Trump Postpones Plans To Prevent His Conflicts Of Interest

With the appointments of Tillerson and Perry and the furor over Russian hacking, the fact that Trump’s transition team has cancelled his promised news conference for Thursday, where Trump was supposed to provide the legal details of how he was going to separate himself from his business, just might have passed under the radar, as I’m sure Trump wanted and expected. The news conference has now been postponed to January although there was no guarantee from the transition that it would occur before or after the inauguration. Instead, Trump put out another late-night tweet where he said he would leave his business before the inauguration and that his sons Eric and Don, Jr. would be running the business instead. In addition, Trump claimed that “no new deals would be done” while he was President. Of course, there will be no way to know whether Trump or the sons will follow through on that promise and there is still plenty of time between now and inauguration day for lots of deals to get underway. In any case, this plan does nothing to resolve the existing conflicts of interests that Trump already has. And it does nothing to really keep any new conflicts from arising. Even if Trump holds that news conference in January, which I have doubts will happen, I’m pretty sure that there will be nothing presented legally that will do anything to resolve or prevent Trump and/or his family from benefitting materially from his position as President. The grift will continue.