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.”








