Donald Trump Couldn’t Get a Job in His Own Administration, According to His Own Administration

The Trump transition team warns applicants that no conflicts of interest will be tolerated.

John Locher/AP

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


Donald Trump’s transition team needs to hire more than 4,000 new staffers to run the next administration, and the website for applicants contains a dire warning for anyone who thinks he or she can mix personal business with public business.

“Consideration is taken for possible conflicts of interest,” the website declares. “Financial holdings and sources of income must be disclosed. Any conflicts must be remedied by divestiture, the creation of special trusts, and other actions.”

That would disqualify Trump himself from serving in his own administration, as his conflicts of interest are numerous and he has steadfastly refused to remedy the matter, even though some of these conflicts apparently violate the Constitution.

But it gets worse for Trump. According to the transition’s job application website, people hired by the Trump administration will have to accept that their dealings with the federal government during and after their service “will be significantly restricted to prevent possible conflicts of interest.” That’s an allusion to Trump’s plan to control lobbyists, but this provision, if applied to Trump, would probably restrict his ability to continue owning and operating his brand-new Washington, DC, hotel.

Fortunately for Trump, he doesn’t have to worry personally about such restraints. The conflict-of-interest rules that apply to every other high-ranking official in the federal government do not apply to the president. In an interview with the New York Times last week, Trump himself expressed surprise that he could get away with conflicts of interest so easily. “I’d assumed that you’d have to set up some type of trust or whatever and you don’t,” he told reporters. But that’s the law: Trump will be free to run his business empire while doing business as president, despite a flood of conflicts. He has made vague remarks about establishing some distance between himself and his financial interests by letting his three oldest children control the family business. Which means, as several ethics specialists have pointed out, this would not be a blind trust or any meaningful separation. The conflicts would remain.

The exception to conflicts for the president came about because of a 1989 ethics law passed under President George H.W. Bush that protects the president from conflict-of-interest rules. Why this occurred isn’t exactly clear. But the original reasoning behind this provision may have been that the president cannot really recuse himself from being president; consequently, he ought not to be governed by rules that could call for a recusal. So here we have Trump, via his transition website, demanding that government officials play by good-government rules that he himself is flouting.

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate