During Donald Trump’s first term, his White House team often expressed an indifference to ethics guidelines. In fact, in one especially memorable instance, Kellyanne Conway freely admitted in 2019 that they simply didn’t care about ethical restrictions that she was supposed to follow.
Things weren’t much better with the Trump Organization, which unveiled a controversial ethics pledge before the Republican took office eight years ago, and which continued to be problematic while Trump was in office.
It’s against this backdrop that the president-elect’s business operation — on the heels of a court ruling about the Trump Organization committing systematic fraud — issued a new ethics agreement addressing potential conflicts of interest for the coming years.
As The New York Times reported, the document largely echoes the comparable pledge from the Republican’s last presidential transition period, with a notable omission: The Trump family and its business are “not pledging to halt any new international real estate deals, unlike eight years ago.”
Rather, the new pledge agrees only to avoid “new transactions” with foreign governments.
Eric Trump, one of the president-elect’s sons, who’s helped run the private-sector company, boasted that he and his colleagues are “going above and beyond.” As the Times’ report added, ethics experts don’t see the framework quite the same way.
For example, Richard Painter, a former White House ethics lawyer from the Bush/Cheney White House, told the newspaper, “If the president receives any profits or benefits from foreign governments — not just new deals — then he is in violation of the Constitution. The money flow has to stop on Jan. 20.”
Similarly, Norm Eisen, an ethics lawyer in the Obama White House, added that the Trump Organization is eyeing “self-imposed limitations” that “were meaningless in the first Trump administration and will be no more effective in the second one.” But the closer one looks at some of the relevant details, the greater the cause for concern. The agreement does not address potential ethics questions that could emerge as a result of the Trump family’s relationship with World Liberty Financial — a cryptocurrency company that it helped start — at the same time that Mr. Trump will be naming the new chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, which regulates cryptocurrency. The agreement also does not address potential conflicts that could emerge as a result of Mr. Trump’s majority ownership stake in Truth Social, the social media platform he created after leaving the White House.
What’s to stop someone from buying Truth Social stock in the hopes of helping the Trumps and/or trying to curry favor with the incoming president? By all appearances, nothing. We probably haven’t heard the last of this one.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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