Blind Trusts, Conflicts of Interest, and the Media
- Charlie Biscotto
- Dec 15, 2016
- 2 min read
That the Trump Organization is facing accusations of conflicts of interest should come as no surprise. As early as September, Newsweek's Kurt Eichenwald was reporting on it, and to his credit, Donald Trump has been consistent in his answers. Or at least in one aspect of it: that "his children would run the company." This setup has been called, both by Donald Trump and members of the media, a "blind trust," but to call an organization run by his children with his last name on any doors that open or close "blind" is comical. Even a piece arguing that this would be the best option written by Laura Lee for Fox Business pointed out:
But for Donald Trump, who owns well-known real estate holdings including Trump Tower and Trump Hotels, setting up a blind trust in the traditional sense may be unrealistic. "It would be fairly hard to have a real blind trust because if a trustee were to sell any assets, the sale would likely be above the radar screen so he would probably know and that defeats it being blind which is you don't really know what you own," says Bruce Steiner, an attorney with Kleinberg Kaplan who specializes in business succession planning and trust administration. If Trump also names his children as trustees, they would not be considered independent.
No matter what, this arrangement will not be a "real blind trust," so we should stop giving Donald Trump the space to call it one.
Nevertheless, David B. Rivkin Jr. and Lee A. Casey (former officials in the Reagan and H.W. Bush administrations) have spelled out in the Washington Post a compelling way that Donald Trump's children can place some solid boundaries between the business interests of Trump Organization and the responsibilities of a President Trump. He has relied so heavily on his children up to this point in his nascent political career that it's hard to imagine him drawing those boundaries, but it's not impossible. Central to Rivkin and Casey's argument, however, is the fact that America has never had a president with the sprawling business and branding empire of Donald Trump. That fact is central to his appeal, but it nevertheless complicates what had been fairly simple transactions for past presidents.
It is not the media that makes Donald Trump's transition from billionaire global businessman to President complex. It's the fact that he's the first person to do it. I do not fault Donald Trump for his wealth, nor should he fault the media for pointing out the entanglements it creates. It is a dangerous impulse for a head of state to attack the news organizations critical of him, and yet he and his enablers do, time and time again, whenever the media stretches its critical muscle.