runs directly counter to what would be best for the country’s security (hosting the event at the White House or an otherwise secure location). Not only that, part of the appeal of Mar-a-Lago is that guests will have a front-row ticket to see Trump at work. Previous presidents like Barack Obama, meanwhile, took a more conventional, and far more secure, approach, setting up a mobile security perimeter known as a sensitive compartmented information facility, or SCIF, to ensure that nobody in the area could look in on or overhear the president’s dealings.

According to the president’s Press Secretary Sean Spicer, Mar-a-Lago does, in fact, have a SCIF on site that they used for the remainder of the Trump’s conversation about North Korea with Abe. That they apparently began their discussion at the dinner table before deploying the SCIF underscores the problem of the situation at Mar-a-Lago: Trump has a financial incentive to hold an open-air meeting like Saturday night’s to keep up the appearance that, by paying to be a member of his exclusive club, anyone can have access to the most powerful man in the world.

Who could have been present? The club’s membership list is private, meaning that the American public has no way of knowing who was around to overhear the conversation. (Two Democratic senators, Tom Udall and Sheldon Whitehouse, have introduced a bill to change this fact, but there is little evidence suggesting it has any hopes of passing through the Republican-held Congress.) Nor have the Trump Organization and White House been forthcoming as to how they intend to screen club members and employees for security clearance; though Udall and Whitehouse reached out to the administration to ask how Mar-a-Lago vets guests for security risks, but received no response. In such a public place, and without protective measures like a SCIF, there may not be anything to stop an agent of a foreign government or other malicious actor from paying the $200,000 initiation fee to stay at the club, effectively paying to be near to the president when he receives sensitive information. Unless Trump takes significant steps either to erect barriers between himself and the guests at Mar-a-Lago—which he certainly didn’t do this time, and which could reduce his ability to profit from the property—there is a real possibility that he will continue to compromise his country’s interests when he travels to his resort in Palm Beach.

One patron of the club, Richard DeAgazio, demonstrated just how much of a breakdown the situation represents. DeAgazio, who, according to a photo he posted on Facebook, joined the club in December after Trump’s election, snapped several pictures of the president and prime minister’s conversation, which helped corroborate a CNN report on the public nature of the ad-hoc meeting and details such as the use of cellphone flashlights to illuminate documents; he also took pictures with Trump’s chief strategist Steve Bannon and the president’s “body man,” whose job is in part to carry the “nuclear football” containing missile-launch codes (and who was initially identified by name in the photo’s caption). As if to reinforce impression that Mar-a-Lago members gain unprecedented access to the the president, even in the middle of a crisis situation, another patron was able to film Trump giving a toast at a wedding shortly after his press conference with Abe.

There is no reason to believe that DeAgazio had any intention of compromising international security with his pictures; he appears to simply be a wealthy Trump supporter who was excited at the chance to see his commander-in-chief in action and wanted photographs with which to remember the occasion. (He has since apparently either deleted his Facebook profile or increased his privacy settings so that it is no longer publicly accessible.) Nevertheless, he demonstrated just how Trump’s continued commingling of his business interests and his presidency places not just Americans but the entire global community in jeopardy.

In a way, the sheer enormity of the situation at Mar-a-Lago briefly crowded out the fact that merely bringing Abe to Mar-a-Lago demonstrates Trump’s conflicts of interest neatly. Though diplomatic meetings outside the White House are not unprecedented, Trump’s trip with Abe is likely the first instance of the president actually making money from such a meeting. Though Trump said that he was footing Abe’s bill, with both increased Secret Service presence and Abe’s retinue on hand, there’s a distinct possibility that, at some point in the weekend, somebody from the U.S. or Japanese government made a payment that ended up in Trump’s pocket. On top of that, the visit generated an inordinate amount of free publicity for Mar-a-Lago, which Trump repeatedly mentioned (and posted photos of) on his social media accounts and was continually noted in coverage of the weekend.

Back to table of contents

That Defense Department Trump Tower Rental

President Donald Trump’s most iconic property is about to get a new tenant: the Department of Defense. According to CNN, the Pentagon, hewing to a longstanding policy of establishing an offshoot headquarters near the president’s private, non-White House residence, is planning to lease space in Trump Tower in New York City to maintain close proximity to Trump should he choose to spend time there instead of Washington, D.C..

The Department of Defense’s decision is yet another example of how Trump’s decision to hold onto his business interests is rewriting norms surrounding the presidency and creating problems in what were once uncontroversial procedures. As mentioned above, the Department of Defense’s decision is not unique to Trump’s presidency: They took up residence in Chicago, for example, during Barack Obama’s two terms for the exact same reason.

The difference, as is true in so many of the stories surrounding Trump and his family’s conflicts of interest—the Red Cross’s decision to hold its annual ball at Mar-a-Lago, for example, or Eric Trump’s business trip to Uruguay—is that the president himself is now making money off of routine governmental functions. Exactly how much money remains unknown, as the Department of Defense has yet to publicly state how much space they will be renting and for how long. However, details of the Secret Service’s decision to do the same are instructive as to the general scope of the bill. When that news first broke back in November 2016, the New York Post used publicly available information regarding rents at Trump Tower to deduce that, at a cost of up to $105 per square foot, the Secret Service’s decision to occupy two 3,000- to 5,000-square-foot floors of the building could cost taxpayers more than $3 million a year, a significant portion of which would be going to the Trump Organization, and, by extension, the president himself.

Just how much the DoD will be paying the Trump Organization for the privilege of working out of the president’s property is not the only outstanding question. Trump’s protestations to the contrary aside, scientific evidence shows that the mere knowledge that one has profited from a relationship in the past often leads to preferential behavior, which could lead Trump to favor the Pentagon in his decision-making. As a result, beyond the overarching problem of a government agency paying the president himself a large sum of money to set up shop in the president’s property, the Department of Defense’s decision to rent space in Trump Tower could have significant ramifications for how the Trump White House operates.

Back to table of contents

That Red Cross Ball

The web of President Donald Trump’s conflicts of interest has grown to encompass the American Red Cross, which held its annual ball on Saturday, February 4, at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Florida. By hosting the ball, the Trump Organization accepted money from an organization that, while not a federal agency per se, is subject to federal oversight that at some point in the next four years will likely involve President Trump.

Unlike a number of the events at Trump properties that have been featured in this list of Trump’s conflicts of interest, the Red Cross Ball, which celebrated the organization’s centennial anniversary, appears to have been scheduled before Trump even received the Republican nomination for president; a calendar listing on the website of the Coastal Star, a local newspaper covering events in the Palm Beach area, is recorded as having been placed in April 2016. Additionally, though the event has been held elsewhere in the past, this was not the first time it has taken place at Mar-a-Lago: Not only was last year’s ball held there, but the very first Red Cross Ball was hosted there by the property’s prior owner, the famous socialite Marjorie Merriweather Post.

Given all that, there is no indication that the decision to hold the event at Mar-a-Lago had anything to do with Trump’s election, and the fact that Trump will likely be attending the event is not unusual—President Barack Obama also attended as the honorary chairman of the organization while in office. Nevertheless, the ball perfectly encapsulates why Trump’s continued refusal to relinquish his business interests complicates even situations that would have taken place had he not become president.

Thanks in part to the makeup of the Red Cross’s leadership and its unique relationship with the federal government, the ball creates a particularly complicated situation. According to its website, the Red Cross “is not a federal agency, nor [does it] receive federal funding on a regular basis to carry out our services and programs,” instead relying on donations and fees for services like health-and-safety training courses. However, the organization operates under a federal charter as a “federal instrumentality … to carry out responsibilities delegated to [it] by the federal government.” The best-known of these duties include overseeing blood-donation drives and disaster-relief efforts; according to its website, it is also the Red Cross’s duty “to fulfill the provisions of the Geneva Convention” and “provide family communications and other forms of support to the U.S. military.” Further, the organization has a chairperson appointed by the president; currently, the chairwoman is Bonnie McElveen-Hunter, who was appointed by President George W. Bush in 2004. The charter also periodically comes before Congress for review and amendments to be signed into effect by the president.

On multiple occasions in recent years, the Red Cross has come under scrutiny for how it handles its multi-billion-dollar budget, most of which comprises donations from the American public. Prompted in part by reporting on the organization’s inadequate response to Hurricane Sandy, misleading statements about how it uses its money, and a September 2015 report by the Governmental Accountability Office, two congresspeople—one Democrat and one Republican—have independently introduced measures to increase the organization’s transparency. Neither has been enacted, but there will likely be another push to improve the relationship between the federal government and the Red Cross during Trump’s presidency, whether via a review of the Red Cross’s charter, the need to appoint a new chairperson, or the introduction of reform-minded legislation. If and when Trump is called upon to weigh in on these decisions, he will be asked to do so having directly profited from the organization while in office, which could limit his ability to act in the best interests of the American people.

Back to table of contents

That D.C. Labor Dispute

One month before he took office, President Donald Trump managed to sidestep a potential conflict of interest at his hotel in Las Vegas. In the fall of 2015, several hundred employees at the city’s Trump International Hotel had voted to join the local branch of the Culinary Workers Union, only to find their efforts stalled by Trump and the hotel’s co-owner, Phil Ruffin. The case languished for more than a year until, after the National Labor Relations Board found Trump and Ruffin in violation of federal law, the workers successfully negotiated their first collectively-bargained contract. If this hadn’t been resolved, a conflict of interest would have arisen: The case would have gone to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, to which Trump will soon be able to appoint members.

Now, the same issue is cropping up at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C. Already a centerpiece of the controversy over the likely violation of the Constitution’s emoluments clause, the property may soon be the site of another legal tussle: According to The Washington Post, 40 workers at the hotel have also voted to unionize, the first group to do so at a Trump-owned establishment since his election.

As was true in Las Vegas, the push for unionization in D.C., if it’s met with resistance from the hotel, would create an opportunity for the president to place his own financial interests above those of the hotel’s workers. In Las Vegas, the dispute appears to have been resolved partly because of the NLRB’s intercession; if the Trump Organization similarly contests the case in D.C., the NLRB may once again be asked to weigh in. And now that Trump is president, he will be appointing new board members to fill two vacancies on the agency’s five-seat panel, which could very well tip it from its current left-leaning, labor-friendly composition to a more conservative, pro-owner bent. If, as in Las Vegas, the NLRB finds in favor of the workers, but the Trump Organization chooses to continue its opposition, there is a possibility that the case could come before a federal appeals court, where judges who Trump himself may have appointed will be asked to review the NLRB’s decision. And if the conflict continues even beyond the Court of Appeals, it will fall to the Supreme Court, to which Trump recently nominated Judge Neil Gorsuch, to render a final verdict. (It should be added that each appointee will be faced with the possibility of ruling against the financial interests of the infamously vindictive man to whom they owe their position.)

Appointing labor-unfriendly officials and justices might fairly be said to be in keeping with Trump’s long history of questionable labor practices, but this does not mean that the conflict-of-interest question will dissipate. It’s difficult, if not impossible, to determine how much his pro-business stances are dictated by a sincere belief in their efficacy rather than an understanding that he himself has benefited from them in the past and will likely continue to do so in the future. As such, Trump’s motivations will continue to occupy an ethical and legal gray area until he eliminates the overlap between his roles as a businessman and as president.

Back to table of contents

That Estate in Palm Beach

To many of President Donald Trump’s critics, his decision to turn Mar-a-Lago, his Florida estate, into a “Southern White House” epitomizes the way he’s mixing his business interests with his duties as president. With each visit to the property, he boosts the resort’s visibility and may very well prompt more people to enroll as members in attempts to get a glimpse of the commander-in-chief. That the club doubled its initiation fees in January, from $100,000 to $200,000, only adds to the impression that Trump—or, at least his namesake company—is banking on his presidency as a means of boosting revenues. And without a publicly available guest list and no word on what security protocols are in place, the possibility that somebody could be using a club membership to gain access to the president has led Democratic members of Congress to draft a bill specifically to mandate better disclosure of the goings-on at the venue.

Still, the president apparently intends to continue not only going to Mar-a-Lago himself but also bringing high-profile diplomatic guests there for meetings. The first time he did so, in February, made news in part because it resulted in an apparent breach of security protocol: When Trump’s meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was interrupted by news of a North Korean nuclear-missile test, the two heads of state read over briefing materials by the light of cellphones, in full view of paying dinner guests, at least one of whom took pictures.

Now, Trump is returning to Palm Beach with another world leader in tow. But, as The New York Times reports, one frequent Mar-a-Lago guest may create friction between Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping. In recent weeks, the billionaire real-estate mogul Guo Wengui has emerged as an outspoken critic of China’s ruling Communist Party, accusing it of rampant corruption. Guo himself is no stranger to charges of corruption: He left China in 2008 amid allegations that he had exploited his ties with one of the country’s top security officials to enhance his businesses. Guo maintains that the reporter who implicated him in the scandal was the tool of a government plot to undermine him, and has in turn pointed the finger at multiple party officials he says have engaged in various forms of graft, although he’s pointedly stopped short of criticizing Xi. He also claims that the Chinese government has seized more than $17 billion of his assets since he left the country.

And, the Times says, Guo is a frequent attendee at Mar-a-Lago. In March, he tweeted a picture of himself with the resort’s managing director.

It is unknown whether Guo will be at Mar-a-Lago, or even in Palm Beach, at the time of Trump’s meeting with Xi. Indeed, without a guest list, it may be hard to ever know who’s there at the same time as the president except via social-media posts. But Guo’s possible presence, and even the fact that Trump is—via the membership fees Guo is paying to his company—profiting from Guo, could still cast a shadow over the president’s meeting there with Xi. Trump’s relationship with his Chinese counterpart already got off to a rocky start when Trump broke decades of protocol by calling the president of Taiwan, something no president has done since the 1970s. Given China’s harsh treatment of dissidents in the past, Trump’s holding a meeting with Xi at a club Guo belongs to could be interpreted as another slight, intentional or not, toward the Chinese government and further undermine one of the world’s most important bilateral relationships.

The problem, then, is twofold: First, it’s that Trump directly profits from spending his weekends at Mar-a-Lago and bringing high-profile guests with him, although only he knows for certain the extent to which his visits to Florida are motivated by this. And second, it’s that by paying the president to be a member at the resort, Guo gains a chance at brushing shoulders with and possibly even influencing the president, although, again, only he knows if that’s his reason for doing so. That exchange of money—Guo’s membership dues going into the president’s pocket—could in part end up being responsible for complicating U.S.-China relations as Trump and Xi hold their first meeting since the former became president.

Guo is also far from the only Mar-a-Lago member who might have a stake in rubbing elbows with the president, nor is he the only controversial foreign oligarch with whom Trump has financial ties of some kind. As such, Guo is indicative of the larger problem with the president’s maintenance of his business interests, both in general and with regard to his estate in Palm Beach.

Back to table of contents

Those Expansion Plans

Of the measures that President Donald Trump and his lawyer Sheri Dillon laid out at his January 11 press conference to address conflicts of interest, only two actually ameliorate any of the concerns critics have raised: the cancellation of all of the Trump Organization’s pending deals and the promise not to pursue expansion in other countries (although developments since the announcement suggest that those pledges leave plenty of wiggle room). Conveniently left out of the plan, however, is any prohibition on expanding holdings within the United States—which is apparently something that Trump Hotels plans on doing while Trump is in office.

On January 25, Bloomberg reported that Eric Danziger, the CEO of Trump Hotels, said after a panel discussion in Los Angeles that the company is considering tripling the number of Trump-branded properties within the U.S. According to Danziger, “There are 26 major metropolitan areas in the U.S., and we’re in five. I don’t see any reason that we couldn’t be in all of them eventually.” Danziger listed Dallas, Seattle, Denver, and San Francisco as among the cities where the Trump Organization is looking to build in the near future.

As the Trump Organization’s holdings expand, so too does the potential that business considerations will have undue effects on the president’s behavior in office, or at least appear to. Each location presents another opportunity for businesspeople or foreign dignitaries to choose to stay in a hotel in an attempt to burnish Trump’s opinion of them, their company, and/or their country. Each location increases the number of municipal governments with whom Trump will be interacting both as president and as the owner of a real-estate empire.

Trump Hotels’ expansion plans could put not only Trump but also the cities where new properties may be built in a difficult situation. San Francisco, for example, is currently experiencing a housing crisis, one possible solution to which would be to increase the pace of new home-construction projects, some of which could be funded by federal grants. On the one hand, it is almost certain that the residents of San Francisco, a city that voted against the president by roughly a 9-to-1 margin in November, would strenuously object to a new Trump-branded property in the city. But there is also an incentive for the city government to work with the Trump Organization in finding a suitable expansion plan. With plenty of evidence to suggest that collaborating with Trump’s businesses could influence the president, there’s added pressure for city officials to pursue a potentially costly project residents may otherwise not want in hopes of reaping the benefits down the road. Meanwhile, the officials in charge of doling out federal largesse such as housing grants may similarly feel pressure based on the knowledge that Trump’s feelings toward particular cities may change based on how receptive the locale was of his business’s expansion plans.

Finally, the Trump Organization’s announcement that it would be pursuing expansion further attests to just how little the president’s plan to mitigate his conflicts of interest actually accomplishes its goal. For the Trump Organization to not just expand but do so on such a large scale violates the professed spirit of the measures laid out on January 11 and defies any argument that the company will cease to act in a way that jeopardizes the president’s ability to do his job.

Back to table of contents

That Hotel in Vancouver

Less than a week into his administration, President Trump has a new property opening for business: the Trump International Hotel & Tower in Vancouver. According to The Washington Post, construction on the hotel finished shortly before Trump assumed office, with the building’s finishing touch—the president’s name spelled out in giant letters—revealed on January 19 (the day before the inauguration), and the first guests and permanent residents checking in on January 25.

As with many buildings bearing the president’s name, the new hotel in Vancouver is a licensing deal, with the Trump Organization leasing its branding to a third party—in this case, a real-estate company called the Holborn Group, which operates several luxury hotels throughout Canada. The Holborn Group is run by Joo Kim Tiah, the eldest son of one of the wealthiest families in Malaysia; several members of Tiah’s family are expected to fly in from Kuala Lumpur to attend the opening with the president’s two adult sons, Donald Jr. and Eric.

The building is yet another manifestation of the running problem posed by Trump’s extensive foreign real-estate holdings. Unless the president actually rids himself of his financial stake in his company, every Trump property influences his incentives when it comes to making policy, foreign or domestic: Should he act in the manner that best serves the country, or the one that will protect his profits? Every building provides the opportunity for third parties to curry favor with the infamously capricious president: If he knows that he has taken money from somebody, be it a company, a private individual, or agents of a foreign government, that knowledge, and the goodwill it creates, is likely to color Trump’s decision-making. Moreover, every businessperson who has a licensing deal with Trump now has leverage: If Tiah, or any of the other businesspeople around the world with a Trump-branded property, disagrees with a decision the president makes, he can threaten to pull out of the partnership and jeopardize some of Trump’s cash-flow in an attempt to change his mind.

Hardly a day had passed between the new hotel in Vancouver opening for business and the first report of an organization choosing to host an event at the site, possibly for political reasons. On January 26, The Washington Post reported that The American Chamber of Commerce in Canada, a business organization affiliated with the conservative U.S. Chamber of Commerce, had scrapped longstanding plans to hold a meeting about trade relations at the home of a diplomatic official and would instead be booking space in the new Trump Hotel for the equivalent of roughly $1,900—a relatively small sum, to be sure, but even small sums have been shown to substantially influence decision making. The change initially prompted at least one planned speaker, the University of British Columbia professor Matilde Bombardini, to back out of the event; however, according to the Vancouver Sun, she has since changed her mind after being told that the change of location was due to a leak at the previous site.

As with so many of the instances chronicled here, the venue change demonstrates how Trump’s conflicts of interest often operate in shades of grey. If the Chamber of Commerce did make its decision solely based on logistics, booking a spot in a Trump-branded building still makes possible the appearance of paying for play. In a marked departure from the Chamber’s copacetic relationship with the Republican nominee Mitt Romney in 2012, the aggressively free-market, pro-trade group clashed with the president on multiple occasions during the 2016 campaign over Trump’s protectionist trade policies, but has already made public overtures since the election to reconcile with the president. If it did, in fact, choose to move the event even in part because of the giant name on the new location’s facade, the decision represents another chapter in the ongoing saga of the business community’s desire to both please and sway a president whose ideology is not that of a typical Republican. Additionally, though nearly all of Trump’s rhetoric about NAFTA centers on Mexico, Canada actually trades more with the U.S. than not just Mexico but any other country in the world. As such, there is plenty incentive for the Canadian branch of the American Chamber of Commerce to do whatever it can to reach out to Trump.

Back to table of contents

That Reality-Television Show

Though President Donald Trump has been a well-known figure in American public life for decades, perhaps the single biggest contributor to his stardom has been NBC’s The Apprentice. Trump himself is no longer the star of the show—former California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has taken over as host in 2017—but the president remains an executive producer on the series for at least the coming year, including receiving a low five-figure salary for the position, according to Variety. Shortly after the news of that income broke, Kellyanne Conway, a counselor to Trump, clarified that he would be taking on his producing duties in his spare time, comparing the situation to previous presidents playing golf or pursuing other leisure activities.

Norm Eisen and Richard Painter, who served as the chief ethics lawyers under Presidents Obama and George W. Bush, respectively, pointed out on NPR’s Fresh Air that Trump’s ongoing involvement with The Apprentice presents yet another conflict of interest. According to AdWeek, 11 companies, including the television-shopping network QVC and Carnival Company (which operates the eponymous cruise line), are providing on-air sponsorships for the newest season of The Apprentice; a twelfth, the Japanese motorcycle company Kawasaki, withdrew from a previously reported deal after customers threatened a boycott because of its sponsorship of the show. All of these companies—plus the numerous companies that run ads during the show’s commercial breaks—are effectively putting money into the pockets of the president, not to mention supporting one of his products.

Trump apparently believes himself immune to such conflicts of interest, both in terms of legal impunity and his ability to ignore them, despite a good deal of research indicating that even minuscule financial incentives (minuscule for a billionaire, that is) can be enough to significantly influence behavior. Additionally, there is little doubt that Trump cares deeply about the ongoing success of The Apprentice: The weekend after the new Schwarzenegger-led season debuted, the then president-elect took to Twitter to voice his thoughts on the new season’s ratings. So when one of the companies that sponsors the show interacts with the executive branch—as when Carnival reached a $40 million settlement with the U.S. government over pollution in the Atlantic Ocean, for example, or when QVC settled a $7.5 million suit regarding deceptive advertising in 2009—the question will necessarily arise how their contributions to Trump’s pocketbook and beloved TV show will affect the outcome.

Even if Trump were able to fully blind himself to the conflicts described above, the president’s role would remain a problem because it provides an unprecedented bargaining chip for both the companies currently sponsoring in the show and those that could seek to use it to attempt to manipulate the president. Consider, for a moment, the potential negotiations between one of Trump’s sponsors and a government agency that finds it in violation of federal regulations. That company, though, has a trump card the likes of which has never been seen in American politics: Should it become apparent that the case is going awry, they can threaten to pull their support of the president’s television show. The move would inevitably make waves on cable news of the kind that Trump has repeatedly demonstrated himself to be susceptible to. Any decision, whether in favor of the company or against it, immediately loses credibility: If the company is found guilty, the decision is easily framed as retaliatory, a vindictive manifestation of the president’s ego and narcissism; if the company is let off the hook, it will appear that the company has manipulated his venality for its own gain. A formerly uninvolved company facing federal investigation could essentially pull the same gambit in reverse: By publicly committing to sponsor The Apprentice, a company could create a situation in which any decision appears to reflect not the facts of the case but the sticky situation created by its involvement with the show. In this sense, then, Trump’s decision to stay on as executive producer, and the conflicts of interest the position creates, jeopardizes not only the president’s ability to carry out his job but also the fundamental legitimacy of the rule of law for any company that currently is or in the future may become involved with the show.

