Trump was too poor to divest
According to tax returns obtained by the New York Times, Trump is insolvent
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) has set up a conflict of interest tracker on their website. According to their calculations, Trump has amassed a historic number of conflicts: 3406 at last count.
Generally speaking, presidents and other elected officials seek to avoid conflicts of interest. When we elect people to office, we hope that they are looking out for our interests, not their own or those of others. Divesting themselves of business interests, or at least putting them in blind trusts, are ways to ensure that presidents can put all their focus on serving Americans, not on serving themselves or their creditors.
Trump, of course, has refused to either divest himself of his businesses or to put them in blind trusts. A blind trust means that you have no control over the assets, and don’t even have the ability to see the financials. As former Congressman John Dingell pointed out, Jimmy Carter, upon his election to the presidency, had to put his peanut farm into a blind trust. One might think there would be few conflicts between the interests of the United States and a Georgia peanut farm, but he did it anyway. And as proof that a blind trust means BLIND, when Carter left the White House, his…
