Because the Trump White House is a business with the shades closed — the visitor logs no longer available to the public, the<br />tax returns a dark secret — we cannot know how extensively the Trump clan is making foreign policy to help its holdings.<br />Turning management over to his sons is a farce, one you would expect from a man who ran a casino into bankruptcy, stiffed plumbers<br />and carpenters, and defrauded thousands of people at a phony “university.”<br />Trump makes money every time a foreign diplomat or favor-seeking industrialist stays at one of his hotels or becomes a tenant in one of his buildings.<br />The same administration that wants to zero-out public money for the arts used<br />public money to inform people of Trump’s exquisite taste in private property.<br />It’s clear now that the reason Trump — in defiance of all ethical standards for the office — has refused to divest his business interests is<br />that the levers of executive power directly help Trump Inc.<br />He spent four hours at the White House with Sarah Palin<br />and Ted Nugent, the no-talent musician who called President Barack Obama a “subhuman mongrel.” The guests posed, in thug mode, before a portrait of Hillary Clinton — a fitting image for a host who has turned the home of Lincoln and Roosevelt into a House of Grifters.<br />The family has extensive entanglements in China, the Philippines and Turkey, to name just a few “conflicts.”<br />And Jared Kushner, who has a far-reaching diplomatic portfolio, is also a beneficiary of many businesses<br />backed by unnamed foreign partners, as my colleague Jesse Drucker reported this week.