Additionally, the president’s continued involvement with the show creates a strange and tricky situation for NBC. Trump’s reputation is inextricably intertwined with that of the show, meaning that NBC will to some extent be caught between promoting Trump as a successful businessman and doing its journalistic work. The network will likely also be advertising The Apprentice during its other programs, not only through commercials but also possibly in-studio promotions on other shows, creating conflicting incentives for NBC journalists who will be trying simultaneously to talk about the Trump administration fairly while their own network markets one of his products.

Back to table of contents

That Pipeline

The Dakota Access Pipeline, or DAPL, was the subject of continual controversy during the presidential campaign, drawing months of protests because of the perceived environmental impact it would create by crossing the Missouri River in close proximity to a Standing Rock Sioux reservation. Shortly before the election, the Army Corps of Engineers announced that it would be halting progress on the pipeline for further environmental review and to study potential routes that might avoid crossing both the river and Native American territory. On January 24, however, only four days after President Trump took office, he decided to move forward with both DAPL and the Keystone XL pipeline, which the Obama administration likewise blocked because of environmental and tribal-sovereignty concerns; the Army Corps of Engineers finalized the easement on the project on February 7. Trump has been vocally supportive of the pipelines for months, claiming that they would create new jobs in construction and the oil industry.

Trump’s FEC filings, which remain the only public record of his finances, suggest that he may have had an additional incentive to greenlight the projects: According to financial-disclosure forms he filed in June 2015 and May 2016, Trump has owned stock in Energy Transfer Partners, the company seeking to build DAPL. The stock was worth between $500,001 and $1,000,000 in 2015 and between $15,001 and $50,000 in 2016.

The president and one of his spokesmen, Jason Miller, have both stated, without offering evidence, that Trump’s stock-related conflicts of interest have been resolved. According to Trump and Miller, the president sold off his stocks in June of last year specifically to head off concerns that they may influence his decision-making in office. However, they have offered no meaningful evidence to back up their claims—evidence which, in this case, would likely be fairly easy to provide. They could, for example, offer more details on when exactly the stocks were sold beyond simply “back in June,” or explain why they did not mention the sale until December, just after the election, if the intention was to proactively address conflict-of-interest questions.

Given Trump’s penchant for dissembling about his personal finances and the lack of evidence that he has sold off his stocks, Trump’s decision to push ahead on DAPL and Keystone XL simply underscores the need for him to take larger, and more public, steps to distance himself from his financial interests. Moving forward with the pipelines is not the first instance of Trump making a significant decision that benefits a company whose stock is listed in his financial disclosures. For example, when Trump announced his intention to intervene at the factory of the air-conditioner manufacturer Carrier in Indianapolis, the Indianapolis Star noted that Trump’s filings list stock in Carrier’s parent company, United Technologies.

Back to table of contents

Those HUD Grants

As has been noted on several previous occasions, one of the overarching questions about America’s first businessman presidency is just how President Trump’s vast empire will interact with federal agencies that answer to him. One of these potentially sticky situations became something of a flashpoint at the hearing for Dr. Ben Carson, Trump’s appointee to lead the Department of Housing and Urban Development. At the hearing, Senator Elizabeth Warren pressed Carson over the fact that, as the head of the department, he would be in charge of numerous programs that the president could manipulate to profit his real estate empire, asking Carson, “Can you assure me that not a single taxpayer dollar that you give out will financially benefit the president-elect or his family?” Though Carson did not respond to the question with regard to Trump specifically, he responded that he “will absolutely not play favorites for anyone” or act with an “intention to do anything to benefit any American, particularly.” (Warren went on to expound on how Trump’s lack of financial transparency makes it borderline impossible to know if a policy will benefit him.)

Warrens’s line of questioning was not entirely hypothetical: Trump does, in fact, own properties the maintenance of which falls under HUD’s purview. Thanks to an inheritance from his father, the president holds an ownership stake in—and has made millions from—Starrett City, a 153-acre, 5,881-unit low-income housing development in Brooklyn. The development, according to ABC News, receives substantial federal funding via HUD’s many programs designed to support low-income renters and homeowners. Trump could easily press for policies that would increase his profits from Starrett, most notably allowing for the sale of the complex, an action HUD blocked in 2007—and, potentially, to other properties from which he may profit in ways that, without more complete financial information, the American public may not even know.

The potential for a profitable relationship with HUD underscores a central problem with Trump’s refusal to fully divest from his holdings before entering office. It’s not just high-ranking officials who will possess the ability to act in a manner that benefits the president’s pocketbook—it’s ordinary civil servants as well. Shortly before his inauguration, The Washington Post noted several additional ways employees in Trump’s executive branch could do so: Trademark disputes, for instance, will be adjudicated by judges appointed by his Commerce secretary, while the EPA could roll back environmental regulations that reduce profits at his golf courses.

Meanwhile, lower-level officials tasked with the day-to-day work of regulating Trump’s properties are likely to face pressure as well—if not explicit from superiors, then from the implicit, inescapable knowledge that enforcement decisions will impact the president personally. Federal Aviation Administration inspectors, for instance, are in charge of on-the-spot, random inspections of aircraft, including Trump’s, and at one point during the campaign grounded one of his planes after its registration expired; the Occupational Safety and Health Administration oversees construction sites, and has fined the Trump Organization on multiple occasions for workplace-safety violations. Only 10 years ago, politically motivated firings within the Justice Department became one of the many enduring scandals of George W. Bush’s administration; with so many executive-branch employees interacting with the president’s properties in so many different ways, some will inevitably face difficult decisions between proper enforcement at his expense or looking the other way to stay in the boss’s good graces.

Back to table of contents

That Golf Course in Aberdeen

Though his golf course at Turnberry is the more famous of his two properties in Scotland, it is Trump’s resort in Aberdeen that has attracted attention for the conflicts of interest it created when Trump spoke with the British politician and Brexit cheerleader Nigel Farage about blocking a proposed wind turbine that Trump believed would have blocked views from the resort. Now, attention has once again turned to Scotland after The Guardian reported that the Trump Organization will soon be moving forward with a multi-million dollar plan to expand its Aberdeen resort, including a new 450-room, five-star hotel and a second 18-hole golf course.

The announced expansion drew criticism almost immediately, especially coming as it did only three days after the press conference at which Trump unveiled his (woefully insufficient) plan to resolve his conflicts of interest. At the conference, the president and one of his lawyers, Sheri Dillon, announced that the Trump Organization would cease pursuing new foreign investments. Additionally, though neither Trump nor Dillon articulated the promise at the event, a press release detailing the steps Trump would be taking also states that he has “directed the Trump Organization to terminate all pending deals—over 30 in number.”

A representative soon clarified the grounds on which the Trump Organization deemed the expansion permissible in light of these statements. She argued that “implementing future phasing of existing properties does not constitute a new transaction, so we intend to proceed.” In other words, plans for the expansion had been drawn up and agreed upon before Trump made his pledge; simply moving forward with the project does not, in their view, breach their commitments to avoid pursuing new foreign investments or moving forward on pending deals.

As with so many of the defenses of Trump’s behavior when it comes to conflicts of interest, the representative’s justification overlooks the actual concerns regarding conflicts of interest: that Trump’s relationship with the British government and other foreign-policy questions may be colored by his expectations of what a policy will do to his property values, for instance, or whether wealthy guests will pay for a stay in the interest of currying favor with him. Instead, the argument relies on a tactic Trump and his many surrogates have used with alarming frequency. On several occasions, Trump has come out with what appears to be a clear policy statement, which then becomes increasingly vague as he and his surrogates attempt to justify an action or position. One famous example is his proposal to ban Muslims from immigrating to the United States: As critics started to question its constitutionality, and as support for the measure declined, he revised it to a vaguer policy of “extreme vetting,” which itself varied significantly depending on who was describing it to whom and what part of the plan they were defending. Here, the Trump Organization has done something similar: In the face of allegations that the Aberdeen development violated the company’s pledges regarding conflicts of interest, the pledges have been revised to create a more vague, and therefore more permissive, stance.  As Richard Painter, who served at the chief ethics adviser for President George W. Bush, put it, the new, more ambiguous policy “clearly illustrates that around the world, he will just simply expand around the various holdings and as they continue to expand, the conflicts of interest expand.”

If, as they argue, the expansion of the Aberdeen golf course constitutes neither a “new foreign deal” nor a “pending deal,” that only further complicates the picture regarding the Trump Organization’s future behavior during Trump’s presidency. The organization currently has several nascent development projects, several of which, including those in Georgia, Argentina, Indonesia, and Taiwan, have already prompted concerns over conflicts of interest. Trump and Dillon’s statements at his press conference appeared to rule out continued development of these properties, but the ongoing development in Scotland calls into question whether other development plans have truly been canceled or whether Trump will find a similarly legalistic framework under which they claim they can proceed. By moving forward in Aberdeen, Trump has demonstrated just how easily he can—and, in all likelihood, will—continue to flout concerns regarding his conflicts of interest by simply redefining the terms of his promises in order to allow for his latest move.

Back to table of contents

That Other Billionaire New York Real-Estate Developer

President Trump’s promise to erect a big, beautiful wall between himself and his business lasted slightly more than 48 hours.

Almost exactly two days after the January 11 press conference at which Trump announced plans purported to disentangle himself from his namesake business, the Huffington Post reported that the president had scheduled a meeting with Steven Roth. Roth, a fellow New York-based billionaire real-estate developer, is in charge of Vornado Realty Trust, an investment firm that co-owns two of Trump’s most valuable properties, one in Manhattan and one in San Francisco, and served as an economic adviser during the campaign. What Trump and Roth discussed at their meeting remains unknown, nor is it clear when exactly the meeting was scheduled. Regardless, that the meeting came directly on the heels of the press conference at which Trump and his lawyer laid out a plan supposedly meant to resolve conflicts of interest, throws the reality of the problems that come from having a businessman as president—and one who seems completely uninterested in taking steps that would actually distance him from his business—into sharp relief.

Shortly thereafter, The Wall Street Journal reported that Roth may soon become involved with the Trump administration beyond just his pre-existing friendship and partnership with the president. Trump, it seems, will soon be naming Roth and Richard LeFrak, yet another New York-based billionaire real-estate developer, to oversee a council of 15 to 20 builders and engineers who will be carrying out the president’s $1 trillion infrastructure proposal, a situation which itself provides ripe opportunities for the pair to direct federal dollars toward projects from which they will financially benefit. This news comes on top of a December report in The Washington Post that Roth’s firm had put in a bid to rebuild the FBI’s headquarters, a deal that could be worth as much as $2 billion. In other words, Trump, mere days after promising to remove himself from his businesses, is instead ushering a longtime partner into his administration.

The move could also end up providing yet another avenue by which Trump could enrich himself in office and by which others could attempt to curry favor. Whether or not he intended to do so, the president’s decision to place Roth at the head of such a large pool of money sends a signal to other companies about the continued intermingling of his business and his presidency: that working with the Trump Organization can be a path to increased influence or even appointment. And though Trump claims that he will no longer be in involved in day-to-day operations, he will be actively profiting off from the company, meaning that he will be personally making money off of the attempts of others to gain influence over American public policy.

Back to table of contents

Those Indonesian Politicians

Despite President Trump’s assurance that he has stopped pursuing deals since the election, his namesake organization apparently moved forward with a pair of projects in Indonesia. According to The New York Times, the two properties that will bear the Trump name, one overlooking a Hindu temple in Bali and the other abutting a theme park in West Java, presented ethical problems even before the election.

To begin with, through his Indonesian partner on the projects, the billionaire media mogul Hary Tanoesoedibjo (known in Indonesia as Hary Tanoe), Trump has forged relationships with several top Indonesian politicians. One such leader is Setya Novanto, the speaker of the country’s House of Representatives who temporarily lost his post for trying to extort $4 billion from the American mining company Freeport-McMoRan (a company which counts Carl Icahn, who will be serving as a special adviser in Trump’s administration, among its largest shareholders, and which has been frequently criticized by labor advocates and environmentalists). Trump had lunch with Novanto and several other Indonesian politicians during the campaign in September 2015 to discuss the Trump Organization’s planned expansion into Indonesia. At a post-luncheon press conference, Trump pulled Novanto in front of the cameras, calling him “an amazing man” and “one of the most powerful men” and asserting, “we will do great things for the United States.” (It is unclear exactly whom Trump meant when he used the word “we.”) Trump then asked Novanto to confirm that “they like me in Indonesia,” which Novanto did.

Another of the politicians who attended the lunch with Trump is Fadli Zon, the vice chairman of Indonesia’s House of Representatives, whose district includes one of the cities in which one of the Trump-branded properties will be built. According to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Zon is associated with a political movement seeking to unseat and jail the current governor of Jakarta, Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, also known by his nickname, Ahok, and has spoken at rallies against Ahok. The anti-Ahok movement is rooted partly in centuries of ethnic tension within the country: Ahok is both Christian, which has made him the target of attacks by hardline clerics claiming to represent Indonesia’s Muslim majority, and a member of the country’s historically oppressed Chinese minority, which was the target of a massacre in 1998. Aside from an interim governor appointed half a century ago, Ahok is the first governor of Jakarta to fall into either category, and is currently on trial for blasphemy for allegedly insulting the Koran, although Ahok’s supporters claim that it is Ahok’s accusers who are guilty of blasphemy for denigrating Ahok’s Christianity.

Both Trump’s question to Novanto and Zon’s presence at the meeting underscore another difficulty the president introduces into the United States’ relations with Indonesia. Indonesia is both the largest predominantly Muslim country in the world and the nation with the largest population of Muslims. Novanto received significant blowback for his statement that, yes, Indonesians do like Trump, because it turns out that, no, many Indonesians don’t like Trump, in large part because of his on-again, off-again proposal to ban Muslims from immigrating to the U.S.; in fact, faced with mounting criticism, Novanto’s party apologized not only for Novanto’s statement but also for his mere attendance at the luncheon. Since Trump’s victory, both Novanto and Zon have stood up for the president, arguing that Trump’s hardline stance toward Muslim immigration was merely campaign rhetoric and not actually reflective of the president’s own beliefs, something Novanto claimed Trump personally assured him was the case. Regardless, it is clear that the Trump Organization’s planned expansion into Indonesia—which, again, is the reason Trump met with Novanto and Zon in the first place—could introduce major complications into the relationship between the president and the political leaders of the world’s largest Muslim country, not to mention a significant trade partner and an important ally in the South China Sea region.

As if that weren’t enough, Tanoe himself has shown increasing interest in becoming involved in Indonesian politics. In 2014, Tanoe publicly supported the retired general Prabowo Subianto in the nation’s presidential election; Subianto lost to the country’s current leader, Joko Widodo. Then, in 2015, he helped found a new political party, the United Indonesia Party, or Partai Perindo, which intends to field candidates for national office in the near future, including Tanoe himself: Shortly after The New York Times reported on the project, Tanoe told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation that, “If there is no one I can believe who can fix the problems of the country, I may try to run for president.”

If Tanoe does so, it will create the possibility that Trump will be dealing with a head of state with whom he has shared business interests, which, as the ethics lawyer Richard Painter told The New York Times, “makes it impossible to conduct diplomacy in an evenhanded manner”—especially considering that, after Trump’s election, stock in Tanoe’s company rose significantly. Moreover, Tanoe, like Ahok, is both Christian and ethnically Chinese, which some insiders consider an obstacle to his electoral chances, although Tanoe argues that it is not Ahok’s religion but his lack of firm leadership that has led to the large-scale protests against the governor. Nevertheless, if Tanoe does choose to run for office, it is difficult to see how his race, religion, and business partnership with a president many see as blatantly Islamophobic could do anything other than create further difficulties both within Indonesia and in the country’s relationship with the U.S..

Tanoe remains close to Trump. He attended the inauguration as a guest of the Trump Organization; he and his wife posted several photos commemorating the occasion on their Instagram accounts, including pictures with Donald Jr. and Eric Trump and a video taken out the window of a car driving along the inaugural parade route. Then, in a February 7 interview with the Indonesian news magazine Tempo, Tanoe bragged about his access to the president. In the interview, he claimed to have seen Trump as recently as January 4 in New York, though he demurred when asked what they discussed, saying, “It wouldn’t be ethical, especially now that he is the president.” Tanoe also confirmed that “nothing has changed” regarding the branding deals in Indonesia, which he says will be moving forward with Trump’s sons in charge, a statement that would seem to contradict Trump and his lawyer’s January 11 announcement that the company would be suspending unfinished development projects.

Back to table of contents

That Emirati Businessman

Though the biggest controversy over the New Year’s Eve celebration at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s Florida estate, was apparently whether or not Joe Scarborough could accurately be described as having “partied” there, video footage taken by a guest and obtained by CNN the next day brought renewed scrutiny to President Trump’s own presence at the event. During a 10-minute speech given in front of the party’s 800-odd attendees, Trump praised his Emirati business partner Hussain Sajwani and Sajwani’s family, saying, “The most beautiful people from Dubai are here tonight, and they’re seeing it and they love it.” CNN identifies Sajwani as a “billionaire developer in Dubai” who has “paid Trump millions of dollars to license the Trump name for golf courses in Dubai.” Trump’s spokeswoman, Hope Hicks, defended the remarks by clarifying that the president and Sajwani “had no formal meetings of professional discussions. Their interactions were social.”

Whether or not Hicks’s statement was true, Trump’s commendation of Sajwani is part of a pattern in which the president praises his business partners in ways that suggest he has little interest in extricating himself from his company’s interests. Previously, he has name-dropped business partners in Turkey and Argentina while on official calls with the countries’ leaders; he also met, and took photos, with associates from India shortly after the election. Moreover, as with several of the countries in which Trump-branded buildings are located, the United Arab Emirates has a questionable record on human rights; Human Rights Watch specifically states that the nation “uses its affluence to mask the government’s human-rights problems.”

By singling out Sajwani, Trump also runs headlong into accusations that he and his family are selling access to his administration through their organization and family foundations. According to Politico, tickets to celebrate with the president at Mar-a-Lago, went for upwards of $500; the stated attendance of at least 800 people means that the Trump Organization made at least $400,000 off of ticket sales for the event. (There is no indication that the party was a fundraiser for any outside organization, such as a charity or campaign fund, as is often the case when politicians attend such an event.) Whether or not the president sees it as such, the event offered attendees the opportunity to be in the same room as Trump and bend his ear for a price. This follows consternation regarding an auction for a face-to-face meeting with Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, and a charity event that offered a reception with the president and a hunting trip with his two sons, both of which have since been cancelled, as well as ongoing speculation that foreign entities will attempt to curry favor with Trump by booking rooms and events at his hotel in Washington, D.C. That Trump singled out Sajwani at the New Year’s Eve party lends credence to these concerns—it’s an instance of someone receiving the president’s attention simply by buying a ticket to one of his events.

Since footage of Trump’s shout-out emerged in early January, Sajwani has continued to feature in coverage of the president’s business entanglements. At the January press conference where Trump and his lawyer, Sheri Dillon, laid out the president’s plan to ostensibly avoid conflicts of interest, Trump said that after the election, Sajwani offered him a $2 billion deal, which Trump turned down. Rather than acknowledge that being offered billions of dollars from a foreign businessman constitutes a conflict of interest, Trump presented his decision not to accept as an example of his magnanimity, saying, “I didn’t have to turn it down, because as you know, I have a no-conflict situation because I’m president. It’s a nice thing to have, but I don’t want to take advantage of something.” Later, Sajwani attended Trump’s inauguration, although it’s unclear if he interacted with the president while there.

Then, on Tuesday, Sajwani posted a picture of himself eating with Donald Trump Jr. in Dubai on Instagram with a caption reading, “It was great having my dear friend and business partner Donald Trump Jr. over for lunch. Discussing new ideas and innovation always make [sic] our meetings even more interesting.”

Donald Jr.’s meeting with Sajwani prompts concerns about the president’s conflicts of interest, for two main reasons. First, the meeting offers a reminder of the insufficiency of the steps Trump has taken to distance himself from his businesses. Though Trump and Dillon claimed that their plan resolved questions about conflicts of interest, ethics experts disagree: Because Trump still knows what his assets are and the identities of those with whom he does business, they say, Trump still knows more than enough to favor his company. Moreover, in an actual blind trust, Trump would have turned his assets over to a trustee with whom he would have no contact. Instead, he turned it over to a long-time executive within the Trump Organization and his sons, who he has long counted as among his closest advisers and with whom he has remained in contact during his presidency so far. Donald Jr.’s meeting with Sajwani is a reminder of these inadequacies, especially because Sajwani posted the picture to Instagram, thus increasing the lunch’s visibility and, along with it, the likelihood that the president will know about the ongoing interactions between his company and Sajwani’s (that is, if Donald Jr. hasn’t already made his father aware of them).

Second, Sajwani’s caption further undermines one of the few parts of the arrangement that actually would have meaningfully reduced the president’s conflicts of interest. In January, Dillon said that the Trump Organization would be canceling all of its pending deals and would stop pursuing foreign deals during Trump’s presidency. Since then, numerous developments have called those intentions into question: Projects appear to be moving forward in both Scotland and the Dominican Republic, with the Trump Organization offering narrow, legalistic explanations as to why the progress didn’t violate the terms of the trust. Though a spokeswoman for the Trump Organization has said that Donald Jr. was not seeking new deals while in Dubai, the previous stories, coupled with Sajwani’s Instagram caption, undermine that account.

Back to table of contents

That Virginia Vineyard

Among the dozens of properties President Trump owns is Trump Vineyard Estates and Winery in Charlottesville, Virginia, the source of his namesake wine. On December 23, the property requested temporary H-2A visas for six foreign workers, according to The Washington Post; on February 17, BuzzFeed reported an additional request that upped the total to 29. The visas, which are administered by the Citizenship and Immigration Services wing of the Department of Homeland Security, allow businesses to temporarily hire foreign, unskilled workers provided that the employer proves that there are not enough domestic candidates to fulfill a one-time or seasonal shortage and that the hiring will not depress wages for U.S.-born employees. Trump, of course, appointed the current Secretary of Homeland Security, which gives Trump authority over the very department responsible for deciding whether to grant the visas that the vineyard has requested. His choice for the position, the retired general John Kelly has a relatively scant track record when it comes to immigration, leaving open the question of how much influence Trump himself will have over the DHS’s policy on the matter.

On top of the fact that Trump will soon be able to influence the outcome of the request, that his organization has continued to request visas after his election underscores a tension in the president’s stance on immigration. From the moment that he announced that he would be running for president, Trump made antagonism toward immigration the central aspect of his campaign, arguing that both legal and illegal immigrants are taking jobs that should be filled by native-born Americans and depressing wages for others. Though he did not specifically single out the H-2B visa, the president has on multiple occasions spoken critically about the H-1B program, which enables employers to temporarily hire foreign workers for skilled jobs like those in the tech industry.

But the Trump Organization has long been a beneficiary of immigrant labor. For example, according to a Reuters report from August 2015, nine companies of which Trump is the majority owner have requested at least 1,100 foreign visas since 2000. The majority of these requests were from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club in Florida, which has requested at least 787 foreign visas since 2006, including 70 applications in 2015. (Meanwhile, The New York Times reported that, since 2010, only 17 of the nearly 300 domestic applicants for positions at the Mar-a-Lago have been hired.) The Trump Organization also famously may have benefited from illegal immigration: There is significant evidence that many of the Polish construction workers at the Trump Tower construction site in New York in 1980 were in the country illegally. In other words, Trump’s track record includes not just taking advantage of the very visa process he claims to abhor but also actually subverting existing law for his own profit. Now, by applying for visas for his vineyard, Trump is signaling that he expects that his business will continue to be able to profit from one of the very immigration programs he continually denounces.

