On Wednesday, at his first press conference since the election, Donald Trump brought out his lawyer to announce that he will be handing off his business operations to his two adult sons, Donald Jr. and Eric—but his decision is unlikely to satisfy critics who worry about potential conflicts of interest.
Rather than completely severing his ties to his business empire by selling his assets or putting the Trump Organization into a blind trust, as the Office of Government Ethics has urged him to do, Trump will merely be resigning from the organization, Trump’s lawyer, Sheri Dillon, explained. His daughter Ivanka will also have no management authority in the group, likely to avoid a conflict of interest with her husband, Jared Kushner, who was just named a White House senior advisor.
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Dillon also explained that the organization will be hiring a chief compliance counsel to act as an ethics advisor for the company and will be responsible for vetting and approving any new domestic deals. She said that the Trump Organization has terminated all existing pending deals and will not enter into new foreign deals while Trump is president. Trump will also apparently have limited “information rights” that will prevent him from knowing or discussing the operations of the company with his sons.
According to the lawyer, selling the company to a third party would inevitably lead to further potential conflicts of interest. “If President-elect Trump sold his brand, he would be entitled to royalties for the use of it,” Dillion said, “and this would result in the trust retaining an interest in the brand without the ability to assure that it does not exploit the office of the presidency.”
And selling the company to his sons would be impossible without third-party financing, which would bring its own problems. “President-elect Trump should not be expected to destroy the company he built,” Dillon insisted.
Dillion also said that Trump hotels would donate all profits from foreign government payments to the US Treasury, though it was unclear how that would work in practice.
Trump himself spoke more casually, appearing to congratulate himself for not doing a $2 billion deal with a Dubai developer who proposed the deal after the election. He also said that conflict-of-interest laws don’t apply to the presidency and that he was not obligated to divest from anything.
“I could actually run my business and run government at the same time,” Trump said. “I don’t like the way that looks, but I would be able to do that if I wanted to.”
