Trump Tweet Suggests Conflicts of Interest Will Continue
Dec. 13, 2016
Trump Tweet Suggests Conflicts of Interest Will Continue
Statement of Robert Weissman, President, Public Citizen
The acid test for President-elect Donald Trump’s conflicts of interest is: Will he sell the family business?
Last night’s tweets suggest that he will not divest, which means that nothing of consequence has changed.
Trump will continue to have the conflicts arising from business operations in more than 20 countries around the world; he will continue to have the conflicts from owning a luxury hotel just a few blocks from the White House that diplomats openly state they will patronize to curry favor with President Trump; and he will continue to have the inescapable, all-encompassing conflicts from business holdings that give him a direct financial stake in policy matters from consumer protection to tax policy, labor rights to bankruptcy.
Candidate Trump promised to root out corruption, cronyism and insider dealmaking. President-elect Trump is making a mockery of those promises, starting with his refusal to end his own conflicts of interest, as serious as any in the history of the American presidency.
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