Back to table of contents

That Las Vegas Labor Dispute

On top of owning various properties and enterprises, Trump and his company employ roughly 34,000 people, according to an analysis by CNN. On December 21, several hundred of those workers resolved a labor dispute against the president—one in which, had it continued for even a few weeks more, Trump would have had the unprecedented power to make appointments to affect its outcome.

Here’s the situation: In October 2015, several hundred employees, primarily housekeeping staff, at the Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas voted to join the local branch of the Culinary Workers Union. Trump Ruffin Commercial LLC, which owns the hotel and is itself owned by Trump and the casino magnate Phil Ruffin, contested the vote, first by enlisting an anti-union consulting firm (for whose services it paid $500,000) and then by filing complaints with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). Shortly before the election, the NLRB not only rejected Trump and Ruffin’s complaints but also found that, because the pair had refused to negotiate with the nascent union, they had violated federal law and their hotel was operating illegally. Trump and Ruffin have since appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.

On December 21, more than a year after the hotel’s workers first voted to join the union, the workers announced that they arrived at their first collectively-bargained contract, achieved, according to an employee quoted in ThinkProgress, despite significant pressure from ownership that attempting to unionize would cost workers their jobs. According to the union, the new agreement “will provide the employees with annual wage increases, a pension, family health care, and job security” comparable to that of other Las Vegas hotels. Moreover, the Culinary Workers Union’s parent organization, UNITE HERE, has reached an agreement to represent workers at Trump’s recently-opened hotel in Washington, D.C..

Although this dispute has been resolved, it is included here because it exemplifies the type of situation in which Trump’s business interests are likely to overlap with his duties as president. Trump will be tasked with appointing members to fill current openings on the NLRB, the very body that ruled against him shortly before the election and will be tasked with resolving any future disputes between the hotel’s owners and its employees. Moreover, as Slate noted, the chief justice of the D.C. Court of Appeals is none other than Merrick Garland, whose nomination to the Supreme Court has spent months languishing in the Republican-controlled Congress and was withdrawn once Trump became president. Finally, if disputes of this nature go beyond the Court of Appeals, the case would go to the Supreme Court, to which Trump will be appointing a justice, which is expected to tip the balance decisively in a more conservative (and likely anti-union) direction. In other words, no matter how far up the chain future disputes of this nature go, Trump’s presidency will give him new power to influence the results.

Back to table of contents

That Kuwaiti Event

According to an anonymous source and documents obtained by ThinkProgress, representatives from the Trump Organization pressured the ambassador of Kuwait to hold its embassy’s annual celebration of the country’s independence at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C. The event, held annually on February 25, was originally scheduled to take place at the Four Seasons Hotel in Georgetown; the location was allegedly changed after members of the Trump Organization contacted the country’s ambassador. ThinkProgress’s source “described the decision as political,” suggesting that the embassy chose to relocate the event in an effort to curry favor with the president. The Kuwaiti ambassador has since disputed the report, telling The Washington Post that he had not been contacted by the Trump Organization and that the move “was solely done with the intention of providing our guests with a new venue.”

If ThinkProgress’s account is correct, Kuwait’s decision represents an escalation of a situation that has been developing since Trump’s election. The Trump International Hotel has been the subject of continual scrutiny for the conflict of interest it poses, in part because its lease explicitly bars elected officials from holding it, but mainly because Trump’s ownership of the hotel will almost definitely result in a violation of the emoluments clause, which prohibits the president from receiving payments from foreign powers—something that will arguably be happening any time a foreign government books a room at the hotel. Already, the hotel has begun advertising itself as a destination for diplomats and dignitaries, and the embassies of Azerbaijan and Bahrain have both scheduled events in the building. However, before the ThinkProgress report, there was no evidence that the Trump Organization had individually reached out to a foreign government in hopes of getting it to relocate an event to the hotel.

Back to table of contents

Those Certificates of Divestiture

In addition to the many possibilities for President Trump to pursue his financial interests in office, the unique makeup of his cabinet also creates a new set of financial motivations. While Trump’s own fortune automatically makes his administration the wealthiest in history, he has also surrounded himself with an unprecedented collection of billionaires and multi-millionaires whose investments are likely to also come under scrutiny.

Unlike the president himself, those who are up for Trump’s cabinet, such as his proposed Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin and Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, will be legally obligated to divest from any holdings which may pose a conflict of interest. However, as The Washington Post noted, even selling off their holdings offers an opportunity for Trump’s cabinet members to enhance their fortunes. A federal program known as a “certificate of divestiture” allows executive-branch appointees and employees to avoid capital-gains taxes when selling their assets. The program has existed since 1989, and most recently received attention when President George W. Bush appointed Hank Paulson, then the chief executive of Goldman Sachs as his Treasury Secretary in 2006. Paulson was forced to sell off $700 million in shares of the bank; the certificate of divestiture enabled him to avoid a potential $200 million in capital-gains tax liability. According to The Washington Post, the Office of Government Ethics is currently researching whether the president himself would qualify for the tax break; even if he doesn’t, the unprecedented wealth of Trump’s cabinet promises to push this provision, and the financial incentives it creates, to the limit.

Back to table of contents

That Carrier Deal

One of President Trump’s first major economic moves as president was the deal that he and Vice President Mike Pence struck with the air-conditioner manufacturer Carrier, which had planned to move 2,100 jobs from its Indiana plant to Mexico. Finalized on November 29, the compromise kept 730 of the plant’s jobs in Indiana in exchange for $7 million in tax breaks over 10 years. The deal immediately attracted praise and criticism on both sides of the aisle, with much of the scrutiny going toward the tradeoff between jobs and tax breaks and Trump’s idiosyncratic, ad-hoc negotiation techniques.

An additional detail soon emerged regarding the deal: According to his FEC filings (which, despite Trump and his spokesman Jason Miller’s unverified statements that the president sold off his stock in June, remain the most recent public record of the president’s finances), Trump holds stock in Carrier’s parent company, United Technologies. In 2014, his investment in the company was between $100,001 and $250,000, while in 2015, the stock is listed as worth less than $1,001, which could indicate that he sold some or most of the stock; each year, his holdings earned him between $2,500 and $5,000.

The paucity of information in the FEC filings makes it difficult to ascertain why his holdings appear to have decreased; regardless, the investment is not only one of several hundred but also a relatively minor one among Trump’s many holdings, some of which are worth over $5,000,000. As a result, it’s difficult to know how much, if at all, Trump may have considered the stock, particularly considering that he didn’t appear to remember his initial promise to save the Carrier plant. Additionally, Trump does not have stock in the next company he called out on Twitter, Rexnord Corporation (which is also based in Indiana), or its parent company, The Carlyle Group. Still, Trump’s deal with Carrier demonstrates the unprecedented challenge the president’s conflicts of interest create: Unless he either puts his holdings in a truly blind trust or divests completely, a significant number of the decisions he makes will involve some level of financial incentive for himself as well as for the country.

Back to table of contents

That Blind-Trust Issue

Almost as soon as Donald Trump and a lawyer from the Trump Organization unveiled their plans to distance the president from his businesses on January 11, many ethics experts argued that the proposal didn’t do nearly enough to ward off concerns that Trump’s business involvements would produce conflicts of interest during his presidency.

Under that plan, Trump resigned from the positions he held at the many companies that make up his real-estate empire, ceding control to his two adult sons and a longtime business associate, with his assets placed in a trust run by his two adult sons and Allen Weisselberg, a longtime Trump Organization executive, for the duration of his presidency. In unveiling the plan, the president vowed to refrain from talking about his financial interests with Donald Jr. and Eric Trump and said that all future business decisions would be reviewed by a newly appointed compliance officer to prevent even accidental impropriety. However, critics said, as long as Trump still profits from his businesses, these measures do almost nothing to mitigate worries about conflicts of interest. Besides, with so much of his fortune derived from highly visible real-estate and branding deals, some lawyers note that no trust would fully blind him from knowing where his financial interests lie; they say the only way to fully protect against conflicts of interest would have been for him to have sold off his businesses before taking office.

Events since the election demonstrate that these experts’ doubts are well-founded. Trump and his sons have shown little interest in maintaining the appearance of separation, with Eric and Donald Jr. showing up at numerous political events for their father. Roughly two weeks before the election, Donald Jr. met with a pro-Russian group in Paris to discuss his father’s policy toward Syria and, according to Politico, was involved in his father’s search for a Secretary of the Interior; he was also spotted hunting in Turkey shortly after his father’s phone call with Turkish President Recep Erdogan in which the president praised a Turkish business partner. Eric, meanwhile, appeared in photos with his father and a group of Indian businessmen mere days after the election.  And both were present for the president’s announcement of his nominee for the Supreme Court.

Then, when asked about the blind trust in a March 24 interview with Forbes, Eric gave answers that seemed to contradict not only the arrangement to which he supposedly agreed but also his own statements on the topic. “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,” he said, before telling the interviewer that he will be providing updates to his father “on the bottom line, profitability reports and stuff like that” on a quarterly basis. “My father and I are very close. I talk to him a lot. We’re pretty inseparable,” he concluded. If Trump is in constant contact with Eric and receiving updates on his businesses from his sons, it renders the trust they created effectively meaningless—and validates the concerns watchdog groups raised when Trump first unveiled his plan in January.

After Eric Trump made those comments to Forbes, other holes in Trump’s plan have come to light. On April 3, ProPublica discovered a previously unreported change to the trust arrangement that effectively allows the president to personally withdraw money from his businesses at virtually any time he chooses. On February 10, a clause was apparently added to a letter outlining the details of the trust stating that “the Trustees shall distribute net income or principal to Donald J. Trump at his request, as the Trustees deem necessary for his maintenance, support or uninsured medical expenses, or as the Trustees otherwise deem appropriate.” In other words, Trump will be able to draw profits from his businesses at any time during his presidency as long as he and the trustees—again, his two sons and his long-time business partner—agree that it is “appropriate,” and will not have to disclose when he does so. This goes directly against the purpose of a blind trust, which in this case would be to distance Trump from his sources of income in an attempt to get rid of his incentive—or even ability—to consciously act in his own financial interest. So far, the plan unveiled in January appears to be as inadequate as many ethics experts had feared.

Finally, removing himself from day-to-day operations will do little to change the fact that Trump will retain substantive knowledge of the illiquid assets involved in his business, such as the numerous buildings and other products that bear his name, especially if he remains in frequent contact with his children. Even assuming that Trump does separate himself from any consideration of his holdings, his children will still likely be major players in the family’s organization, which will still bear at least the Trump name—arguably one of their most valuable properties, as much of the family’s wealth derives from licensing the name to third-party companies. Given the family’s oft-touted brand-consciousness (Ivanka, for example, briefly appeared to be distancing herself from the campaign, and several properties considered rebranding under the name “Scion” when it appeared Trump would lose), the situation epitomizes the way Trump’s, and his family’s, business interests may very well prove inextricable from his actions as president.

Back to table of contents

Those Fannie and Freddie Investments

After railing against elites during the campaign, Trump has so far stocked his prospective cabinet with an array of billionaires whose policy positions seem likely to significantly benefit those who are also doing very well. Trump’s putative treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, is no exception: His resume includes stints as a banker at Goldman Sachs, a Hollywood producer, and the operator of a bank that has been described as a “foreclosure machine” and once foreclosed on a homeowner over a 27-cent discrepancy.

One of Mnuchin’s apparent beliefs is that the government should cede control of the mortgage guarantors Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which the government acquired during the 2008 financial crisis. The two financial institutions’ stocks rose by more than 40 percent after Mnuchin stated that he believes the Trump administration “will get it done reasonably fast.”

Doing so would be broadly compatible with Trump’s general antipathy toward regulation of the banking industry. However, The Wall Street Journal identified an additional wrinkle to the story: When Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s stocks rose, one major beneficiary was John Paulson, an adviser to the Trump campaign and a business partner of Mnuchin’s. Paulson’s hedge funds include significant investments in both Fannie and Freddie. Trump himself has invested between $3 million and $5 million across three of Paulson’s funds, according to his filings with the Federal Election Commission (which remain the only available window into the president’s financial holdings). In other words, as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s stock prices increase—and they have so far more than doubled since the election on the expectation that the incoming Trump administration will be more lenient toward the financial sector than Obama—Trump’s portfolio benefits.

Back to table of contents

That Phone Call With Taiwan

When news first emerged that the president spoke on the phone with Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen on December 2, the immediate reaction was uproar over his apparently impetuous breach of decades of U.S. protocol toward China and Taiwan. As my colleague David Graham explained, since 1979, the United States has participated in the “artful diplomatic fiction” of officially recognizing the mainland People’s Republic of China as the only legitimate Chinese government while maintaining loose, unofficial recognition of—and significant economic and military ties to—Taiwan. That Trump would speak to the president of Taiwan, especially before doing the same with Xi Jinping, the president of the PRC, flies in the face of a diplomatic tradition that has undergirded almost 40 years of U.S.-China relations.

Amid the days of dissembling that followed the phone call, an additional worrisome detail came out: At the time, the Trump Organization was apparently exploring expansion into Taiwan. Soon afterwards, the Trump Organization denied that it planned to do so; however, even before the controversy arose, the mayor of Taoyuan, Taiwan, the municipality in which the Trump Organization allegedly wants to build, described in a televised interview a meeting with a representative of the Trump Organization in September to discuss prospective real-estate projects, and at least one Trump employee was found to have posted on Facebook that she was in Taiwan at the time on a business trip. Based on the January 11 announcement that the Trump Organization will be suspending its development plans and will not pursue foreign deals in office, it would appear that any movement on development in Taiwan is no longer on the table.

The phone call, and the many statements that have followed, are of particular interest because of the extent to which they dovetail with some of the biggest concerns about Trump’s approach toward governance. In the ensuing 48 hours, Republican officials offered several, sometimes entirely contradictory, explanations of what initially appeared to be an impulsive move by Trump; depending on who was speaking, the phone call was actually initiated by Ing-wen (which, if technically true, ignores that it was Trump’s staff who arranged the conversation), was just “a courtesy,” or manifested a policy shift weeks in the making—although, regardless, it was made without first consulting the White House or State Department. The defense of the move, and the questions it creates regarding conflicts of interest, have largely hinged on the belief that, since voters apparently don’t mind, the reaction was overblown.

On this issue, though, whether or not voters care is immaterial to the central question. The president of the United States breached decades of international protocol created to preserve a precarious balance of power. That decision raised not only the possibility that Trump was blundering into a potential international incident but also that he may have done so in part out of consideration for his business prospects.

Back to table of contents

That Deutsche Bank Debt

Though he often brags about leveraging corporate-finance law to become “The King of Debt,” Trump’s numerous bankruptcy filings have left most large Wall Street banks reticent to lend to him, according to The Wall Street Journal. Among the few exceptions is Deutsche Bank, which “has led or participated in loans of at least $2.5 billion” to the president since 1996, with at least another $1 billion in loan commitments to Trump-affiliated companies; more than $300 million of those loans have come since 2012.

The president’s indebtedness does not itself pose a conflict of interest, but Deutsche Bank’s ongoing legal troubles very well might. The Justice Department is currently negotiating with Deutsche Bank regarding a preliminary settlement of $14 billion to resolve probes into allegedly misleading predatory lending practices in the leadup to the 2008 financial crisis; while it is believed that Deutsche Bank will push back against the sum, there has been no public news regarding negotiations since the initial figure was reported in September. Trump will soon be naming many of the officials with jurisdiction over this and other deals, prompting several House Democrats to send a letter to federal financial agencies calling for close scrutiny of how Trump may seek to influence the settlement through his appointments—although doing so would be just as in keeping with his general stance toward financial regulation as with active protection of his pocketbook. Other Democrats have called for the proactive appointment of independent prosecutors to avoid any appearance of conflict if the case is not resolved before Trump takes office.

Fears that Trump may unduly consider his indebtedness to Deutsche Bank in deciding his administration’s policy toward the financial sector go beyond general anxiety about deregulation. Deutsche Bank is undergoing a period of struggle that may have it on the verge of failure already. Its stock valuation has dropped by more than half since July 2015; in January, it posted its first full-year loss since 2008; and one of its many tranches of bonds—one specifically designed to be a high-risk, high-reward safety valve in times of trouble—has recently begun to crash. In June, the International Monetary Fund called Deutsche Bank “the most important net contributor to systemic risks” among globally important financial institutions. If the bank were to fail, it could have major consequences for not only Trump’s businesses, which would lose their sole remaining lender, but for the global economy as well.

Arguably, the $14 billion fine the Justice Department is seeking to impose has exacerbated rather than alleviated these struggles. Based the company’s market capitalization—the number of shares multiplied by their price— of roughly $16 billion, the sum would leave Deutsche Bank critically low in liquid assets with which to absorb future troubles, although the institution’s own self-valuation of $68 billion argues otherwise. But given the complexity and potential volatility of the situation, it is important for any decision to be free from outside influence, something Trump’s outstanding debt threatens to jeopardize.

Back to table of contents

That Secret Service Detail

During the election, the Trump campaign put no small portion of its funds toward paying for use of the candidate’s own properties; perhaps the most notable of these expenditures was the nearly $170,000 the campaign spent in July on rent for its headquarters in Trump Tower. These expenses raised the possibility that, as Trump predicted in 2000, he “could be the first presidential candidate to run and make money on it.” Now that he will be president, he may be able to profit off of the Secret Service by virtue of the fact that he and his family will live in Trump Tower and fly in his private jets—which requires the agents tasked with guarding them to pay him rent and airfare.

The first way Trump could monetize his own protective detail is by having family members travel in his two planes and three helicopters. This is not so much speculative as foregone: Over the course of the campaign, the Secret Service, which traditionally pays for its own travel during elections, spent $2.74 million to fly on a plane owned by one of Trump’s own companies. While in office, Trump will fly exclusively on Air Force One, while Mike Pence will be riding Air Force Two. However, their families may still be flying on Trump’s private planes—along with their protective details, which would effectively direct even more money to Trump. (Previous first families have flown with a detail, whose legal purview covers “the immediate family members,” but none have done so on planes they themselves own.)

A bigger question regards Trump Tower in New York, where the president appears likely to spend a significant amount of time. For the past few decades, it has been common practice for the Secret Service to provide protection for the president and vice president’s non-White House residences, which sometimes entails paying rent to the officeholder. (Joe Biden, for example, received $2,200 per month when the agency rented a cottage he owned near his home in Delaware.)

But Trump Tower is a unique case, as it’s not in Delaware but the middle of Manhattan. Already, pedestrians and tourists are chafing at the increased security around the building, Trump’s frequent use of which has required closing a block of 56th Street and multiple lanes of Fifth Avenue; with multiple outlets reporting that Trump’s wife Melania and 10-year-old son Barron are expected to stay at Trump Tower for at least part of his term, it appears that the consternation will continue, with an enormous price tag for taxpayers: According to the New York Post, it could cost as much as $3 million a year to rent out two of the building’s vacant floors, meaning that Trump will be making money off of his own security detail. Meanwhile, Reuters has reported that the city of New York is calling for federal funds to reimburse the costs of keeping up a security detail around Trump Tower.

This system creates an unusual set of conflicting interests for Trump regarding his own travel and residences. Though presidents as disparate as Dwight Eisenhower and Barack Obama have evoked partisan ire over time spent away from the White House, whether on the golf course or on vacation in Hawaii, only Donald Trump will actually have gained from his and his family’s travels. And if, while in office, Trump visits properties he owns other than Trump Tower—his buildings in other U.S. cities like Chicago and Miami, for example, or his golf course and resort in Scotland, or one of the many international hotels bearing his name—he stands to gain from the stays for which his security detail (and, by extension, taxpayers) may be paying. Moreover, the more his family members fly on his planes, whether they are running his business on his behalf or running interference with foreign leaders, the more the Secret Service will end up paying for seats alongside them.

In fact, there are already signs that the Trump Organization has no qualms about making money off of the New York tower’s new security arrangements in more ways than one. According to Politico, just five days after the election, a prominent New York real-estate firm invoked Trump Tower’s new secret-service detail as a selling point for a $2.1 million condominium, which it described as “The Best Value in the Most Secure Building in Manhattan.” Though the flier was issued by an outside agency, the president’s corporation still stands to benefit from increased traffic through processing and other service fees, making the advertisement a clear example of how Trump stands to benefit off of his new position.

Back to table of contents

That Property in Georgia (the Country)

Trump’s election has had the effect of speeding up development on a number of his branded properties, even when the president appears not to be pulling any strings himself. As occurred with Trump Tower Buenos Aires, the completion of an embattled Trump-branded building in the former Soviet republic of Georgia is no longer on hold now that Trump has won. The project, which has been in the works in the seaside resort city of Batumi since 2010, was initially scheduled to break ground in 2013, but has been in stasis for several reasons, possibly including the 2013 electoral defeat of President Mikheil Saakashvili, a friend of Trump’s and a supporter of the deal.

According to a report in The Washington Post, the green-lighting of the Trump property in Batumi has not been linked to a specific conversation with Georgian leaders, and a U.S.-based partner on the project has suggested that it has moved forward without any nudging from the government. However, numerous public statements in the days since suggest that Trump’s election was a major factor, including an interview with a real-estate entrepreneur who said, “Cutting the ribbon on a new Trump Tower in Georgia will be a symbol of victory for all of the free world.”

That the property seems to be moving forward solely because Trump was elected suggests his various business interests around the world may play a role not only in his foreign policy but in how other countries seek to deal with the U.S. as well. America’s relationship with Georgia is largely shaped by concerns about Russian influence and potential aggression in the region, most recently manifested in Russia’s 2008 seizure of two regions of Georgia, South Ossetia and Abkhazia. With controversy already swirling over Trump’s admiration for Putin and Russia’s alleged role in the U.S. election, some in the foreign-policy community have expressed trepidation that Trump’s potential deferential attitude toward Russia would prove deleterious for the continued independence of former satellite nations like Georgia. So, if Georgia has an ulterior motive behind the approval of Trump’s property in Batumi, it would be to keep Russia at bay and maintain the status quo in the region.

According to Trump and his lawyer, as of January 11, the Trump Organization has suspended ongoing development projects and will no longer pursue deals in foreign countries. As the project in Batumi falls under both categories, the statement suggests that progress on the president’s property in the city is no longer moving forward. Still, it’s alarming that a country like Georgia may be giving Trump’s businesses favorable treatment (whether he asked for it or not) in an attempt to influence his foreign policy.

Back to table of contents

That Phone Call With Erdogan

One of the worries regarding Trump’s many conflicts of interest is that they may influence policy towards countries whose relationships with the U.S. are currently strained. Such is the case with Turkey, whose president, Recep Erdogan, has been cracking down significantly on civil liberties and democratic institutions within the country after a failed coup last summer. Though Turkey has in the past been a vital U.S. ally as a bulwark against Islamic terror, Erdogan’s authoritarian turn and combative stance toward Europe have led to some reevaluation of that relationship.

Thus, it was troubling news that when Erdogan phoned Trump shortly after the election—it was one of the first calls Trump received after his victory—Trump used the opportunity to plug his business partners in Istanbul. According to the Huffington Post, while on the line with Erdogan, Trump relayed praise for the leader from Mehmet Ali Yalcindag, whose father-in-law, Aydin Dogan, owns the holding company that operates the Trump Towers in Istanbul. Dogan has previously drawn Erdogan’s ire by criticizing the leader; in recent years, however, Dogan’s companies, most notably CNN Turk, have shown support for Erdogan’s regime, including broadcasting his first message after the uprising in July.

