Of all the things people said about my run for the presidency, the funniest was that I did it to make money. Get your 15 minutes of fame, build your brand, and voila! Book sales, speaking fees, etc.
Ha!
If only.
Anyone who has actually run for president can tell you that you give up a lot more than you can ever hope to get. And I didn’t spend millions of my own money like Donald Trump did.
Trump isn’t done giving up his money either. He announced last week that not only will he turn over control of his business enterprise to his sons and a longtime colleague, but get this: Trump intends to donate all hotel profits that come from foreign payments to the U.S. Treasury.
You realize, of course, that he is under no obligation to do any of this. He doesn’t have to give up his business interests. He doesn’t have to give up the money they make. They’re his, after all, and he built them. There is no law that says that, upon becoming president, you have to give all that up.
Or give any of it up.
Trump is choosing to do so, I think, mainly to avoid any appearance of a conflict. There may be some real conflicts, like the fact that the federal government leases some space in Trump Tower. That makes Trump his own landlord. It’s nothing on the order of politicians taking campaign contributions from public employee unions and then rewarding them with fat contracts at taxpayer expense. But it’s something, and it’s wise for Trump to let someone else handle the leasing decisions for as long as he’s president.
Still, he didn’t have to do it, and he certainly doesn’t have to take the extraordinary step of donating all hotel profits that come from foreign payments to the Treasury.
So you’d think that, having gone above and beyond anything that’s required of him, Trump would have mollified his critics and gotten them to stop yelping about his supposed conflicts of interest.
But you’d be wrong! Of course they haven’t stopped yelping!
Time Magazine is sadly typical of the whiny complainers who demand he completely divest of his entire business enterprise. That’s simply insane. For one thing, it’s not that easy to do. For another thing, if you immediately liquidate all your business holdings, you’re almost certainly not going to get full value in cash. That means that after all the years you spend building these businesses, you now have to give up realizing their true value.
Why would you do that? No one with a brain would. But the political class seems to think that business profits are evil, and that if a president is realizing profits from any business while he’s in office, that somehow puts him at odds with the best interests of the American people.
Support Canada Free Press
I’m sure Trump realized his critics would never be satisfied, no matter what he did. But what he’s done is beyond anything that could or should have been asked of him, and it speaks to his seriousness in embracing the presidency and turning the problems of this nation around.
And I know he isn’t doing it for gratitude, and that’s a good thing. Because while some people will surely thank him for the hard work he’s going to do, it’s clear he’s going to get a lot more grief than gratitude – at least from the people who yell the loudest.
I’ve had about enough of listening to them.