Trump’s conversation with Erdogan is also worth noting because of a number of Trump’s previous statements regarding the Turkish president. Though Erdogan briefly called for Trump’s name to be removed from the Istanbul property due to his proposed ban on Muslim immigration, Erdogan dropped the demand when, after the overthrow attempt, Trump praised Erdogan for “turning it around” and essentially dismissed concerns over Erdogan’s crackdown on civil liberties by bringing up domestic problems. Michael Flynn, who was recently named Trump’s national security adviser, wrote an election-day op-ed in The Hill arguing against offering asylum to a Muslim cleric whom Erdogan has accused of orchestrating the uprising, which some have interpreted as a diplomatic overture. Erdogan has also bristled at post-election protests in the U.S. and the description of both himself and Trump as part of a “ring of autocrats.” That the two are now talking about their countries’ relationship as in the same conversation as Trump’s business interests further complicates Trump’s strangely effusive comments about Erdogan.

It’s worth noting that Trump himself considers his hotel in Istanbul a potential conflict of interest. In a December 2015 interview with Stephen Bannon, at the time the chairman of Breitbart News, Trump said as much, telling Bannon, “I have a little conflict of interest ‘cause I have a major, major building in Istanbul. It’s a tremendously successful job.” That he chose to discuss the towers with Erdogan, albeit obliquely, through his references to his business partners when he has already acknowledged the impropriety of doing so simply reinforces the perception that he may prove unable to separate his business from his official duties while in office.  

Back to table of contents

That Hotel in Washington, D.C.

The White House is not the only new Trump property in Washington, D.C.; there’s also the new Trump International Hotel, which opened in October and is located just a few blocks away in what was formerly known as the Old Post Office Pavilion. Previously, the hotel played a role in the campaign as the site of the event at which Trump recanted (sort of) his belief that Barack Obama was not born in the United States. Now, the hotel is at the center of speculation as a symbol of how inextricable Trump’s presidential role may be from his personal interests.

First and foremost, since his election, ethics groups and critics of the president have repeatedly alleged that, simply by taking office, Trump has been in continual violation of the lease he holds on the Old Post Office, the government-owned building the Trump International Hotel inhabits. At issue is a clause in the lease stating that “no ... elected official of the Government of the United States shall be admitted to any share or part of this Lease, or to any benefit that may arise therefrom.” As such, watchdog organizations such as Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington have repeatedly appealed to the Government Services Administration, the federal agency that administers the lease, to terminate the agreement with the Trump Organization.

On March 23, however, the GSA released a letter finding that Trump “is in full compliance” with the lease. According to Kevin Terry, the contract officer who oversaw the initial negotiations between the government and Trump, the president’s plan to turn over his businesses to his two adult sons and the long-time Trump Organization executive Alen Garten is sufficient to meet the terms of the agreement, as Trump is no longer “an officer, director, manager, employee, or other official in any of the entities” involved in operating the hotel. The letter immediately drew outcry from ethics organizations like CREW, which called the ruling “a disappointment” that failed to address the underlying problems of Trump’s businesses, and the left-leaning advocacy group Public Citizen, which described it as “an affront to the rule of law” based on “tortured and wholly uncompelling analysis” that “would get a first-year law student kicked out of law school.”

The GSA’s decision may also prove a blow to the more general argument that Trump has not done enough to distance himself from his namesake organization. Critics have strenuously objected to the plan Trump and his lawyer Sheri Dillon laid out on January 11 to mitigate conflicts of interest, under which the president has stepped down from, but retains ownership of, his numerous business interests, and placed his assets in a trust to be administered by his adult sons and Garten. His opponents maintain that, because Trump still has significant knowledge of his business interests and will still be benefiting from them, and because he has put in place few real barriers between himself and his sons, there is still ample opportunity for outside actors to seek to influence the president’s decisions by patronizing his companies. Though the letter from the GSA discusses only the Trump International Hotel and not the legality of the overall arrangement, it is nonetheless a decidedly favorable outcome for Trump in the first legal challenge over his conflicts of interest.

As if its location didn’t pose enough of an ethical question, the hotel has already hosted at least one promotional event specifically aimed at enticing foreign diplomats to stay at the establishment while in town on official state business. On the one hand, direct influence will likely be difficult to prove: The establishment is, after all, a five-star hotel that would have been likely to attract high-class clientele even if Trump had lost the election, a fact to which Trump and those who surround him may well point in order to maintain a patina of respectability around their dealings. Still, the meeting’s proximity to the election reinforces that it will be worth watching the comings and goings at the hotel closely for signs that Trump, who so often accused his opponent (often without evidence) of pay-for-play, may be using his position as president to promote his businesses.

Trump himself acknowledged that his presidency is likely to increase traffic to his Washington, D.C. property. Speaking to The New York Times, the president noted that the property is “probably a more valuable asset than it was before” and that his brand is “hotter” since the election. However, he went on to insist that there was nothing even potentially problematic about his unprecedented situation and that he sees no reason why he couldn’t run both the presidency and his business without conflict.

Multiple events since the election have made Trump’s lease on the hotel a central focus of discussions of his conflicts of interest, including among Democrats in the House. On November 29, Bahrain—a country whose donations to the Clinton Foundation Trump and his campaign decried during the campaign—announced that it would be celebrating the anniversary of its king’s ascension to the throne at the hotel. Other events announced since the election include a Hannukah celebration co-hosted by the Embassy of Azerbaijan and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations and a reception for the conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation featuring Vice President Mike Pence as its keynote speaker.

Nor did the string of bookings by international entities end after Trump’s inauguration: On February 9, Politico reported that a lobbying group with connections to the government of Saudi Arabia had booked a four-day stay at the hotel in Washington, D.C. And on March 13, The Daily Caller reported that the Turkish-American Business Council will be co-hosting its annual conference at the Trump International Hotel after a seven-year runat the Ritz-Carlton. The latter announcement is especially notable because the organization’s chairman, Ekim Alptekin, is involved in another of the Trump administration’s scandals: One of Alptekin’s companies, the apparent shell company Inovo BV, paid $530,000 to the former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn to lobby on behalf of the Turkish government, which prompted Flynn to register as a foreign agent shortly after he was ousted from the Trump administration for lying about his contacts with Russian agents while a member of the president’s transition team.

Back to table of contents

That Argentinian Office Building

According to a report by the prominent Argentine journalist Jorge Lanata, the president’s first phone call with his Argentine counterpart Mauricio Macri included a discussion of the permit issues currently holding up construction of a new Trump-branded office building in Buenos Aires. Both Macri and Trump quickly denied the report; according to a statement from the Embassy of Argentina, “The subject both leaders talked about was the institutional relationship, and they briefly mentioned the personal relationship they have had for years.”

As summarized in a tweetstorm here, Trump’s relationship with Argentina’s government and business elites—and the story so far on his property there—is already long and convoluted. The phone call with Macri was apparently set up through Felipe Yaryura, one of Trump’s longtime associates whose company, YY Development Group, is in charge of Trump Tower Buenos Aires. The day after the phone call, the PanAm Post reported that YY Development Group had been approved to break ground in June 2017; evidence has since emerged that the permitting process is not, in fact, finished, although Trump’s business associates are moving ahead as though it is.

Based on the information at the president’s January 11 press conference, it appears that the properties in Argentina, as both ongoing development projects and deals in a foreign country, is no longer moving forward. Nevertheless, the questionable circumstances under which it did so in the immediate aftermath of the election demonstrates just how many avenues there are for Trump’s conflicts of interest to interfere with governance around the world.  

Back to table of contents

Those Companies in Saudi Arabia

Even as Trump was running for president, his company was continuing to operate and open new properties. While the most memorable openings may have been that of his hotel in Washington, D.C., and his golf course in Turnberry, Scotland, the Trump Organization was continuing to work on projects in other countries, including, according to a report the Washington Post, registering eight new companies in Saudi Arabia during the 16-month campaign.

The organization’s endeavors in Saudi Arabia are notable not only because they may further complicate the shaky relationship between the U.S. and an oil-rich gulf state notorious for human-rights abuses but also because of how they relate to Trump’s campaign rhetoric. One of his criticisms of Hillary Clinton was that her charitable foundation had accepted donations from governments with questionable records on human rights, most notably Qatar and Saudi Arabia, always with the implication (or direct accusation) that they were doing so to curry favor with Clinton when she was secretary of state. That Trump was continuing to level this criticism while his namesake organization was actively pursuing new projects in Saudi Arabia not only bodes ill for his ability to separate his personal and presidential interests but also further calls into question the honesty and transparency of his campaign.

Back to table of contents

That British Wind Farm

As he indicated when he stopped there during the campaign, President Trump takes enormous pride in his recently opened golf course in Turnberry, Scotland. The day after the British public voted for Brexit—over intense Scottish opposition—Trump spoke at the property’s opening, proudly touting how the decision’s deflationary effect on the pound would benefit his business.

However, Trump also has a second golf course in Aberdeen, where it appears Trump has attempted to intercede in the interest of his own pocketbook.* According to The New York Times, Trump had a post-election meeting with Nigel Farage in which he “encouraged Mr. Farage and his entourage to oppose the kind of offshore wind farms that Mr. Trump believes will mar the pristine view from one of his two Scottish golf courses.” Hope Hicks, a spokeswoman for the president, denied that the two had discussed the subject, only for Trump to later confirm that the topic had, in fact, come up in their conversation.

* This entry originally misstated that Trump intervened at Turnberry, his other golf course in Scotland. We regret the error.

Back to table of contents

Those Indian Business Partners

It didn’t take long after the election for President Trump to be seen in public with international business partners. According to a November 19 article in The New York Times, Trump took a break from his transition schedule to meet with three Indian real-estate executives who are currently building a Trump-branded apartment complex in Mumbai. According to both Trump and the Indian businessmen, the meeting was essentially congratulatory in nature; a picture posted by one of the executives on Twitter shows the four men smiling broadly and giving a thumbs-up to the camera. However, that the meeting happened in the first place suggests that Trump does not currently have any qualms about forestalling official state business for personal business.

On top of that, the meeting raises questions in the blind-trust realm as well. The president himself was not the only member of his family there; two Facebook photos show that Ivanka and Eric Trump both attended the meeting as well. Their presence serves as a reminder that their father seems so far uninterested in maintaining even the nominal separation between himself and his assets that he repeatedly said he would create during the campaign.

Back to table of contents

That Envoy From the Philippines

One leader with whom Trump already has an advantage over President Obama is Rodrigo Duterte, the similarly brash president of the Philippines. Duterte, who has threatened to “break up with America,” told Obama to “go to hell,” and called the president a “son of a whore,” expressed admiration for Trump, noting that, among other similarities, they both enjoy swearing.

Duterte’s affinity for Trump apparently goes beyond vulgar word choice. Late in October, Duterte appointed a longtime business associate of Trump’s as a special envoy to the United States, an announcement that became public shortly after the election. This appointment in particular raises questions because it is just as open to exploitation by Duterte as it is to Trump, as the Filipino president could intend to use his new envoy’s relationship with Trump to strengthen the Philippines’ hand. Whichever side the appointment does eventually benefit, however, the situation is nevertheless fraught with conflicts between the three men’s personal and political interests.

Back to table of contents

Until 4:44, Jay-Z’s albums could be understood as an indictment of the immorality of capitalism by a man luxuriating in its fruits. Jay-Z argued that there was something revolutionary in this, in a black man born in the projects proving himself a better entrepreneur than white men born into plenty, as if to suggest the infinite human potential destroyed by the circumstances he escaped. He was right.

Jay-Z used the terms of finance to describe the drug trade—referring to his crew as his “staff,” his organization as his “conglomerate,” smoothly transitioning from acknowledging the violence of the trade to comparing it to the stock market (“drug prices up and down like it’s Wall Street homes, but this is worse than the Dow Jones, your brains are now blown”), and connecting the inequality of the system that shaped his life with his determination to triumph over it.

He saw clearly that his pursuit of success visited countless cruelties and indignities upon himself and those around him, and that his triumph would come at unimaginable cost. Perhaps the one thing he didn’t expect was that it would have a happy ending, one with wealth and family, fame and fatherhood.

The contradiction of that transition is that while Shawn Corey Carter’s politics have simplified in disappointing ways, that’s come with an emotional maturity Jay-Z never had. On Reasonable Doubt, Jay-Z’s ideal relationship was one in which fidelity was optional; on 4:44, Carter raps movingly about the devastating realization that someday, his children will learn of his transgressions. He imagines himself on the other end of the knife he used to stab the director Lance “Un” Rivera in 1999. He gives his mother space on the album to speak about the years she spent hiding her sexual orientation.

The tension between Jay-Z’s love of the game and his fear of losing his soul, his indulgence in worldly pleasures as the years ripped away friends and family through death or betrayal, formed the emotional core of every Jay-Z album from Reasonable Doubt to The Blueprint 3. Appropriately enough, 4:44 begins with the metaphorical assassination of the Jay-Z persona as Carter takes on the responsibilities of fatherhood, marriage, and wealth. He offers a new vision of capitalism as a tool for community uplift. Carter is not at the height of his lyrical prowess on 4:44, but the album is ambitious and emotionally vulnerable, and represents a profound shift from Jay-Z’s previous offerings, especially in its belief in the power of the market to improve black lives rather than destroy them.  

***

Perhaps the most concise and perplexing statement of Carter’s new unambiguous love for capitalism comes in a couplet on the second track, “The Story of O.J.,” a song whose main theme is the indelible force of racism against black people regardless of class. On one jarring line, Carter states, “You wanna know what’s more important than throwin’ away money at a strip club? Credit. You ever wonder why Jewish people own all the property in America? This how they did it.”

Carter’s admonition is meant to encourage black people to imitate what he perceives to be a Jewish strength of ethnic solidarity and financial prowess. “‘The Story of O.J.’ is really a song about we as a culture, having a plan, how we’re gonna push this forward,” Carter said on iHeartRadio. But the line is nonetheless startling because it invokes the anti-Semitic canard that Jews maintain financial control of everything you see. It’s beneath Carter, a writer and artist of astonishing ability and sophistication who has every reason to know better. Responding to prior criticisms in his book Decoded, Jay-Z  wrote that “when I use lines like this, I count on people knowing who I am and my intentions, knowing that I’m not anti-Semitic or racist, even when I use stereotypes in my rhymes.”

There’s an old strain of black capitalism here that runs from Booker T. Washington through the Black Power movement to the Nation of Islam and beyond. Carter is also drawing on an old tradition of using American Jews as a model of a downtrodden people who found success in America. Frederick Douglass predicted that just as Jewish people had “risen” despite discrimination in Europe, “in like manner the Negro will rise in social scale.”

“The Jew, who was once in about the same position as the Negro is to-day, has now complete recognition, because he has entwined himself in America in a business or industrial sense,” Washington wrote in Industrial Training for the Negro in 1904. Washington also had a similar vision of community uplift through labor that never materialized, because the white South never truly adhered to its side of the bargain Washington offered—submission to Jim Crow in exchange for peace.

“The organization of the 3,000,000 Jews in America is little less than marvelous,” wrote W.E.B DuBois in the NAACP magazine The Crisis in 1915. “This is the great net work of organization which makes the Jewish people the tremendous force for good and for uplift which they are in this country. Let black men look at them with admiration and emulate them.”  

These sorts of admonitions, drawn from Maureen Adams’s anthology of essays on black-Jewish relations, echo through the high point of black-Jewish cooperation during the civil-rights movement, and its nadir beginning in the late 1960s, when both communities drifted toward nationalisms that would prove to be incompatible. Shirley Chisholm asserted that within Bed-Stuy, Barbadian Americans like her parents were referred to as “Black Jews” “because of their work ethic and obsession with their children’s education,” the historian Michael Woodsworth writes in Battle for Bed-Stuy.

And of course, there were those who bristled at the comparison, such as James Baldwin. He wrote that “the Jew profits from his status in America, and he must expect Negroes to distrust him for it. The Jew does not realize that the credential he offers, the fact that he has been despised and slaughtered, does not increase the Negro’s understanding. It increases the Negro’s rage.”

The analogy has never worked, because even at its worst moments America has generally been a haven for its Jewish immigrants and their descendants, and a place of bondage for its black residents and theirs. We know the names Leo Frank, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner; the names of black people who were killed in the South under similar circumstances are too numerous to recall without aid.

“Jews had a choice, they could be white and American in all things secular, and Jewish in all things religious,” wrote Julius Lester, a former Amherst professor and African American convert to Judaism. “This choice was not available to black people for obvious reasons.” American Jews simply have not, and likely never will, face the structural barriers that black Americans continue to face. To this day, black Americans are targeted by mainstream financial institutions with predatory loans and subprime mortgages with the potential to wipe out whatever financial success they’ve attained.

You rarely hear black people suggesting that they emulate Jewish success anymore, although as the only Jew in mostly black spaces growing up, and almost always the only black Jew, I sometimes heard it, often with the same ambivalent mix of admiration and hostility with which it comes across on 4:44. That advice isn’t given anymore because of the popular recognition that if American blacks had the same access to credit as American Jews, if thrift and moral rectitude were all that was necessary for economic success, the Bed-Stuy that created Shawn Carter would never have existed.  

***

At first, the Brooklyn neighborhood was actually two different ones: Bedford and Stuyvesant Heights. But when black families began to move into the adjacent communities in the 1930s, they became one entity. By 1940, the New Deal-era Home Owners’ Loan Corporation graded the neighborhood as “hazardous” because of an “infiltration of negroes.” The HOLC noted that “Colored infiltration” was  “a definitely adverse influence on neighborhood desirability although Negroes will buy properties at fair prices and usually rent rooms.” Racism made Bed-Stuy, and then the government drew a red line around it.

As Woodsworth writes in Battle for Bed-Stuy, “subsequent assessments by private lenders reinforced the notion that Central Brooklyn, with its expanding black population, should be quarantined. As a result, few prospective homebuyers in the area, black or white, could access federally guaranteed mortgages; existing homeowners, foreseeing plummeting property values, sold out while they could.”

The HOLC’s designation ensured that banks would not extend their usual loans there—depriving black Americans of the credit lines and capital investment that other communities would use to build wealth, and then look down their noses at black people wondering why they had not done the same. Ten years after the HOLC’s assessment, the New York City Housing Authority opened a 27-building complex known as the Marcy Houses, built on nearly 30 acres of homes and businesses cleared to make room for the public housing project. It was built to house working-class Americans and veterans, and was the childhood home of Shawn Corey Carter.

That Bed-Stuy, like all of New York City and black neighborhoods all over America, was created through private racism and state discrimination, by the hands of presidents like Franklin Roosevelt and city bureaucrats like Robert Moses. “Until the last quarter of the twentieth century,” writes Richard Rothstein in The Color of Law, “racially explicit policies of federal, state, and local governments defined where whites and African Americans should live.” Black Americans in Bed-Stuy (as elsewhere) organized to fight these policies, but as Woodsworth describes, fighting segregation in the North could be as daunting as fighting it in the South: “The problem for New York activists was that segregation was illegal, even if it persisted on the ground. They could not hope to deal a fatal blow to the Jim Crow system, since the Jim Crow system did not officially exist.”

That historical context is lacking from the economic nationalism of 4:44. The strip club line is a more risque expression of the Obamaesque notion that black people would have better credit if they spent less money on vice, that they would have money to invest in gentrifying Brooklyn real estate or fine art that appreciates in value. “What’s better than one billionaire? Two,” Carter raps on “Smile.” “Especially when they from the same hue as you.” Does Carter really believe a few more black members of the one percent club is going to change circumstances for the black masses?

This is far afield from the Jay-Z on Reasonable Doubt who acknowledged, “nine to five is how you survive but I’m not trying to survive I’m trying to live it to the limit and love it a lot”; who recalled the fleeting and bittersweet triumph of drug money, allowing him to sit at the bar “laughin’ hard, happy to be escapin’ poverty, however brief.” It’s not the Jay-Z who reveled in the skills he learned in the same drug trade, while confessing that drugs killed his father and led him to carry the gun that he used to shoot his brother. Who bragged about being able to sell “ice in the winter, I’ll sell fire in hell, I am a hustler baby, I’ll sell water to a well,” a line that’s brilliant because it identifies the essence of hustling as selling people things they don’t need. The Jay-Z who confessed that “the pressure for success can put a good strain, on a friend you call best, and yes, it could bring out the worst in every person, even the good and sane.” The rapper who acknowledged that his experience, the “American dream,” was “a journey seldom seen.”

There are hints of the old Jay-Z on 4:44 (“I still ain’t trippin’, that’s life, winners and losers, drug dealers and abusers, America likes me ruthless”), but he is largely gone, replaced by Shawn Carter the mogul, who raps on “Legacy” about leaving his wealth to his children over a sample of Donny Hathaway singing “one day we’ll all be free.” In 1999, Jay-Z told Vibe that his most important goal was “to create a comfortable position for me and everybody around me ... blacks, when we come up, we don’t normally inherit business. That’s not a common thing for us to have old money, like three and four generations, inheriting our parents’ businesses. That’s what we workin on right now, a legacy.” Nearly two decades later, Jay-Z’s vision of legacy has evolved past his inner circle to the larger black community.  

It’s a sunny optimism that stands out across the release of albums from black artists over the past two years from Solange Knowles to Kendrick Lamar that linger in the shadow of post-Obama melancholy, the sort of feeling Jay-Z might have been describing when he said in 2000, “niggas say it’s the dawn but I’m superstitious, shit is as dark as it’s been, nothing has moved as you predicted.” The point is not that 4:44’s message of community uplift is not inspiring—it is. But a lack of inspiration or motivation is not the reason that the black community suffers disproportionately from poverty, unemployment, crime, or incarceration.

And so the arc that began with Reasonable Doubt comes to an end of sorts: Jay-Z was willing to exploit the unjust system that condemned him to a life of poverty to escape it; Shawn Carter the mogul believes that system can set black people free, implying his improbable success and undeniable genius could or should be imitated. Jay-Z savaged the hypocrisy and cruelty of American capitalism while mastering it; on 4:44, Carter wonders if the system might work after all.  

Jay-Z has always asked a lot of his audience, rewarding those who look for a deeper meaning behind his deceptively casual flow. Carter’s newfound positivity and calls to buy black—and therefor subscribe to his TIDAL streaming service and buy his  champagne and cognac—whether sincere or otherwise, help his bottom line.

It’s hard not to think back to The Black Album, Jay-Z’s temporary farewell to the industry in 2003, in which he explains why he doesn’t adopt the more overtly political and activist stances of rappers like Talib Kweli and Common, and wonder whether, like Batman hiding behind Bruce Wayne, Jay-Z  the hustler is as dead as you might presume from listening to 4:44’s first track.

“If skills sold, truth be told, I’d probably be lyrically Talib Kweli, truthfully I wanna rhyme like Common Sense, but I did 5 mill, I ain’t been rhyming like Common since,” Jay-Z raps. Later, he says, “so next time you see the homie and his rims spin, just know my mind is working just like them (the rims, that is).”

President Donald Trump still has not taken the necessary steps to distance himself from his businesses while in office. In accordance with a plan that he and one of his lawyers, Sheri Dillon, laid out at a press conference on January 11, Trump has filed paperwork to remove himself from the day-to-day operation of his eponymous organization. However, numerous ethics experts have voiced strenuous objections to the plan, which they say does very little to resolve the issue: As long as Trump continues to profit from his business empire—which he does whether or not he is nominally in charge—they say, the possibility that outside actors will attempt to affect his policies by plumping up his pocketbook will remain very much in play.

Several of Trump’s critics have moved forward with legal action. The watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, or CREW, filed a lawsuit alleging that Trump’s business holdings violate the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution, which makes it illegal for government officials to “accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.” CREW’s bipartisan legal team includes, among others, Norm Eisen and Richard Painter, who served as ethics lawyers under Presidents Obama and George W. Bush, respectively; Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard University; and Zephyr Teachout, a professor at Fordham University (and former congressional candidate) who is considered an authority on the Emoluments Clause. All have been vocally critical of Trump’s continued refusal to sell off his business, and are now taking their case to court to argue that several of Trump’s businesses present avenues by which foreign governments could seek to influence the president by, for example, booking stays at one of his hotels or renting space at one of his properties. Additionally, the lawsuit seeks to force Trump to reveal his tax returns, something every president has done since Gerald Ford but which Trump has refused to do, significantly limiting the public’s ability to understand the president’s finances. When asked about the lawsuit, Trump described it as “totally without merit.” Eisen was quick to respond on Twitter, offering to “debate Trump (or his chosen champion) on the merits of our case anytime,” making it clear that CREW intends to continue to pursue its case. (CREW has also filed a separate complaint to the General Services Administration arguing that Trump has violated the lease on his Washington, D.C. hotel, which states that “no ... elected official of the Government of the United States … shall be admitted to any share or part of this Lease, or to any benefit that may arise therefrom.”)

Though CREW is the first group to bring a lawsuit against President Trump, it may soon have company. According to The New York Times, Anthony Romero, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, has said that his organization is looking for a plaintiff to sue Trump for violating the Emoluments Clause, although with a different claim to legal standing: While CREW intends to demonstrate that the group itself has suffered financial harm because the need to focus on the Emoluments Clause has diverted its resources away from other worthy causes, the ACLU is hoping to find a hotel or bed-and-breakfast owner that can prove he or she has lost business to one of Trump’s hotels during his presidency.

CREW’s lawsuit is just the latest development in what promises to be a continuing saga regarding Trump’s many conflicts of interest that began almost as soon as he won the presidency. Along with his unprecedented wealth, Trump brings to the office unique and gravely concerning entanglements that, whether he recognizes their effects or not, threaten to undermine his decision-making as president. The plan Trump and Dillon announced on January 11 would do very little to resolve the conflicts: It places control of his assets in the hands of his two adult sons and a longtime associate of their father’s with what so far amounts to a pinky-swear assurance that, despite their proximity to the president, they will not discuss any aspect of the business with him. On top of that, the plan supposedly would terminate several of the Trump Organization’s pending deals and place a ban on new foreign deals, two conditions undermined by the announcement that the organization would be moving forward with expanding its golf course in Aberdeen, Scotland.

Even before his most recent plan was laid out, Trump has attempted to deflect criticism by repeatedly asserting that the law barring executive-branch officials from maintaining financial holdings or business ties that overlap with their duties does not apply to the president or vice president. In this, he is correct; the law, passed in 1989, exempts the two chief executives from conflict-of-interest rules on the understanding that their purview is so broad that it would be impossible for them to completely disentangle themselves.

Regardless, legality does not imply propriety. Unless Trump acts to put actual distance between himself and his business ventures, these questions are likely to continue throughout his time in the Oval Office. On top of the aforementioned legal actions, the director of the Office of Government Ethics, Walter Shaub, has declared Trump’s efforts insufficient, remarking, “I don’t think divestiture is too high of a price to pay to be the president of the United States,” and a number of Senate Democrats have introduced legislation that would force Trump to divest or face impeachment. Below is an attempt to catalogue the more clear-cut examples of conflicts of interest that have emerged so far. The most recent entries appear at the top:

• That Meeting in Brussels
• That Tower in Toronto
• That Caribbean Villa
• Those Condos for Sale
• Those Reelection-Campaign Funds
• That Second Hotel in Washington, D.C.
• That Property in Azerbaijan
• That Trump Tower Penthouse
• That Resort in the Dominican Republic
• That Chinese Trademark
• That Meeting at Mar-a-Lago
• That Defense Department Trump Tower Rental
• That Red Cross Ball
• That D.C. Labor Dispute
• That Estate in Palm Beach
• Those Expansion Plans
• That Hotel in Vancouver
• That Reality-Television Show
• That Pipeline
• Those HUD Grants
• That Golf Course in Aberdeen
• That Other Billionaire New York Real-Estate Developer
• Those Indonesian Politicians
• That Emirati Businessman
• That Virginia Vineyard
• That Las Vegas Labor Dispute
• That Kuwaiti Event
• Those Certificates of Divestiture
• That Carrier Deal
• That Blind-Trust Issue
• Those Fannie and Freddie Investments
• That Phone Call With Taiwan
• That Deutsche Bank Debt
• That Secret Service Detail
• That Property in Georgia (the Country)
• That Phone Call With Erdogan
• That Hotel in Washington, D.C.
• That Argentinian Office Building
• Those Companies in Saudi Arabia
• That British Wind Farm
• Those Indian Business Partners
• That Envoy From the Philippines  

That Meeting in Brussels

On the European leg of his first foreign trip, President Donald Trump elucidated the relationship between his business and his presidency, although in a way that only further complicates the already-difficult task of understanding how his financial interests might impact his decisions in office. According to the Belgian newspaper Le Soir, in a meeting with Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel, Trump discussed his skepticism toward the European Union through the lens of his experiences as a real-estate mogul. Per a translation in The Guardian, an anonymous source told the paper, “Every time we talk about a country, [Trump] remembered the things he had done. Scotland? He said he opened a club. Ireland? He said it took him two and a half years to get a license and that did not give him a very good image of the European Union.”

The meeting isn’t the first time the president has discussed the Trump Organization—which he still owns, but no longer operates—with other world leaders: In a phone call with Turkish President Recep Erdogan, one of the first Trump made after his election, he relayed praise from a business partner on the company’s towers in Istanbul; on the line with Mauricio Macri, the president of Argentina, Trump mentioned a long-stalled project in Buenos Aires (which suspiciously began moving forward after the exchange).

His conversation with Michel, though, is different, for one key reason: Trump has no hotels in Belgium—and, unless his company is willing to violate a pledge meant to mitigate conflicts of interest, it won’t be pursuing deals there until Trump is out of office. That doesn’t definitively preclude the possibility that he meant to boost his businesses by venting to Michel, but it certainly reduces its likelihood.

What the conversation does do, though, is demonstrate how inextricable Trump’s businesses are from his behavior as president. It’s not just that Trump has ample knowledge of his holdings to act in his own financial interests and little reason to fear that a Republican-controlled Congress might try to stop him. It’s also that Trump seems to approach every issue with a mind toward how it’s impacted his company in the past—and how it will impact his company in the future. As the aforementioned anonymous source in Le Soir described it, “One feels that he wants a system where everything can be realized very quickly and without formality”—a broad pro-business stance that would just so happen to make it significantly easier for the Trump Organization to operate in Europe as well.

As long as the president retains ownership of his company, it’s possible to impute the Trump Organization’s footprint in a variety of the administration’s policy stances. For instance, the notion that Trump favors leaders of countries where he has property is arguably the least concerning explanation for his affinity for noted authoritarians like Erdogan and Filipino President Rodrigo Duterte. On economic issues as well, the president has supported numerous policies over the years that would mainly help wealthy businesspeople in general and the Trump Organization in particular; for example, he’s in favor of weakening the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which would make it significantly easier for his company to move forward on deals in countries like Azerbaijan where bribery of public officials is more common than it is in the U.S. These questions of where genuine policy positions end and self-interest begins will continue—unless, of course, Trump does what ethics experts have urged him to do and actually sells his business.

Back to table of contents  

That Tower in Toronto

President Donald Trump’s properties around the world bring with them business partners from around the world. Several of these ties have already come under scrutiny: A Trump-branded tower in Baku, Azerbaijan, put him in business with allegedly corrupt officials who are themselves connected with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, for example, while two properties in Indonesia link him to officials implicated in a bribery scandal and a racially-motivated attempt to oust a sitting governor.

Now, The Wall Street Journal has reported an additional source of a conflict of interest along these lines: Trump International Tower and Hotel in Toronto. According to the Journal, one of Trump’s partners in the project, Alexander Shnaider, received millions of dollars from the Russian bank Vnesheconombank, or VEB, shortly before investing in the project. Shnaider, who is Russian American and was the main developer on the Trump-branded property, sold his own company’s share in a Ukrainian steelmaker to VEB for $850 million in 2010. Shnaider’s lawyer said in April that $15 million from the sale went into the Toronto tower, although he walked back his statement the next day, writing that he is “not able to confirm that any funds” from the sale went into the project.

VEB is owned by the Russian government; according to its website, its mandate is “to enhance [the] competitiveness of the Russian economy, diversify it, and stimulate investment activity,” and the bank’s supervisory board is chaired by the country’s prime minister, Dmitry Medvedev. At the time of the deal with Shnaider’s company, though, its chairman was the current Russian President Vladimir Putin, who, according to a Russian government official and multiple experts, would have had to sign off on such an exchange.

As with many of Trump’s business holdings, the property represents a conflict of interest because it brings him revenue that’s made possible by money from a bank owned and operated by a foreign government. Though Trump doesn’t own the tower—he merely licenses his name to Shnaider, who owns the building through his company Talon International Development Inc.—the Trump Organization nevertheless profits off of the building and, by extension, from VEB’s deal with Shnaider. This potentially gives the Russian government leverage that it could use should it want to influence Trump’s policies. That means that the Trump Organization’s continued involvement with the tower may represent a violation of the Constitution’s Emoluments Clause, which precludes elected officials from “accept[ing] of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.”

The Journal’s report highlights the inadequacy of the financial disclosures the president has so far offered. Last week, Trump insisted that his company does not have business ties to Russian “persons or entities.” As my colleague David Graham wrote, the letter from Trump’s lawyers that Trump proffered on the subject last week “doesn’t define several key terms,” leaving open the possibility that one of Trump’s projects benefited from Russian funding through a pass-through corporation or another intermediary. VEB’s role in the financing of the Trump-branded property in Toronto is a perfect example: Because money from VEB went toward enriching Trump (through Shnaider), one can reasonably argue that Trump didn’t do enough to eliminate the conflict of interest that the hotel creates for him in office.

Back to table of contents  ​

That Caribbean Villa

President Donald Trump has another property on the market: Le Château des Palmiers, his estate on the Caribbean island of St. Maarten. The president’s company bought the 11-bedroom beachfront compound in 2013, and the Trump Organization has been using it as a rental property ever since. It’s listed at $6,000 per night on TripAdvisor; according to specialty sites such as Luxury Retreats, which lists the price as between $6,000 and $20,000, and Mansion Global, which places the upper limit at $28,000, the price increases substantially during the winter, when the Caribbean offers an escape from cold weather. According to the disclosure forms Trump submitted to the Federal Election Commission (which remain the only public documentation of his finances), he derived between $100,001 and $1 million from the property in the year leading up to May 2016.

The asking price for Le Château des Palmiers remains unknown. The Trump Organization is selling the property through the real-estate agency and auction house Sotheby’s; according to the listing for the complex, the price is available only upon request. However, there are some clues available. On his FEC disclosure forms, Trump lists the property as worth between $5 million and $25 million, which does correspond with the $19.7 million he paid for it four years ago. According to Mansion Global, 7th Heaven, a real-estate brokerage in St. Maarten, has identified the asking price as $28 million, although 7th Heaven’s current page for the property lists the price as “PoA,” or Price on Application.

Though Trump no longer runs the Trump Organization, he still owns the company and, by extension, the property, meaning that he will profit from its sale. That means that Le Château des Palmiers offers yet another avenue by which somebody could attempt to influence the president’s decisions by putting a large sum of money in his pocket. It would even be possible for somebody to make an offer well above the currently unknown asking price to curry favor with him (and, possibly, through the artful use of a shell company, hide their identity).

As NPR noted, the Trump Organization’s decision to sell Le Château des Palmiers is “the first known major divestiture of a Trump property since he became president.” As such, it demonstrates the insufficiency of the steps the president has taken to eliminate his conflicts of interest. Trump has put the leadership of his company in the hands of his adult sons and a longtime Trump Organization executive with relatively few—and, based on Donald Jr. and Eric’s frequent presence at administration events and Eric’s statement that he will share some business-related data with his father, relatively permeable—barriers blinding him from knowledge of his financial interests.

Had Trump taken the measures suggested repeatedly by ethics experts on both sides of the political aisle, he would by now have put his assets in what’s called a blind trust, which would entail turning over his empire to a third party with whom he will have no contact, who would sell off the properties and reinvest the resulting money in other assets without providing the president any information about the sales or the purchases. Instead, Trump has set up a system under which, even if he does proceed to sell off his business, one property at a time, he will simply create new conflicts of interest as he takes payments from those who are purchasing the Trump Organization’s real estate.

Back to table of contents  

Those Condos for Sale

President Donald Trump’s finances are infamously opaque. Since he has not followed the long-standing presidential custom of releasing his tax returns to the public, the only publicly available records of where he derives his income are his two filings with the Federal Elections Commission. Even those are difficult to parse: Much of his business empire comprises limited-liability companies (or LLCs), which face very few disclosure requirements, and shell and pass-through corporations, which can obscure ownership and make money trails harder to follow.

Much the same can be said for whoever has been buying up Trump Organization condominiums. A lengthy investigation published in USA Today found that, “since launching his White House bid, Trump’s companies have sold at least 58 units nationwide”—out of a total of more than 400 currently on the market—”for about $90 million. Almost half of those sold to LLCs.” One of those LLCs, a financial firm created shortly before the Republican National Convention named Milan Investment Limited, spent $3.1 million to buy 11 condominiums in the building the president co-owns in Las Vegas.

Normally, such a story would then identify who is behind the purchase and whether they may have some ulterior motive in buying something from the president. In this case, though, repeated efforts by the USA Today to ascertain who exactly is behind Milan apparently came up empty. The company’s headquarters in a strip mall the outskirts of Las Vegas are registered to two individuals named Jun Xu and Qi Huang; however, the reporters were unable to reach Xu and Huang through either their listed addresses and phone numbers or through business associates. A third individual associated with Milan, Chen Huang, also apparently could not be reached for comment, nor did the Trump Organization respond to inquiries about the identities of the buyers. The newspaper’s attempts to find the buyers of other Trump Organization condos met with mixed results: Though reporters were able to track down the real people behind some of the purchases, including a couple who said they bought the property because they’re fans of Trump’s, others proved just as elusive as whoever is behind Milan.

As the USA Today notes, the story highlights one of the major problems underlying Trump’s decision to retain his businesses while in office. There is no law requiring a shell company like Milan to disclose the identities of its owner(s) or the source of its money while purchasing real estate. The Trump Organization still owns hundreds of condominiums, the sales of which will directly profit it and, by extension, the president; this offers plenty of chances for any individual or corporation to purchase a unit to attempt to curry favor with Trump without having to disclose their own identity to the public.

So far, the Republican-controlled Congress has shown little interest in investigating the constitutionality of Trump’s decision to hold onto his businesses. That means that the only real disincentive for those attempting to influence the president by patronizing his businesses is the bad publicity that might ensue. But Milan Investment Limited’s secretive investment in Trump’s properties shows how easy it would be for an individual or a corporation to stay anonymous and avoid that scrutiny.

Back to table of contents  

Those Reelection-Campaign Funds

For President Donald Trump, it pays to be in constant campaign mode.

Metaphorically, at least, this isn’t unusual; the idea of the “permanent campaign,” a reference to how politicians consider their reelection chances from almost the moment they take office, has been around for decades. Such is the case for Trump, who filed a letter with the Federal Election Commission establishing his eligibility to run for a second term in 2020 just hours after taking the oath of office. Though the letter declares only that he can run, not necessarily that he will run, it gives broad coverage for the president to begin fundraising and holding campaign events, and to do so far earlier in his first term than have previous presidents.

Since doing so, Trump has held several events that, while officially presented as part of his “thank-you tour,” have seemed an awful lot like his campaign rallies. Meanwhile, between merchandise sales and an already-active fundraising effort, he has raised more than $7.1 million, and the Republican National Committee has raised an additional $23 million. That’s not necessarily noteworthy by itself; by this time, President Obama and the Democratic National Committee had raised $15 million. (Obama had not yet filed for eligibility in 2012 three months into his first term, although he had held events to promote his economic-stimulus package.) What does make Trump unusual is that he has already spent $6.3 million of his reelection campaign funds—and, according to reports he recently filed with the FEC, he is paying some of that money to his own personal businesses—for instance, renting space at his hotels or golfing on his courses—thereby literally profiting off of his permanent campaign.

This practice is nothing new for Trump. As early as 2000, he was speculating that he “could be the first presidential candidate to run and make money on it” by patronizing his own businesses and running the campaign out of one of his properties. During his 2016 bid, he did exactly that, establishing his political headquarters in Trump Tower (and quintupling the rent as soon as he became the Republican nominee and began drawing funds from the party rather than his personal war chest). Shortly before his victory, The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump’s campaign had paid out the unprecedented sum of more than $14 million to his family and companies for such services as flights on his personal airplanes, rent at Trump Tower, and meals and hotel rooms at other Trump buildings.

Similarly, since taking office, Trump has profited off of the federal government’s newfound need to patronize his properties. Both the Secret Service and Department of Defense are renting out space in Trump Tower, for example, with the former believed to be paying at least $3 million per year to do so. This has led to rumblings that Trump may be violating the Constitution’s Domestic Emoluments Clause, which holds that the president “shall not receive ... any other Emolument from the United States, or any of them,” beyond his official salary.

The amount Trump’s reelection campaign has spent at his businesses is comparatively small: According to The Wall Street Journal, more than 6 percent of the $6.3 million it’s spent so far, or almost $500,000, went to Trump’s hotels, golf courses, and restaurants. But that’s a higher rate than when his campaign money was going to his own businesses for the 2016 campaign ($14 million out of a total of $322 million, or about 4.3 percent). At his current rate, if he spends a similar amount over the next election cycle—and given that he’s already started spending, he could easily far outdo himself—he would be directing nearly $20 million to his own businesses.

On top of the arguable impropriety of personally profiting off of his donors’ and his party’s largesse, the situation presents perverse incentives for Trump. Already, elected officials, up to and including the president, to an extent base their behavior in office on what they believe will play well with voters rather than (or, in the best-case scenario, on top of) what is best for America. This is certainly true of Trump, whose every decision seems to prompt discussion of how it plays into the tension between his nationalist base and traditional Republican voters.

The personal financial benefits of campaigning mean that Trump has a little more motivation to delve into his reelection efforts than most politicians in his position. Because he is personally profiting, he has another reason to aim his politics toward his base so that they will continue donating to him and buying his merchandise in the downtime between election years. Moreover, rather than stockpile for 2020, he has an incentive to keep up the campaign rallies—and keep charging for them, as he did in 2016—so that he can continue funneling money from his donors and voters into his personal businesses.

Moreover, that the president is redirecting donors’ money into his own businesses only further highlights the inadequacy of the trust arrangement he has set up to supposedly prevent him from conflicts of interest. Trump and his lawyers have claimed that, by resigning from his positions within the Trump Organization and handing over control to his two adult sons and a long-time business associate, the president has distanced himself from his businesses enough that he will no longer be tempted to act in his own financial interests. Ethics experts (and common sense) immediately disagreed: Unless the president actually sells his businesses, many have said, and has the funds reinvested without his knowledge, he still knows more than enough about his sources of profit to put his own personal gain above that of the country. The almost $500,000 he’s channeled into the Trump Organization via his reelection campaign demonstrates this: Trump doesn’t need to be in charge of his businesses to know how to direct money their way; all he needs to know is where they are.

Back to table of contents

That Second Hotel in Washington, D.C.

There may soon be more than one Trump Hotel in Washington D.C. According to The Washington Post, the Trump Organization is considering purchasing another property in the nation’s capital to develop for its recently created Scion brand, which aims to offer a more affordable alternative to the upscale properties bearing the president’s name.

Unlike the Trump International Hotel—the upscale property that opened in September 2016 and has become something of a synecdoche for the president’s conflicts of interest—a new Scion hotel in D.C. would likely be a licensing deal. That means that, rather than the Trump Organization owning and operating the property itself, a third-party hotelier will be paying the president’s company for the right to use the Scion name; candidates identified by the Post include Foxhall Partners, which has two properties in the city and a third under development, and the Beacon Hotel in downtown D.C.

But even if it isn’t actually owned or operated by the Trump Organization, the new hotel would likely attract scrutiny along the same lines as the Trump International. A licensing agreement means that the president will not be profiting off of the building directly; payments from individuals or organizations booking rooms or events there will not go straight to the Trump Organization, but to the hotelier. But Trump will still have a financial stake in the hotel’s viability: The longer it stays in business and the more successful it is, the more (and longer) the licensee will pay to use the Scion name, and the more likely other owners may be to commit to similar partnerships with the fledgling brand. Trump has resigned from his positions with the Trump Organization and transferred control of his assets to his two adult sons and a long-time business partner. But he still owns the company, which means he will still profit from his properties. According to his son Eric, the president will even continue to receive quarterly reports on how his real-estate empire is faring financially. The pathway to Trump’s pocketbook may be slightly more complicated, but it still exists.

The proposed new property also engenders some of the same concerns as the broader round of expansions the Trump Organization announced in February. Developing a hotel, even in an existing building, means working with local government bureaucracies, such as zoning offices that sign off on structural changes or licensing boards. In any city, this would create  conflicting incentives for government officials who are suddenly being asked to rule on the president’s businesses. On the one hand, Washington, D.C., like many of the cities into which the Trump Organization is looking to expand, voted strongly against the president in the 2016 election; city officials, especially those elected by D.C.’s denizens, may feel a need to factor his unpopularity into their decisions with regard to the newly proposed hotel. On the other hand, the federal government still controls D.C.’s budget, placing additional pressure to green-light a proposal from the infamously mercurial commander-in-chief.

Back to table of contents

That Property in Azerbaijan

When it comes to President Donald Trump’s constellation of foreign investments, properties, and companies, much of the attention so far has been on his business’s apparent violation of the Constitution’s Emoluments Clause, which bars officeholders from taking gifts from foreign leaders. According to numerous ethics experts, the clause takes an expansive definition of gifts, encompassing everything from a direct bribe to a foreign official’s approval of construction of a new Trump property. But some of the Trump Organization’s properties raise additional red flags due to the specific partners involved. That’s true in Indonesia, for example, where Trump’s affiliates have been involved in bribery scandals and radical Islamic nationalist parties, and Brazil, where the company pulled out of a branding agreement amid a criminal investigation of a local business partner.

Such is the case in Azerbaijan, which Transparency International ranks as among the most corrupt countries in the world, where the Trump International Hotel and Tower in Baku remains unopened. Though the long-stalled development has generated a steady drip of news and rumors for years, an overview by Adam Davidson in The New Yorker, entitled “Donald Trump’s Worst Deal,” puts into perspective just how convoluted the situation is, and just how much the project has led Trump and his company into a partnership with numerous corrupt officials in the Middle East. The details suggest that, on top of the continual underlying breach of the Emoluments Clause, the Trump Organization’s involvement may also violate the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, or FCPA, which forbids American companies from participating, even unknowingly, in bribery schemes in other countries, with a penalty of up to $2 million and up to five years in jail.

According to Davidson, though the project originated in 2008 as a high-end apartment building, the Trump Organization has had a licensing deal with the building’s Azerbaijani developers to turn the property into a hotel since 2012. Though the Trump Organization presented the deal as a straightforward licensing agreement, it was in fact a much more involved agreement granting the company—specifically, Trump’s daughter Ivanka—extensive oversight over the project. Based on his FEC disclosures in 2016, which as of this moment remain the only official record of Trump’s finances, the president has so far made $2.8 million from the partnership.

But what makes this story unique among the dozens of ethical questions surrounding the president is the Trump Organization’s partners on the project. Ostensibly, the main developer behind the property is Anar Mammadov. He is in turn the son of Azerbaijan’s transportation minister Ziya Mammadov, who was once described in a leaked diplomatic cable as “notoriously corrupt even for Azerbaijan.” Also in on the deal, though not initially publicly disclosed, is Ziya’s brother Elton, who founded the company that currently owns the property in Baku while serving in Azerbaijan’s parliament. Then there’s the Mammadovs’ relationships with Iranian oligarchs. For years, the Mammadovs have been closely linked with the Darvishis, whose members include the head of a  construction firm implicated in the Iranian Revolutionary Guard’s possibly illicit financial operations and the former leader of a company that was sanctioned by the United States for its role in Iran’s attempts to develop an arsenal of nuclear missiles. As the Mammadovs’ influence within Azerbaijan has begun to weaken in recent years, they have  increased both their wealth and their mutually profitable relationship with the Darvishis, green-lighting a number of deals that will prove lucrative for both families.

Alan Garten, the chief legal officer for the Trump Organization, asserted to The New Yorker that, as the company has never worked directly with Ziya or Elton Mammadov, it has not engaged in any behavior that should trip ethical alarms. He has additionally claimed that the company did “extensive due diligence” in making the deal, which did not raise “any red flags,” although the actual employees who carried out the process are no longer with the company.

Still, merely by partnering with the Mammadov family, the Trump Organization may have violated the FCPA. The law explicitly covers cases in which an American company claims not to have known it was working with corrupt officials; jurisprudence since its 1977 passage has further expanded the law’s definition to include “conscious avoidance,” or active efforts by an American company to not learn of a foreign partner’s corruption. So though Garten claims that, since the Trump Organization did not have enough control over the project and has not itself engaged in bribery, its hands are essentially clean, experts on the law say that the Trump Organization may be legally liable if its foreign partners engaged in corrupt practices.

Adding to all this is the fact that Trump is on the record as opposing the FCPA in May 2012, right when it would have become relevant to his company’s engagement in Azerbaijan. Trump called the law “absolutely horrible” and argued that, since other countries do not have the same provision, American corporations are at a major disadvantage in which bribery is the norm. Trump’s appointee to the Securities and Exchange Commission (which enforces the statute), Jay Clayton, similarly considers the FCPA an obstacle to U.S. companies seeking to expand abroad. A dissenting voice on the topic is Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who stated in his confirmation hearings that he intends to continue enforcing the statute. Which of these voices will end up winning out on the topic remains an open question.

This, then, is the situation in which the Trump Organization—and, by extension, the president, who has stepped down from his position within the business but who retains ownership—finds itself in Azerbaijan: The company’s direct partner on Trump Tower Baku is the scion of a wealthy and notoriously corrupt family that appears to have only stepped up its self-dealing as its political power wanes. That family is engaged in what appears to be a relationship of mutual graft with Iranian oligarchs with deep connections to their country’s Revolutionary Guard, the ideological militia widely suspected by the international community of gross corruption and sponsoring terror at home and abroad.

These families can be added to the ever-growing list of international partners whose relationships with the Trump Organization could create conflicts of interest for the president. The Mammadovs’ arrangement with Trump’s company may not only violate the Emoluments Clause but could also feasibly put the president and his family in legal trouble should the SEC choose to actively pursue enforcement of the FCPA in Azerbaijan. And the Darvishis could in turn use their relationship to influence the Mammadovs, which could have significant implications should Trump attempt, as he has said he will, to take hard-line stances that could affect the Iranian Revolutionary Guard’s activities. And if Trump so chooses, he could direct the Justice Department to curtail its enforcement of the FCPA or even use his bully pulpit to lead a legislative push to undo it, essentially condoning unethical behavior that in many countries enables leaders to personally profit at the expense of their own citizens—which, of course, could be a fair way to characterize the current situation with Trump’s business holdings.

Back to table of contents

That Trump Tower Penthouse

With President Trump in office and still refusing to distance himself from his businesses, every new tenant in one of his buildings creates another possibility of a conflict of interest. Such is the case with Xiao Yan Chen, who also goes by Angela Chen, a business executive who, according to documents filed with the New York City Department of Finance, purchased a $15.8 million penthouse apartment at Trump Tower in New York on February 21. Chen’s transaction is the first notable real-estate deal involving one of Trump’s properties since the election, although it should be noted that she has lived in a different unit in Trump Tower since 2004. And though Trump has officially removed himself from the board of directors of Trump Park Avenue LLC, the corporation that runs Trump Tower, he remains the company’s owner, meaning that he profits from its dealings.

Chen’s purchase represents the exact kind of entanglement that has fueled concerns that Trump’s financial interests could influence his decision-making as president. Chen is the founder and managing director of Global Alliance Associates, a consulting firm that, according to its website, “facilitates the right strategic relationships with the most prominent public and private decision makers in China.” The firm is explicit about what it sells: access. Though the page listing its partnerships is currently empty, the firm’s “affiliates” page includes a number of international organizations promoting relationships between private corporations and the governments of the United States and China, including the USA-China Chamber of Commerce, the Asia Society, and the China Institute. Notably, Global Alliance Associates also consults for the U.S. Department of Commerce and the U.S. Trade & Development Agency, meaning that Trump is accepting money from the founder and managing director of a firm that works with the U.S. government.

Because Trump is holding onto his businesses, he has created a situation in which some of his earnings include money from the leader of a company whose sole goal is to help its clients curry favor with the Chinese government; it’s no stretch to believe that her move to Trump Tower and the money it puts in Trump’s pocket may help her gain access to the United States government. (Reached for comment by the New York Post, Chen said she was “not comfortable” discussing the purchase and its possible ramifications for her company.) Even if it wasn’t Chen’s intention, the transaction still could influence the president. As the president’s conflicts of interest continually accumulate, the likelihood that one or more will eventually impact his decision-making continually grows—as does the appearance that he is ethically compromised by the many people, organizations, and governments from which he is receiving money while in office.

Back to table of contents

That Resort in the Dominican Republic

The Trump Organization’s January 11 pledge that it would no longer be pursuing new deals in foreign countries is looking increasingly toothless. Shortly after President Donald Trump took office, The Guardian reported that the president’s business would be moving forward with a planned expansion of its golf course in Aberdeen. Now, the Associated Press has reported that the company is working on a licensing deal in the Dominican Republic.

As was true with the Aberdeen plans, the Trump Organization has provided a narrow justification under which it argues that the news does not violate its promise. Technically, it argues, the deal is not new: The Trump Organization has had a contract with Ricardo and Fernando Hazoury, the brothers who own the Cap Cana Resort in the Dominican Republic, since 2007. But the financial crisis and disagreements between the Trump family and the Hazoury brothers, which climaxed with Eric Trump accusing the pair of “textbook fraud” in a 2012 lawsuit, had stalled the arrangement for nearly a decade, and the two parties haven’t written a new contract since the 2007 deal was struck. Even other real-estate developers have said that the resumption of the relationship between the Trumps and Hazourys caught them by surprise. For their part, the Hazourys have said that the relationship with the Trumps “remains incredibly strong, especially with Eric, who has led this project since its conception.”

The development in the Dominican Republic epitomizes the way the Trump Organization seems intent to violate the spirit of their “no new foreign deals” pledge, and arguably even the letter. Asked about the Organization’s justification for the deal, Richard Painter, who served as the ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush, noted that the company “can take the tiniest little past involvement in something and then extend it into an enormous new deal” and hasn’t presented a meaningful way “to distinguish between new business and old business.” Already, the Trump Organization has provided excuses for moving forward with two projects based on an interpretation of its own pledge that seems predicated on the idea that a deal can only be described as “new” if there had never been any relationship whatsoever between the Trump family and the property in question. As the company finds more explanations to broaden what initially seemed to be a clear-cut policy to reduce conflicts of interest—arguably, the only step in Trump’s plan that actually would have helped him do so—the pledge will likely become increasingly meaningless.

The Cap Cana story is yet another conflict of interest that only became public because of reporting from local media—and because of the nonchalance with which the Trump family handles the relationship between their business and the presidency. The first outlet to report on Eric’s trip was the Dominican newspaper Diario Libre, shortly after Cap Cana posted a picture of the Hazourys with Eric on its website. This follows stories like the president’s phone call with the president of Argentina and his company’s plans to expand into Taiwan, both of which were similarly broken by local newspapers before getting picked up by American press outlets. Further, like the president’s post-election meeting with business partners from India and Eric’s trip to Uruguay, the Trump family’s propensity for photo ops played a role: Even amid intensifying scrutiny of the Trump Organization’s actions, Eric seems unworried about having not only taken the trip but also taken pictures with his business partners.

The president’s putative pick for his ambassador to the Dominican Republic only adds to the perception that Trump will intermingle business and politics in the country. Trump has picked Robin Bernstein, a campaign donor, business partner, and founding member of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club, to be his administration’s representative in the country. Bernstein and her husband Richard have been in business with the president and his company for decades through The Americas Group, a consulting and marketing firm focused on construction projects in Latin America and the Caribbean. Choosing personal friends and supporters to be ambassadors is relatively common, especially in countries with which the United States has relatively uncomplicated relations. However, Trump’s decision to appoint somebody with whom he has long maintained a financial relationship—his second such appointment, after having named fellow billionaire real-estate developer and business partner Steven Roth to head his infrastructure program—suggests a continued willingness to blur the lines between his endeavors as a businessman and his duties as president, all while contributing to the perception that the president is willing to reward those who have done business with him in the past.

Back to table of contents

That Chinese Trademark

On February 15, President Trump scored a long-sought-after victory when a Chinese court ruled in his favor in a trademark dispute. In the case, which dragged on for more than a decade, the Trump Organization won sole rights to use the president’s name on products in the country, which would help prevent a bevy of unrelated entrepreneurs from applying it to a wide range of products, from toilets to clothing to condoms to explosives.

Almost immediately, Trump’s critics pointed out that the ruling poses a clear conflict of interest. Senator Dianne Feinstein of California called the trademark decision “deeply troubling,” adding, “If this isn’t a violation of the Emoluments Clause, I don’t know what is.” Some, including Feinstein, went further in their assertions: Only days before, Trump had apparently reversed one of his stances toward China by offering a full-throated endorsement of the “One China Policy” (under which countries officially recognize the mainland Chinese government but not Taiwan), leading to the suggestion that the court’s decision was part of a quid-pro-quo deal between the two governments.

Additional context, though, complicates this picture. The case, it turns out, was largely resolved in November 2016, before there was any indication that the president would waffle on the One China Policy by calling the president of Taiwan, and was the culmination of more than a decade of litigation that largely predates Trump’s involvement in politics. Conflicts of this kind over trademarks are fairly common in China, and, though resolving such cases often costs companies significant time and money, the Trump Organization’s victory is one of several that have gone in favor of American corporations in recent years. None of this rules out the possibility of a quid-pro-quo arrangement, but in sum it suggests that there is more to the case than what Feinstein alleges.

Whether or not the Chinese government tried to curry favor with the president by seeing to it that the court ruled in his favor, Trump’s newly awarded trademark poses a conflict of interest that could impact his future interactions with China. On top of the questions around his adherence, or lack thereof, to the One China Policy, Trump has taken a number of controversial stands when it comes to China, from accusing the country of currency manipulation to threatening to take hard-line trade positions that experts worry could lead to a trade war. Over all of these questions will loom the president’s knowledge that, with its trademark now secured, his company has an ongoing profitable relationship with the Chinese government—which, even if Trump does not proactively consider it in approaching the negotiating table, could provide his Chinese counterparts with leverage to influence the president’s decisions.

Back to table of contents

That Meeting at Mar-a-Lago

Of his first three weekends in office, President Donald Trump spent two of them away from Washington, D.C., at his Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Florida. On his first trip to the resort, which he has dubbed his “Winter White House,” Trump spent time on the golf course, attended a ball held by the Red Cross—a federally chartered organization over which he will likely be tasked to wield authority while in office—and held a Super Bowl party at which he hobnobbed with wealthy patrons.

His third weekend in office, Trump brought a guest of honor along with him: the prime minister of Japan, Shinzo Abe. After first meeting with Abe at the real White House, Trump took his Japanese counterpart to Florida for a weekend on the links. The biggest controversy out of the weekend was over the president’s handling of a situation that developed on Saturday, February 11: As news of a North Korean missile test broke during dinner, Trump and Abe discussed the situation in public, using light from phones of gathered onlookers to read briefing documents, an incredibly lax approach to information security, particularly ironic given that Trump won in part because of his opponent’s own lapses in information security.

The situation perfectly encapsulates the way the president’s business interests are coming up against those of the country. Already, the Trump Organization’s decision to double Mar-a-Lago’s initiation fees led to accusations of profiteering, premised on the notion that people would be willing to pony up in the hopes of earning an audience with the commander-in-chief.

The events of Saturday, February 11 took the problem to a whole new level. By discussing the recently obtained intelligence with Abe without leaving the table, the president committed a breach of international-security protocol in a very public setting. Even had the meeting been taking place in the White House, Trump’s lackadaisical approach to information security would have been cause for concern; for self-evident reasons, briefings on urgent security situations do not typically happen in somewhat open settings around civilians. But on the patio at Mar-a-Lago, the situation becomes much more dangerous, because the patio is not a secure setting, and the administration does not appear to have taken measures to make it one. This is a perfect example of a conflict of interest in practice: Trump has an incentive to host an event at Mar-a-Lago (personal financial gain) that runs directly counter to what would be best for the country’s security (hosting the event at the White House or an otherwise secure location). Not only that, part of the appeal of Mar-a-Lago is that guests will have a front-row ticket to see Trump at work. Previous presidents like Barack Obama, meanwhile, took a more conventional, and far more secure, approach, setting up a mobile security perimeter known as a sensitive compartmented information facility, or SCIF, to ensure that nobody in the area could look in on or overhear the president’s dealings.

According to the president’s Press Secretary Sean Spicer, Mar-a-Lago does, in fact, have a SCIF on site that they used for the remainder of the Trump’s conversation about North Korea with Abe. That they apparently began their discussion at the dinner table before deploying the SCIF underscores the problem of the situation at Mar-a-Lago: Trump has a financial incentive to hold an open-air meeting like Saturday night’s to keep up the appearance that, by paying to be a member of his exclusive club, anyone can have access to the most powerful man in the world.

Who could have been present? The club’s membership list is private, meaning that the American public has no way of knowing who was around to overhear the conversation. (Two Democratic senators, Tom Udall and Sheldon Whitehouse, have introduced a bill to change this fact, but there is little evidence suggesting it has any hopes of passing through the Republican-held Congress.) Nor have the Trump Organization and White House been forthcoming as to how they intend to screen club members and employees for security clearance; though Udall and Whitehouse reached out to the administration to ask how Mar-a-Lago vets guests for security risks, but received no response. In such a public place, and without protective measures like a SCIF, there may not be anything to stop an agent of a foreign government or other malicious actor from paying the $200,000 initiation fee to stay at the club, effectively paying to be near to the president when he receives sensitive information. Unless Trump takes significant steps either to erect barriers between himself and the guests at Mar-a-Lago—which he certainly didn’t do this time, and which could reduce his ability to profit from the property—there is a real possibility that he will continue to compromise his country’s interests when he travels to his resort in Palm Beach.

One patron of the club, Richard DeAgazio, demonstrated just how much of a breakdown the situation represents. DeAgazio, who, according to a photo he posted on Facebook, joined the club in December after Trump’s election, snapped several pictures of the president and prime minister’s conversation, which helped corroborate a CNN report on the public nature of the ad-hoc meeting and details such as the use of cellphone flashlights to illuminate documents; he also took pictures with Trump’s chief strategist Steve Bannon and the president’s “body man,” whose job is in part to carry the “nuclear football” containing missile-launch codes (and who was initially identified by name in the photo’s caption). As if to reinforce impression that Mar-a-Lago members gain unprecedented access to the the president, even in the middle of a crisis situation, another patron was able to film Trump giving a toast at a wedding shortly after his press conference with Abe.

There is no reason to believe that DeAgazio had any intention of compromising international security with his pictures; he appears to simply be a wealthy Trump supporter who was excited at the chance to see his commander-in-chief in action and wanted photographs with which to remember the occasion. (He has since apparently either deleted his Facebook profile or increased his privacy settings so that it is no longer publicly accessible.) Nevertheless, he demonstrated just how Trump’s continued commingling of his business interests and his presidency places not just Americans but the entire global community in jeopardy.

In a way, the sheer enormity of the situation at Mar-a-Lago briefly crowded out the fact that merely bringing Abe to Mar-a-Lago demonstrates Trump’s conflicts of interest neatly. Though diplomatic meetings outside the White House are not unprecedented, Trump’s trip with Abe is likely the first instance of the president actually making money from such a meeting. Though Trump said that he was footing Abe’s bill, with both increased Secret Service presence and Abe’s retinue on hand, there’s a distinct possibility that, at some point in the weekend, somebody from the U.S. or Japanese government made a payment that ended up in Trump’s pocket. On top of that, the visit generated an inordinate amount of free publicity for Mar-a-Lago, which Trump repeatedly mentioned (and posted photos of) on his social media accounts and was continually noted in coverage of the weekend.

Back to table of contents

That Defense Department Trump Tower Rental

President Donald Trump’s most iconic property is about to get a new tenant: the Department of Defense. According to CNN, the Pentagon, hewing to a longstanding policy of establishing an offshoot headquarters near the president’s private, non-White House residence, is planning to lease space in Trump Tower in New York City to maintain close proximity to Trump should he choose to spend time there instead of Washington, D.C..

The Department of Defense’s decision is yet another example of how Trump’s decision to hold onto his business interests is rewriting norms surrounding the presidency and creating problems in what were once uncontroversial procedures. As mentioned above, the Department of Defense’s decision is not unique to Trump’s presidency: They took up residence in Chicago, for example, during Barack Obama’s two terms for the exact same reason.

The difference, as is true in so many of the stories surrounding Trump and his family’s conflicts of interest—the Red Cross’s decision to hold its annual ball at Mar-a-Lago, for example, or Eric Trump’s business trip to Uruguay—is that the president himself is now making money off of routine governmental functions. Exactly how much money remains unknown, as the Department of Defense has yet to publicly state how much space they will be renting and for how long. However, details of the Secret Service’s decision to do the same are instructive as to the general scope of the bill. When that news first broke back in November 2016, the New York Post used publicly available information regarding rents at Trump Tower to deduce that, at a cost of up to $105 per square foot, the Secret Service’s decision to occupy two 3,000- to 5,000-square-foot floors of the building could cost taxpayers more than $3 million a year, a significant portion of which would be going to the Trump Organization, and, by extension, the president himself.

Just how much the DoD will be paying the Trump Organization for the privilege of working out of the president’s property is not the only outstanding question. Trump’s protestations to the contrary aside, scientific evidence shows that the mere knowledge that one has profited from a relationship in the past often leads to preferential behavior, which could lead Trump to favor the Pentagon in his decision-making. As a result, beyond the overarching problem of a government agency paying the president himself a large sum of money to set up shop in the president’s property, the Department of Defense’s decision to rent space in Trump Tower could have significant ramifications for how the Trump White House operates.

Back to table of contents

That Red Cross Ball

The web of President Donald Trump’s conflicts of interest has grown to encompass the American Red Cross, which held its annual ball on Saturday, February 4, at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Florida. By hosting the ball, the Trump Organization accepted money from an organization that, while not a federal agency per se, is subject to federal oversight that at some point in the next four years will likely involve President Trump.

Unlike a number of the events at Trump properties that have been featured in this list of Trump’s conflicts of interest, the Red Cross Ball, which celebrated the organization’s centennial anniversary, appears to have been scheduled before Trump even received the Republican nomination for president; a calendar listing on the website of the Coastal Star, a local newspaper covering events in the Palm Beach area, is recorded as having been placed in April 2016. Additionally, though the event has been held elsewhere in the past, this was not the first time it has taken place at Mar-a-Lago: Not only was last year’s ball held there, but the very first Red Cross Ball was hosted there by the property’s prior owner, the famous socialite Marjorie Merriweather Post.

Given all that, there is no indication that the decision to hold the event at Mar-a-Lago had anything to do with Trump’s election, and the fact that Trump will likely be attending the event is not unusual—President Barack Obama also attended as the honorary chairman of the organization while in office. Nevertheless, the ball perfectly encapsulates why Trump’s continued refusal to relinquish his business interests complicates even situations that would have taken place had he not become president.

Thanks in part to the makeup of the Red Cross’s leadership and its unique relationship with the federal government, the ball creates a particularly complicated situation. According to its website, the Red Cross “is not a federal agency, nor [does it] receive federal funding on a regular basis to carry out our services and programs,” instead relying on donations and fees for services like health-and-safety training courses. However, the organization operates under a federal charter as a “federal instrumentality … to carry out responsibilities delegated to [it] by the federal government.” The best-known of these duties include overseeing blood-donation drives and disaster-relief efforts; according to its website, it is also the Red Cross’s duty “to fulfill the provisions of the Geneva Convention” and “provide family communications and other forms of support to the U.S. military.” Further, the organization has a chairperson appointed by the president; currently, the chairwoman is Bonnie McElveen-Hunter, who was appointed by President George W. Bush in 2004. The charter also periodically comes before Congress for review and amendments to be signed into effect by the president.

On multiple occasions in recent years, the Red Cross has come under scrutiny for how it handles its multi-billion-dollar budget, most of which comprises donations from the American public. Prompted in part by reporting on the organization’s inadequate response to Hurricane Sandy, misleading statements about how it uses its money, and a September 2015 report by the Governmental Accountability Office, two congresspeople—one Democrat and one Republican—have independently introduced measures to increase the organization’s transparency. Neither has been enacted, but there will likely be another push to improve the relationship between the federal government and the Red Cross during Trump’s presidency, whether via a review of the Red Cross’s charter, the need to appoint a new chairperson, or the introduction of reform-minded legislation. If and when Trump is called upon to weigh in on these decisions, he will be asked to do so having directly profited from the organization while in office, which could limit his ability to act in the best interests of the American people.

Back to table of contents

That D.C. Labor Dispute

One month before he took office, President Donald Trump managed to sidestep a potential conflict of interest at his hotel in Las Vegas. In the fall of 2015, several hundred employees at the city’s Trump International Hotel had voted to join the local branch of the Culinary Workers Union, only to find their efforts stalled by Trump and the hotel’s co-owner, Phil Ruffin. The case languished for more than a year until, after the National Labor Relations Board found Trump and Ruffin in violation of federal law, the workers successfully negotiated their first collectively-bargained contract. If this hadn’t been resolved, a conflict of interest would have arisen: The case would have gone to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, to which Trump will soon be able to appoint members.

Now, the same issue is cropping up at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C. Already a centerpiece of the controversy over the likely violation of the Constitution’s Emoluments Clause, the property may soon be the site of another legal tussle: According to The Washington Post, 40 workers at the hotel have also voted to unionize, the first group to do so at a Trump-owned establishment since his election.

As was true in Las Vegas, the push for unionization in D.C., if it’s met with resistance from the hotel, would create an opportunity for the president to place his own financial interests above those of the hotel’s workers. In Las Vegas, the dispute appears to have been resolved partly because of the NLRB’s intercession; if the Trump Organization similarly contests the case in D.C., the NLRB may once again be asked to weigh in. And now that Trump is president, he will be appointing new board members to fill two vacancies on the agency’s five-seat panel, which could very well tip it from its current left-leaning, labor-friendly composition to a more conservative, pro-owner bent. If, as in Las Vegas, the NLRB finds in favor of the workers, but the Trump Organization chooses to continue its opposition, there is a possibility that the case could come before a federal appeals court, where judges who Trump himself may have appointed will be asked to review the NLRB’s decision. And if the conflict continues even beyond the Court of Appeals, it will fall to the Supreme Court, to which Trump recently nominated Judge Neil Gorsuch, to render a final verdict. (It should be added that each appointee will be faced with the possibility of ruling against the financial interests of the infamously vindictive man to whom they owe their position.)

Appointing labor-unfriendly officials and justices might fairly be said to be in keeping with Trump’s long history of questionable labor practices, but this does not mean that the conflict-of-interest question will dissipate. It’s difficult, if not impossible, to determine how much his pro-business stances are dictated by a sincere belief in their efficacy rather than an understanding that he himself has benefited from them in the past and will likely continue to do so in the future. As such, Trump’s motivations will continue to occupy an ethical and legal gray area until he eliminates the overlap between his roles as a businessman and as president.

Back to table of contents

That Estate in Palm Beach

To many of President Donald Trump’s critics, his decision to turn Mar-a-Lago, his Florida estate, into a “Southern White House” epitomizes the way he’s mixing his business interests with his duties as president. With each visit to the property, he boosts the resort’s visibility and may very well prompt more people to enroll as members in attempts to get a glimpse of the commander-in-chief. That the club doubled its initiation fees in January, from $100,000 to $200,000, only adds to the impression that Trump—or, at least his namesake company—is banking on his presidency as a means of boosting revenues. And without a publicly available guest list and no word on what security protocols are in place, the possibility that somebody could be using a club membership to gain access to the president has led Democratic members of Congress to draft a bill specifically to mandate better disclosure of the goings-on at the venue.

Still, the president apparently intends to continue not only going to Mar-a-Lago himself but also bringing high-profile diplomatic guests there for meetings. The first time he did so, in February, made news in part because it resulted in an apparent breach of security protocol: When Trump’s meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was interrupted by news of a North Korean nuclear-missile test, the two heads of state read over briefing materials by the light of cellphones, in full view of paying dinner guests, at least one of whom took pictures.

Now, Trump is returning to Palm Beach with another world leader in tow. But, as The New York Times reports, one frequent Mar-a-Lago guest may create friction between Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping. In recent weeks, the billionaire real-estate mogul Guo Wengui has emerged as an outspoken critic of China’s ruling Communist Party, accusing it of rampant corruption. Guo himself is no stranger to charges of corruption: He left China in 2008 amid allegations that he had exploited his ties with one of the country’s top security officials to enhance his businesses. Guo maintains that the reporter who implicated him in the scandal was the tool of a government plot to undermine him, and has in turn pointed the finger at multiple party officials he says have engaged in various forms of graft, although he’s pointedly stopped short of criticizing Xi. He also claims that the Chinese government has seized more than $17 billion of his assets since he left the country.

And, the Times says, Guo is a frequent attendee at Mar-a-Lago. In March, he tweeted a picture of himself with the resort’s managing director.

It is unknown whether Guo will be at Mar-a-Lago, or even in Palm Beach, at the time of Trump’s meeting with Xi. Indeed, without a guest list, it may be hard to ever know who’s there at the same time as the president except via social-media posts. But Guo’s possible presence, and even the fact that Trump is—via the membership fees Guo is paying to his company—profiting from Guo, could still cast a shadow over the president’s meeting there with Xi. Trump’s relationship with his Chinese counterpart already got off to a rocky start when Trump broke decades of protocol by calling the president of Taiwan, something no president has done since the 1970s. Given China’s harsh treatment of dissidents in the past, Trump’s holding a meeting with Xi at a club Guo belongs to could be interpreted as another slight, intentional or not, toward the Chinese government and further undermine one of the world’s most important bilateral relationships.

The problem, then, is twofold: First, it’s that Trump directly profits from spending his weekends at Mar-a-Lago and bringing high-profile guests with him, although only he knows for certain the extent to which his visits to Florida are motivated by this. And second, it’s that by paying the president to be a member at the resort, Guo gains a chance at brushing shoulders with and possibly even influencing the president, although, again, only he knows if that’s his reason for doing so. That exchange of money—Guo’s membership dues going into the president’s pocket—could in part end up being responsible for complicating U.S.-China relations as Trump and Xi hold their first meeting since the former became president.

Guo is also far from the only Mar-a-Lago member who might have a stake in rubbing elbows with the president, nor is he the only controversial foreign oligarch with whom Trump has financial ties of some kind. As such, Guo is indicative of the larger problem with the president’s maintenance of his business interests, both in general and with regard to his estate in Palm Beach.

Back to table of contents

Those Expansion Plans

Of the measures that President Donald Trump and his lawyer Sheri Dillon laid out at his January 11 press conference to address conflicts of interest, only two actually ameliorate any of the concerns critics have raised: the cancellation of all of the Trump Organization’s pending deals and the promise not to pursue expansion in other countries (although developments since the announcement suggest that those pledges leave plenty of wiggle room). Conveniently left out of the plan, however, is any prohibition on expanding holdings within the United States—which is apparently something that Trump Hotels plans on doing while Trump is in office.

On January 25, Bloomberg reported that Eric Danziger, the CEO of Trump Hotels, said after a panel discussion in Los Angeles that the company is considering tripling the number of Trump-branded properties within the U.S. According to Danziger, “There are 26 major metropolitan areas in the U.S., and we’re in five. I don’t see any reason that we couldn’t be in all of them eventually.” Danziger listed Dallas, Seattle, Denver, and San Francisco as among the cities where the Trump Organization is looking to build in the near future.

As the Trump Organization’s holdings expand, so too does the potential that business considerations will have undue effects on the president’s behavior in office, or at least appear to. Each location presents another opportunity for businesspeople or foreign dignitaries to choose to stay in a hotel in an attempt to burnish Trump’s opinion of them, their company, and/or their country. Each location increases the number of municipal governments with whom Trump will be interacting both as president and as the owner of a real-estate empire.

Trump Hotels’ expansion plans could put not only Trump but also the cities where new properties may be built in a difficult situation. San Francisco, for example, is currently experiencing a housing crisis, one possible solution to which would be to increase the pace of new home-construction projects, some of which could be funded by federal grants. On the one hand, it is almost certain that the residents of San Francisco, a city that voted against the president by roughly a 9-to-1 margin in November, would strenuously object to a new Trump-branded property in the city. But there is also an incentive for the city government to work with the Trump Organization in finding a suitable expansion plan. With plenty of evidence to suggest that collaborating with Trump’s businesses could influence the president, there’s added pressure for city officials to pursue a potentially costly project residents may otherwise not want in hopes of reaping the benefits down the road. Meanwhile, the officials in charge of doling out federal largesse such as housing grants may similarly feel pressure based on the knowledge that Trump’s feelings toward particular cities may change based on how receptive the locale was of his business’s expansion plans.

Finally, the Trump Organization’s announcement that it would be pursuing expansion further attests to just how little the president’s plan to mitigate his conflicts of interest actually accomplishes its goal. For the Trump Organization to not just expand but do so on such a large scale violates the professed spirit of the measures laid out on January 11 and defies any argument that the company will cease to act in a way that jeopardizes the president’s ability to do his job.

Back to table of contents

That Hotel in Vancouver

Less than a week into his administration, President Trump has a new property opening for business: the Trump International Hotel & Tower in Vancouver. According to The Washington Post, construction on the hotel finished shortly before Trump assumed office, with the building’s finishing touch—the president’s name spelled out in giant letters—revealed on January 19 (the day before the inauguration), and the first guests and permanent residents checking in on January 25.

As with many buildings bearing the president’s name, the new hotel in Vancouver is a licensing deal, with the Trump Organization leasing its branding to a third party—in this case, a real-estate company called the Holborn Group, which operates several luxury hotels throughout Canada. The Holborn Group is run by Joo Kim Tiah, the eldest son of one of the wealthiest families in Malaysia; several members of Tiah’s family are expected to fly in from Kuala Lumpur to attend the opening with the president’s two adult sons, Donald Jr. and Eric.

The building is yet another manifestation of the running problem posed by Trump’s extensive foreign real-estate holdings. Unless the president actually rids himself of his financial stake in his company, every Trump property influences his incentives when it comes to making policy, foreign or domestic: Should he act in the manner that best serves the country, or the one that will protect his profits? Every building provides the opportunity for third parties to curry favor with the infamously capricious president: If he knows that he has taken money from somebody, be it a company, a private individual, or agents of a foreign government, that knowledge, and the goodwill it creates, is likely to color Trump’s decision-making. Moreover, every businessperson who has a licensing deal with Trump now has leverage: If Tiah, or any of the other businesspeople around the world with a Trump-branded property, disagrees with a decision the president makes, he can threaten to pull out of the partnership and jeopardize some of Trump’s cash-flow in an attempt to change his mind.

Hardly a day had passed between the new hotel in Vancouver opening for business and the first report of an organization choosing to host an event at the site, possibly for political reasons. On January 26, The Washington Post reported that The American Chamber of Commerce in Canada, a business organization affiliated with the conservative U.S. Chamber of Commerce, had scrapped longstanding plans to hold a meeting about trade relations at the home of a diplomatic official and would instead be booking space in the new Trump Hotel for the equivalent of roughly $1,900—a relatively small sum, to be sure, but even small sums have been shown to substantially influence decision making. The change initially prompted at least one planned speaker, the University of British Columbia professor Matilde Bombardini, to back out of the event; however, according to the Vancouver Sun, she has since changed her mind after being told that the change of location was due to a leak at the previous site.

As with so many of the instances chronicled here, the venue change demonstrates how Trump’s conflicts of interest often operate in shades of grey. If the Chamber of Commerce did make its decision solely based on logistics, booking a spot in a Trump-branded building still makes possible the appearance of paying for play. In a marked departure from the Chamber’s copacetic relationship with the Republican nominee Mitt Romney in 2012, the aggressively free-market, pro-trade group clashed with the president on multiple occasions during the 2016 campaign over Trump’s protectionist trade policies, but has already made public overtures since the election to reconcile with the president. If it did, in fact, choose to move the event even in part because of the giant name on the new location’s facade, the decision represents another chapter in the ongoing saga of the business community’s desire to both please and sway a president whose ideology is not that of a typical Republican. Additionally, though nearly all of Trump’s rhetoric about NAFTA centers on Mexico, Canada actually trades more with the U.S. than not just Mexico but any other country in the world. As such, there is plenty incentive for the Canadian branch of the American Chamber of Commerce to do whatever it can to reach out to Trump.

Back to table of contents

That Reality-Television Show

Though President Donald Trump has been a well-known figure in American public life for decades, perhaps the single biggest contributor to his stardom has been NBC’s The Apprentice. Trump himself is no longer the star of the show—former California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has taken over as host in 2017—but the president remains an executive producer on the series for at least the coming year, including receiving a low five-figure salary for the position, according to Variety. Shortly after the news of that income broke, Kellyanne Conway, a counselor to Trump, clarified that he would be taking on his producing duties in his spare time, comparing the situation to previous presidents playing golf or pursuing other leisure activities.

Norm Eisen and Richard Painter, who served as the chief ethics lawyers under Presidents Obama and George W. Bush, respectively, pointed out on NPR’s Fresh Air that Trump’s ongoing involvement with The Apprentice presents yet another conflict of interest. According to AdWeek, 11 companies, including the television-shopping network QVC and Carnival Company (which operates the eponymous cruise line), are providing on-air sponsorships for the newest season of The Apprentice; a twelfth, the Japanese motorcycle company Kawasaki, withdrew from a previously reported deal after customers threatened a boycott because of its sponsorship of the show. All of these companies—plus the numerous companies that run ads during the show’s commercial breaks—are effectively putting money into the pockets of the president, not to mention supporting one of his products.

Trump apparently believes himself immune to such conflicts of interest, both in terms of legal impunity and his ability to ignore them, despite a good deal of research indicating that even minuscule financial incentives (minuscule for a billionaire, that is) can be enough to significantly influence behavior. Additionally, there is little doubt that Trump cares deeply about the ongoing success of The Apprentice: The weekend after the new Schwarzenegger-led season debuted, the then president-elect took to Twitter to voice his thoughts on the new season’s ratings. So when one of the companies that sponsors the show interacts with the executive branch—as when Carnival reached a $40 million settlement with the U.S. government over pollution in the Atlantic Ocean, for example, or when QVC settled a $7.5 million suit regarding deceptive advertising in 2009—the question will necessarily arise how their contributions to Trump’s pocketbook and beloved TV show will affect the outcome.

Even if Trump were able to fully blind himself to the conflicts described above, the president’s role would remain a problem because it provides an unprecedented bargaining chip for both the companies currently sponsoring in the show and those that could seek to use it to attempt to manipulate the president. Consider, for a moment, the potential negotiations between one of Trump’s sponsors and a government agency that finds it in violation of federal regulations. That company, though, has a trump card the likes of which has never been seen in American politics: Should it become apparent that the case is going awry, they can threaten to pull their support of the president’s television show. The move would inevitably make waves on cable news of the kind that Trump has repeatedly demonstrated himself to be susceptible to. Any decision, whether in favor of the company or against it, immediately loses credibility: If the company is found guilty, the decision is easily framed as retaliatory, a vindictive manifestation of the president’s ego and narcissism; if the company is let off the hook, it will appear that the company has manipulated his venality for its own gain. A formerly uninvolved company facing federal investigation could essentially pull the same gambit in reverse: By publicly committing to sponsor The Apprentice, a company could create a situation in which any decision appears to reflect not the facts of the case but the sticky situation created by its involvement with the show. In this sense, then, Trump’s decision to stay on as executive producer, and the conflicts of interest the position creates, jeopardizes not only the president’s ability to carry out his job but also the fundamental legitimacy of the rule of law for any company that currently is or in the future may become involved with the show.

Additionally, the president’s continued involvement with the show creates a strange and tricky situation for NBC. Trump’s reputation is inextricably intertwined with that of the show, meaning that NBC will to some extent be caught between promoting Trump as a successful businessman and doing its journalistic work. The network will likely also be advertising The Apprentice during its other programs, not only through commercials but also possibly in-studio promotions on other shows, creating conflicting incentives for NBC journalists who will be trying simultaneously to talk about the Trump administration fairly while their own network markets one of his products.

Back to table of contents

That Pipeline

The Dakota Access Pipeline, or DAPL, was the subject of continual controversy during the presidential campaign, drawing months of protests because of the perceived environmental impact it would create by crossing the Missouri River in close proximity to a Standing Rock Sioux reservation. Shortly before the election, the Army Corps of Engineers announced that it would be halting progress on the pipeline for further environmental review and to study potential routes that might avoid crossing both the river and Native American territory. On January 24, however, only four days after President Trump took office, he decided to move forward with both DAPL and the Keystone XL pipeline, which the Obama administration likewise blocked because of environmental and tribal-sovereignty concerns; the Army Corps of Engineers finalized the easement on the project on February 7. Trump has been vocally supportive of the pipelines for months, claiming that they would create new jobs in construction and the oil industry.

Trump’s FEC filings, which remain the only public record of his finances, suggest that he may have had an additional incentive to greenlight the projects: According to financial-disclosure forms he filed in June 2015 and May 2016, Trump has owned stock in Energy Transfer Partners, the company seeking to build DAPL. The stock was worth between $500,001 and $1,000,000 in 2015 and between $15,001 and $50,000 in 2016.

The president and one of his spokesmen, Jason Miller, have both stated, without offering evidence, that Trump’s stock-related conflicts of interest have been resolved. According to Trump and Miller, the president sold off his stocks in June of last year specifically to head off concerns that they may influence his decision-making in office. However, they have offered no meaningful evidence to back up their claims—evidence which, in this case, would likely be fairly easy to provide. They could, for example, offer more details on when exactly the stocks were sold beyond simply “back in June,” or explain why they did not mention the sale until December, just after the election, if the intention was to proactively address conflict-of-interest questions.

Given Trump’s penchant for dissembling about his personal finances and the lack of evidence that he has sold off his stocks, Trump’s decision to push ahead on DAPL and Keystone XL simply underscores the need for him to take larger, and more public, steps to distance himself from his financial interests. Moving forward with the pipelines is not the first instance of Trump making a significant decision that benefits a company whose stock is listed in his financial disclosures. For example, when Trump announced his intention to intervene at the factory of the air-conditioner manufacturer Carrier in Indianapolis, the Indianapolis Star noted that Trump’s filings list stock in Carrier’s parent company, United Technologies.

Back to table of contents

Those HUD Grants

As has been noted on several previous occasions, one of the overarching questions about America’s first businessman presidency is just how President Trump’s vast empire will interact with federal agencies that answer to him. One of these potentially sticky situations became something of a flashpoint at the hearing for Dr. Ben Carson, Trump’s appointee to lead the Department of Housing and Urban Development. At the hearing, Senator Elizabeth Warren pressed Carson over the fact that, as the head of the department, he would be in charge of numerous programs that the president could manipulate to profit his real estate empire, asking Carson, “Can you assure me that not a single taxpayer dollar that you give out will financially benefit the president-elect or his family?” Though Carson did not respond to the question with regard to Trump specifically, he responded that he “will absolutely not play favorites for anyone” or act with an “intention to do anything to benefit any American, particularly.” (Warren went on to expound on how Trump’s lack of financial transparency makes it borderline impossible to know if a policy will benefit him.)

Warrens’s line of questioning was not entirely hypothetical: Trump does, in fact, own properties the maintenance of which falls under HUD’s purview. Thanks to an inheritance from his father, the president holds an ownership stake in—and has made millions from—Starrett City, a 153-acre, 5,881-unit low-income housing development in Brooklyn. The development, according to ABC News, receives substantial federal funding via HUD’s many programs designed to support low-income renters and homeowners. Trump could easily press for policies that would increase his profits from Starrett, most notably allowing for the sale of the complex, an action HUD blocked in 2007—and, potentially, to other properties from which he may profit in ways that, without more complete financial information, the American public may not even know.

The potential for a profitable relationship with HUD underscores a central problem with Trump’s refusal to fully divest from his holdings before entering office. It’s not just high-ranking officials who will possess the ability to act in a manner that benefits the president’s pocketbook—it’s ordinary civil servants as well. Shortly before his inauguration, The Washington Post noted several additional ways employees in Trump’s executive branch could do so: Trademark disputes, for instance, will be adjudicated by judges appointed by his Commerce secretary, while the EPA could roll back environmental regulations that reduce profits at his golf courses.

Meanwhile, lower-level officials tasked with the day-to-day work of regulating Trump’s properties are likely to face pressure as well—if not explicit from superiors, then from the implicit, inescapable knowledge that enforcement decisions will impact the president personally. Federal Aviation Administration inspectors, for instance, are in charge of on-the-spot, random inspections of aircraft, including Trump’s, and at one point during the campaign grounded one of his planes after its registration expired; the Occupational Safety and Health Administration oversees construction sites, and has fined the Trump Organization on multiple occasions for workplace-safety violations. Only 10 years ago, politically motivated firings within the Justice Department became one of the many enduring scandals of George W. Bush’s administration; with so many executive-branch employees interacting with the president’s properties in so many different ways, some will inevitably face difficult decisions between proper enforcement at his expense or looking the other way to stay in the boss’s good graces.

Back to table of contents

That Golf Course in Aberdeen

Though his golf course at Turnberry is the more famous of his two properties in Scotland, it is Trump’s resort in Aberdeen that has attracted attention for the conflicts of interest it created when Trump spoke with the British politician and Brexit cheerleader Nigel Farage about blocking a proposed wind turbine that Trump believed would have blocked views from the resort. Now, attention has once again turned to Scotland after The Guardian reported that the Trump Organization will soon be moving forward with a multi-million dollar plan to expand its Aberdeen resort, including a new 450-room, five-star hotel and a second 18-hole golf course.

The announced expansion drew criticism almost immediately, especially coming as it did only three days after the press conference at which Trump unveiled his (woefully insufficient) plan to resolve his conflicts of interest. At the conference, the president and one of his lawyers, Sheri Dillon, announced that the Trump Organization would cease pursuing new foreign investments. Additionally, though neither Trump nor Dillon articulated the promise at the event, a press release detailing the steps Trump would be taking also states that he has “directed the Trump Organization to terminate all pending deals—over 30 in number.”

A representative soon clarified the grounds on which the Trump Organization deemed the expansion permissible in light of these statements. She argued that “implementing future phasing of existing properties does not constitute a new transaction, so we intend to proceed.” In other words, plans for the expansion had been drawn up and agreed upon before Trump made his pledge; simply moving forward with the project does not, in their view, breach their commitments to avoid pursuing new foreign investments or moving forward on pending deals.

As with so many of the defenses of Trump’s behavior when it comes to conflicts of interest, the representative’s justification overlooks the actual concerns regarding conflicts of interest: that Trump’s relationship with the British government and other foreign-policy questions may be colored by his expectations of what a policy will do to his property values, for instance, or whether wealthy guests will pay for a stay in the interest of currying favor with him. Instead, the argument relies on a tactic Trump and his many surrogates have used with alarming frequency. On several occasions, Trump has come out with what appears to be a clear policy statement, which then becomes increasingly vague as he and his surrogates attempt to justify an action or position. One famous example is his proposal to ban Muslims from immigrating to the United States: As critics started to question its constitutionality, and as support for the measure declined, he revised it to a vaguer policy of “extreme vetting,” which itself varied significantly depending on who was describing it to whom and what part of the plan they were defending. Here, the Trump Organization has done something similar: In the face of allegations that the Aberdeen development violated the company’s pledges regarding conflicts of interest, the pledges have been revised to create a more vague, and therefore more permissive, stance.  As Richard Painter, who served at the chief ethics adviser for President George W. Bush, put it, the new, more ambiguous policy “clearly illustrates that around the world, he will just simply expand around the various holdings and as they continue to expand, the conflicts of interest expand.”

If, as they argue, the expansion of the Aberdeen golf course constitutes neither a “new foreign deal” nor a “pending deal,” that only further complicates the picture regarding the Trump Organization’s future behavior during Trump’s presidency. The organization currently has several nascent development projects, several of which, including those in Georgia, Argentina, Indonesia, and Taiwan, have already prompted concerns over conflicts of interest. Trump and Dillon’s statements at his press conference appeared to rule out continued development of these properties, but the ongoing development in Scotland calls into question whether other development plans have truly been canceled or whether Trump will find a similarly legalistic framework under which they claim they can proceed. By moving forward in Aberdeen, Trump has demonstrated just how easily he can—and, in all likelihood, will—continue to flout concerns regarding his conflicts of interest by simply redefining the terms of his promises in order to allow for his latest move.

Back to table of contents

That Other Billionaire New York Real-Estate Developer

President Trump’s promise to erect a big, beautiful wall between himself and his business lasted slightly more than 48 hours.

Almost exactly two days after the January 11 press conference at which Trump announced plans purported to disentangle himself from his namesake business, the Huffington Post reported that the president had scheduled a meeting with Steven Roth. Roth, a fellow New York-based billionaire real-estate developer, is in charge of Vornado Realty Trust, an investment firm that co-owns two of Trump’s most valuable properties, one in Manhattan and one in San Francisco, and served as an economic adviser during the campaign. What Trump and Roth discussed at their meeting remains unknown, nor is it clear when exactly the meeting was scheduled. Regardless, that the meeting came directly on the heels of the press conference at which Trump and his lawyer laid out a plan supposedly meant to resolve conflicts of interest, throws the reality of the problems that come from having a businessman as president—and one who seems completely uninterested in taking steps that would actually distance him from his business—into sharp relief.

Shortly thereafter, The Wall Street Journal reported that Roth may soon become involved with the Trump administration beyond just his pre-existing friendship and partnership with the president. Trump, it seems, will soon be naming Roth and Richard LeFrak, yet another New York-based billionaire real-estate developer, to oversee a council of 15 to 20 builders and engineers who will be carrying out the president’s $1 trillion infrastructure proposal, a situation which itself provides ripe opportunities for the pair to direct federal dollars toward projects from which they will financially benefit. This news comes on top of a December report in The Washington Post that Roth’s firm had put in a bid to rebuild the FBI’s headquarters, a deal that could be worth as much as $2 billion. In other words, Trump, mere days after promising to remove himself from his businesses, is instead ushering a longtime partner into his administration.

The move could also end up providing yet another avenue by which Trump could enrich himself in office and by which others could attempt to curry favor. Whether or not he intended to do so, the president’s decision to place Roth at the head of such a large pool of money sends a signal to other companies about the continued intermingling of his business and his presidency: that working with the Trump Organization can be a path to increased influence or even appointment. And though Trump claims that he will no longer be in involved in day-to-day operations, he will be actively profiting off from the company, meaning that he will be personally making money off of the attempts of others to gain influence over American public policy.

Back to table of contents

Those Indonesian Politicians

Despite President Trump’s assurance that he has stopped pursuing deals since the election, his namesake organization apparently moved forward with a pair of projects in Indonesia. According to The New York Times, the two properties that will bear the Trump name, one overlooking a Hindu temple in Bali and the other abutting a theme park in West Java, presented ethical problems even before the election.

To begin with, through his Indonesian partner on the projects, the billionaire media mogul Hary Tanoesoedibjo (known in Indonesia as Hary Tanoe), Trump has forged relationships with several top Indonesian politicians. One such leader is Setya Novanto, the speaker of the country’s House of Representatives who temporarily lost his post for trying to extort $4 billion from the American mining company Freeport-McMoRan (a company which counts Carl Icahn, who will be serving as a special adviser in Trump’s administration, among its largest shareholders, and which has been frequently criticized by labor advocates and environmentalists). Trump had lunch with Novanto and several other Indonesian politicians during the campaign in September 2015 to discuss the Trump Organization’s planned expansion into Indonesia. At a post-luncheon press conference, Trump pulled Novanto in front of the cameras, calling him “an amazing man” and “one of the most powerful men” and asserting, “we will do great things for the United States.” (It is unclear exactly whom Trump meant when he used the word “we.”) Trump then asked Novanto to confirm that “they like me in Indonesia,” which Novanto did.

Another of the politicians who attended the lunch with Trump is Fadli Zon, the vice chairman of Indonesia’s House of Representatives, whose district includes one of the cities in which one of the Trump-branded properties will be built. According to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Zon is associated with a political movement seeking to unseat and jail the current governor of Jakarta, Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, also known by his nickname, Ahok, and has spoken at rallies against Ahok. The anti-Ahok movement is rooted partly in centuries of ethnic tension within the country: Ahok is both Christian, which has made him the target of attacks by hardline clerics claiming to represent Indonesia’s Muslim majority, and a member of the country’s historically oppressed Chinese minority, which was the target of a massacre in 1998. Aside from an interim governor appointed half a century ago, Ahok is the first governor of Jakarta to fall into either category, and is currently on trial for blasphemy for allegedly insulting the Koran, although Ahok’s supporters claim that it is Ahok’s accusers who are guilty of blasphemy for denigrating Ahok’s Christianity.

Both Trump’s question to Novanto and Zon’s presence at the meeting underscore another difficulty the president introduces into the United States’ relations with Indonesia. Indonesia is both the largest predominantly Muslim country in the world and the nation with the largest population of Muslims. Novanto received significant blowback for his statement that, yes, Indonesians do like Trump, because it turns out that, no, many Indonesians don’t like Trump, in large part because of his on-again, off-again proposal to ban Muslims from immigrating to the U.S.; in fact, faced with mounting criticism, Novanto’s party apologized not only for Novanto’s statement but also for his mere attendance at the luncheon. Since Trump’s victory, both Novanto and Zon have stood up for the president, arguing that Trump’s hardline stance toward Muslim immigration was merely campaign rhetoric and not actually reflective of the president’s own beliefs, something Novanto claimed Trump personally assured him was the case. Regardless, it is clear that the Trump Organization’s planned expansion into Indonesia—which, again, is the reason Trump met with Novanto and Zon in the first place—could introduce major complications into the relationship between the president and the political leaders of the world’s largest Muslim country, not to mention a significant trade partner and an important ally in the South China Sea region.

As if that weren’t enough, Tanoe himself has shown increasing interest in becoming involved in Indonesian politics. In 2014, Tanoe publicly supported the retired general Prabowo Subianto in the nation’s presidential election; Subianto lost to the country’s current leader, Joko Widodo. Then, in 2015, he helped found a new political party, the United Indonesia Party, or Partai Perindo, which intends to field candidates for national office in the near future, including Tanoe himself: Shortly after The New York Times reported on the project, Tanoe told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation that, “If there is no one I can believe who can fix the problems of the country, I may try to run for president.”

If Tanoe does so, it will create the possibility that Trump will be dealing with a head of state with whom he has shared business interests, which, as the ethics lawyer Richard Painter told The New York Times, “makes it impossible to conduct diplomacy in an evenhanded manner”—especially considering that, after Trump’s election, stock in Tanoe’s company rose significantly. Moreover, Tanoe, like Ahok, is both Christian and ethnically Chinese, which some insiders consider an obstacle to his electoral chances, although Tanoe argues that it is not Ahok’s religion but his lack of firm leadership that has led to the large-scale protests against the governor. Nevertheless, if Tanoe does choose to run for office, it is difficult to see how his race, religion, and business partnership with a president many see as blatantly Islamophobic could do anything other than create further difficulties both within Indonesia and in the country’s relationship with the U.S..

Tanoe remains close to Trump. He attended the inauguration as a guest of the Trump Organization; he and his wife posted several photos commemorating the occasion on their Instagram accounts, including pictures with Donald Jr. and Eric Trump and a video taken out the window of a car driving along the inaugural parade route. Then, in a February 7 interview with the Indonesian news magazine Tempo, Tanoe bragged about his access to the president. In the interview, he claimed to have seen Trump as recently as January 4 in New York, though he demurred when asked what they discussed, saying, “It wouldn’t be ethical, especially now that he is the president.” Tanoe also confirmed that “nothing has changed” regarding the branding deals in Indonesia, which he says will be moving forward with Trump’s sons in charge, a statement that would seem to contradict Trump and his lawyer’s January 11 announcement that the company would be suspending unfinished development projects.

Back to table of contents

That Emirati Businessman

Though the biggest controversy over the New Year’s Eve celebration at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s Florida estate, was apparently whether or not Joe Scarborough could accurately be described as having “partied” there, video footage taken by a guest and obtained by CNN the next day brought renewed scrutiny to President Trump’s own presence at the event. During a 10-minute speech given in front of the party’s 800-odd attendees, Trump praised his Emirati business partner Hussain Sajwani and Sajwani’s family, saying, “The most beautiful people from Dubai are here tonight, and they’re seeing it and they love it.” CNN identifies Sajwani as a “billionaire developer in Dubai” who has “paid Trump millions of dollars to license the Trump name for golf courses in Dubai.” Trump’s spokeswoman, Hope Hicks, defended the remarks by clarifying that the president and Sajwani “had no formal meetings of professional discussions. Their interactions were social.”

Whether or not Hicks’s statement was true, Trump’s commendation of Sajwani is part of a pattern in which the president praises his business partners in ways that suggest he has little interest in extricating himself from his company’s interests. Previously, he has name-dropped business partners in Turkey and Argentina while on official calls with the countries’ leaders; he also met, and took photos, with associates from India shortly after the election. Moreover, as with several of the countries in which Trump-branded buildings are located, the United Arab Emirates has a questionable record on human rights; Human Rights Watch specifically states that the nation “uses its affluence to mask the government’s human-rights problems.”

By singling out Sajwani, Trump also runs headlong into accusations that he and his family are selling access to his administration through their organization and family foundations. According to Politico, tickets to celebrate with the president at Mar-a-Lago, went for upwards of $500; the stated attendance of at least 800 people means that the Trump Organization made at least $400,000 off of ticket sales for the event. (There is no indication that the party was a fundraiser for any outside organization, such as a charity or campaign fund, as is often the case when politicians attend such an event.) Whether or not the president sees it as such, the event offered attendees the opportunity to be in the same room as Trump and bend his ear for a price. This follows consternation regarding an auction for a face-to-face meeting with Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, and a charity event that offered a reception with the president and a hunting trip with his two sons, both of which have since been cancelled, as well as ongoing speculation that foreign entities will attempt to curry favor with Trump by booking rooms and events at his hotel in Washington, D.C. That Trump singled out Sajwani at the New Year’s Eve party lends credence to these concerns—it’s an instance of someone receiving the president’s attention simply by buying a ticket to one of his events.

Since footage of Trump’s shout-out emerged in early January, Sajwani has continued to feature in coverage of the president’s business entanglements. At the January press conference where Trump and his lawyer, Sheri Dillon, laid out the president’s plan to ostensibly avoid conflicts of interest, Trump said that after the election, Sajwani offered him a $2 billion deal, which Trump turned down. Rather than acknowledge that being offered billions of dollars from a foreign businessman constitutes a conflict of interest, Trump presented his decision not to accept as an example of his magnanimity, saying, “I didn’t have to turn it down, because as you know, I have a no-conflict situation because I’m president. It’s a nice thing to have, but I don’t want to take advantage of something.” Later, Sajwani attended Trump’s inauguration, although it’s unclear if he interacted with the president while there.

Then, on Tuesday, Sajwani posted a picture of himself eating with Donald Trump Jr. in Dubai on Instagram with a caption reading, “It was great having my dear friend and business partner Donald Trump Jr. over for lunch. Discussing new ideas and innovation always make [sic] our meetings even more interesting.”

Donald Jr.’s meeting with Sajwani prompts concerns about the president’s conflicts of interest, for two main reasons. First, the meeting offers a reminder of the insufficiency of the steps Trump has taken to distance himself from his businesses. Though Trump and Dillon claimed that their plan resolved questions about conflicts of interest, ethics experts disagree: Because Trump still knows what his assets are and the identities of those with whom he does business, they say, Trump still knows more than enough to favor his company. Moreover, in an actual blind trust, Trump would have turned his assets over to a trustee with whom he would have no contact. Instead, he turned it over to a long-time executive within the Trump Organization and his sons, who he has long counted as among his closest advisers and with whom he has remained in contact during his presidency so far. Donald Jr.’s meeting with Sajwani is a reminder of these inadequacies, especially because Sajwani posted the picture to Instagram, thus increasing the lunch’s visibility and, along with it, the likelihood that the president will know about the ongoing interactions between his company and Sajwani’s (that is, if Donald Jr. hasn’t already made his father aware of them).

Second, Sajwani’s caption further undermines one of the few parts of the arrangement that actually would have meaningfully reduced the president’s conflicts of interest. In January, Dillon said that the Trump Organization would be canceling all of its pending deals and would stop pursuing foreign deals during Trump’s presidency. Since then, numerous developments have called those intentions into question: Projects appear to be moving forward in both Scotland and the Dominican Republic, with the Trump Organization offering narrow, legalistic explanations as to why the progress didn’t violate the terms of the trust. Though a spokeswoman for the Trump Organization has said that Donald Jr. was not seeking new deals while in Dubai, the previous stories, coupled with Sajwani’s Instagram caption, undermine that account.

Back to table of contents

That Virginia Vineyard

Among the dozens of properties President Trump owns is Trump Vineyard Estates and Winery in Charlottesville, Virginia, the source of his namesake wine. On December 23, the property requested temporary H-2A visas for six foreign workers, according to The Washington Post; on February 17, BuzzFeed reported an additional request that upped the total to 29. The visas, which are administered by the Citizenship and Immigration Services wing of the Department of Homeland Security, allow businesses to temporarily hire foreign, unskilled workers provided that the employer proves that there are not enough domestic candidates to fulfill a one-time or seasonal shortage and that the hiring will not depress wages for U.S.-born employees. Trump, of course, appointed the current Secretary of Homeland Security, which gives Trump authority over the very department responsible for deciding whether to grant the visas that the vineyard has requested. His choice for the position, the retired general John Kelly has a relatively scant track record when it comes to immigration, leaving open the question of how much influence Trump himself will have over the DHS’s policy on the matter.

On top of the fact that Trump will soon be able to influence the outcome of the request, that his organization has continued to request visas after his election underscores a tension in the president’s stance on immigration. From the moment that he announced that he would be running for president, Trump made antagonism toward immigration the central aspect of his campaign, arguing that both legal and illegal immigrants are taking jobs that should be filled by native-born Americans and depressing wages for others. Though he did not specifically single out the H-2B visa, the president has on multiple occasions spoken critically about the H-1B program, which enables employers to temporarily hire foreign workers for skilled jobs like those in the tech industry.

But the Trump Organization has long been a beneficiary of immigrant labor. For example, according to a Reuters report from August 2015, nine companies of which Trump is the majority owner have requested at least 1,100 foreign visas since 2000. The majority of these requests were from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club in Florida, which has requested at least 787 foreign visas since 2006, including 70 applications in 2015. (Meanwhile, The New York Times reported that, since 2010, only 17 of the nearly 300 domestic applicants for positions at the Mar-a-Lago have been hired.) The Trump Organization also famously may have benefited from illegal immigration: There is significant evidence that many of the Polish construction workers at the Trump Tower construction site in New York in 1980 were in the country illegally. In other words, Trump’s track record includes not just taking advantage of the very visa process he claims to abhor but also actually subverting existing law for his own profit. Now, by applying for visas for his vineyard, Trump is signaling that he expects that his business will continue to be able to profit from one of the very immigration programs he continually denounces.

Back to table of contents

That Las Vegas Labor Dispute

On top of owning various properties and enterprises, Trump and his company employ roughly 34,000 people, according to an analysis by CNN. On December 21, several hundred of those workers resolved a labor dispute against the president—one in which, had it continued for even a few weeks more, Trump would have had the unprecedented power to make appointments to affect its outcome.

Here’s the situation: In October 2015, several hundred employees, primarily housekeeping staff, at the Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas voted to join the local branch of the Culinary Workers Union. Trump Ruffin Commercial LLC, which owns the hotel and is itself owned by Trump and the casino magnate Phil Ruffin, contested the vote, first by enlisting an anti-union consulting firm (for whose services it paid $500,000) and then by filing complaints with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). Shortly before the election, the NLRB not only rejected Trump and Ruffin’s complaints but also found that, because the pair had refused to negotiate with the nascent union, they had violated federal law and their hotel was operating illegally. Trump and Ruffin have since appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.

On December 21, more than a year after the hotel’s workers first voted to join the union, the workers announced that they arrived at their first collectively-bargained contract, achieved, according to an employee quoted in ThinkProgress, despite significant pressure from ownership that attempting to unionize would cost workers their jobs. According to the union, the new agreement “will provide the employees with annual wage increases, a pension, family health care, and job security” comparable to that of other Las Vegas hotels. Moreover, the Culinary Workers Union’s parent organization, UNITE HERE, has reached an agreement to represent workers at Trump’s recently-opened hotel in Washington, D.C..

Although this dispute has been resolved, it is included here because it exemplifies the type of situation in which Trump’s business interests are likely to overlap with his duties as president. Trump will be tasked with appointing members to fill current openings on the NLRB, the very body that ruled against him shortly before the election and will be tasked with resolving any future disputes between the hotel’s owners and its employees. Moreover, as Slate noted, the chief justice of the D.C. Court of Appeals is none other than Merrick Garland, whose nomination to the Supreme Court has spent months languishing in the Republican-controlled Congress and was withdrawn once Trump became president. Finally, if disputes of this nature go beyond the Court of Appeals, the case would go to the Supreme Court, to which Trump will be appointing a justice, which is expected to tip the balance decisively in a more conservative (and likely anti-union) direction. In other words, no matter how far up the chain future disputes of this nature go, Trump’s presidency will give him new power to influence the results.

Back to table of contents

That Kuwaiti Event

According to an anonymous source and documents obtained by ThinkProgress, representatives from the Trump Organization pressured the ambassador of Kuwait to hold its embassy’s annual celebration of the country’s independence at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C. The event, held annually on February 25, was originally scheduled to take place at the Four Seasons Hotel in Georgetown; the location was allegedly changed after members of the Trump Organization contacted the country’s ambassador. ThinkProgress’s source “described the decision as political,” suggesting that the embassy chose to relocate the event in an effort to curry favor with the president. The Kuwaiti ambassador has since disputed the report, telling The Washington Post that he had not been contacted by the Trump Organization and that the move “was solely done with the intention of providing our guests with a new venue.”

If ThinkProgress’s account is correct, Kuwait’s decision represents an escalation of a situation that has been developing since Trump’s election. The Trump International Hotel has been the subject of continual scrutiny for the conflict of interest it poses, in part because its lease explicitly bars elected officials from holding it, but mainly because Trump’s ownership of the hotel will almost definitely result in a violation of the Emoluments Clause, which prohibits the president from receiving payments from foreign powers—something that will arguably be happening any time a foreign government books a room at the hotel. Already, the hotel has begun advertising itself as a destination for diplomats and dignitaries, and the embassies of Azerbaijan and Bahrain have both scheduled events in the building. However, before the ThinkProgress report, there was no evidence that the Trump Organization had individually reached out to a foreign government in hopes of getting it to relocate an event to the hotel.

Back to table of contents

Those Certificates of Divestiture

In addition to the many possibilities for President Trump to pursue his financial interests in office, the unique makeup of his cabinet also creates a new set of financial motivations. While Trump’s own fortune automatically makes his administration the wealthiest in history, he has also surrounded himself with an unprecedented collection of billionaires and multi-millionaires whose investments are likely to also come under scrutiny.

Unlike the president himself, those who are up for Trump’s cabinet, such as his proposed Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin and Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, will be legally obligated to divest from any holdings which may pose a conflict of interest. However, as The Washington Post noted, even selling off their holdings offers an opportunity for Trump’s cabinet members to enhance their fortunes. A federal program known as a “certificate of divestiture” allows executive-branch appointees and employees to avoid capital-gains taxes when selling their assets. The program has existed since 1989, and most recently received attention when President George W. Bush appointed Hank Paulson, then the chief executive of Goldman Sachs as his Treasury Secretary in 2006. Paulson was forced to sell off $700 million in shares of the bank; the certificate of divestiture enabled him to avoid a potential $200 million in capital-gains tax liability. According to The Washington Post, the Office of Government Ethics is currently researching whether the president himself would qualify for the tax break; even if he doesn’t, the unprecedented wealth of Trump’s cabinet promises to push this provision, and the financial incentives it creates, to the limit.

Back to table of contents

That Carrier Deal

One of President Trump’s first major economic moves as president was the deal that he and Vice President Mike Pence struck with the air-conditioner manufacturer Carrier, which had planned to move 2,100 jobs from its Indiana plant to Mexico. Finalized on November 29, the compromise kept 730 of the plant’s jobs in Indiana in exchange for $7 million in tax breaks over 10 years. The deal immediately attracted praise and criticism on both sides of the aisle, with much of the scrutiny going toward the tradeoff between jobs and tax breaks and Trump’s idiosyncratic, ad-hoc negotiation techniques.

An additional detail soon emerged regarding the deal: According to his FEC filings (which, despite Trump and his spokesman Jason Miller’s unverified statements that the president sold off his stock in June, remain the most recent public record of the president’s finances), Trump holds stock in Carrier’s parent company, United Technologies. In 2014, his investment in the company was between $100,001 and $250,000, while in 2015, the stock is listed as worth less than $1,001, which could indicate that he sold some or most of the stock; each year, his holdings earned him between $2,500 and $5,000.

The paucity of information in the FEC filings makes it difficult to ascertain why his holdings appear to have decreased; regardless, the investment is not only one of several hundred but also a relatively minor one among Trump’s many holdings, some of which are worth over $5,000,000. As a result, it’s difficult to know how much, if at all, Trump may have considered the stock, particularly considering that he didn’t appear to remember his initial promise to save the Carrier plant. Additionally, Trump does not have stock in the next company he called out on Twitter, Rexnord Corporation (which is also based in Indiana), or its parent company, The Carlyle Group. Still, Trump’s deal with Carrier demonstrates the unprecedented challenge the president’s conflicts of interest create: Unless he either puts his holdings in a truly blind trust or divests completely, a significant number of the decisions he makes will involve some level of financial incentive for himself as well as for the country.

Back to table of contents

That Blind-Trust Issue

Almost as soon as Donald Trump and a lawyer from the Trump Organization unveiled their plans to distance the president from his businesses on January 11, many ethics experts argued that the proposal didn’t do nearly enough to ward off concerns that Trump’s business involvements would produce conflicts of interest during his presidency.

Under that plan, Trump resigned from the positions he held at the many companies that make up his real-estate empire, ceding control to his two adult sons and a longtime business associate, with his assets placed in a trust run by his two adult sons and Allen Weisselberg, a longtime Trump Organization executive, for the duration of his presidency. In unveiling the plan, the president vowed to refrain from talking about his financial interests with Donald Jr. and Eric Trump and said that all future business decisions would be reviewed by a newly appointed compliance officer to prevent even accidental impropriety. However, critics said, as long as Trump still profits from his businesses, these measures do almost nothing to mitigate worries about conflicts of interest. Besides, with so much of his fortune derived from highly visible real-estate and branding deals, some lawyers note that no trust would fully blind him from knowing where his financial interests lie; they say the only way to fully protect against conflicts of interest would have been for him to have sold off his businesses before taking office.

Events since the election demonstrate that these experts’ doubts are well-founded. Trump and his sons have shown little interest in maintaining the appearance of separation, with Eric and Donald Jr. showing up at numerous political events for their father. Roughly two weeks before the election, Donald Jr. met with a pro-Russian group in Paris to discuss his father’s policy toward Syria and, according to Politico, was involved in his father’s search for a Secretary of the Interior; he was also spotted hunting in Turkey shortly after his father’s phone call with Turkish President Recep Erdogan in which the president praised a Turkish business partner. Eric, meanwhile, appeared in photos with his father and a group of Indian businessmen mere days after the election.  And both were present for the president’s announcement of his nominee for the Supreme Court.

Then, when asked about the blind trust in a March 24 interview with Forbes, Eric gave answers that seemed to contradict not only the arrangement to which he supposedly agreed but also his own statements on the topic. “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,” he said, before telling the interviewer that he will be providing updates to his father “on the bottom line, profitability reports and stuff like that” on a quarterly basis. “My father and I are very close. I talk to him a lot. We’re pretty inseparable,” he concluded. If Trump is in constant contact with Eric and receiving updates on his businesses from his sons, it renders the trust they created effectively meaningless—and validates the concerns watchdog groups raised when Trump first unveiled his plan in January.

After Eric Trump made those comments to Forbes, other holes in Trump’s plan have come to light. On April 3, ProPublica discovered a previously unreported change to the trust arrangement that effectively allows the president to personally withdraw money from his businesses at virtually any time he chooses. On February 10, a clause was apparently added to a letter outlining the details of the trust stating that “the Trustees shall distribute net income or principal to Donald J. Trump at his request, as the Trustees deem necessary for his maintenance, support or uninsured medical expenses, or as the Trustees otherwise deem appropriate.” In other words, Trump will be able to draw profits from his businesses at any time during his presidency as long as he and the trustees—again, his two sons and his long-time business partner—agree that it is “appropriate,” and will not have to disclose when he does so. This goes directly against the purpose of a blind trust, which in this case would be to distance Trump from his sources of income in an attempt to get rid of his incentive—or even ability—to consciously act in his own financial interest. So far, the plan unveiled in January appears to be as inadequate as many ethics experts had feared.

Finally, removing himself from day-to-day operations will do little to change the fact that Trump will retain substantive knowledge of the illiquid assets involved in his business, such as the numerous buildings and other products that bear his name, especially if he remains in frequent contact with his children. Even assuming that Trump does separate himself from any consideration of his holdings, his children will still likely be major players in the family’s organization, which will still bear at least the Trump name—arguably one of their most valuable properties, as much of the family’s wealth derives from licensing the name to third-party companies. Given the family’s oft-touted brand-consciousness (Ivanka, for example, briefly appeared to be distancing herself from the campaign, and several properties considered rebranding under the name &ldqu