November 30, 2016

Trump Promises to Leave His Businesses. We’ll Believe It When We See It.

“I feel it is visually important.”

Peter Foley/ZUMA

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Amid mounting concerns over his ever-growing potential conflicts of interest, Donald Trump on Wednesday said he intends to abandon his businesses “in total” so he can properly lead the country. The president-elect posted a series of early-morning tweets:

Trump has insisted that despite concerns about massive conflicts of interest that have arisen since his election, he is under no legal obligation to distance himself from his businesses. “The law is totally on my side, meaning, the president can’t have a conflict of interest,” he told the New York Times last week. Trump is correct. The presidency is exempt from conflict-of-interest rules.

But his intention to transfer his business ties to his adult children will likely do little to ameliorate concerns over Trump’s various business entanglements. Legal experts note that simply knowing who controls the assets negates the blind trust arrangement. His announcement on Wednesday comes one day after the Kingdom of Bahrain revealed it was hosting a large celebration at Trump’s Washington, DC, hotel next month—the same property other foreign diplomats have said they feel pressured to stay at while in town.

“Why wouldn’t I stay at his hotel blocks from the White House, so I can tell the new president, ‘I love your new hotel!'” one Asian diplomat recently told the Washington Post. “Isn’t it rude to come to his city and say, ‘I am staying at your competitor?'”

Trump’s news conference on December 15 will be his first since becoming president-elect.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT.

We have a considerable $390,000 gap in our online fundraising budget that we have to close by June 30. There is no wiggle room, we've already cut everything we can, and we urgently need more readers to pitch in—especially from this specific blurb you're reading right now.

We'll also be quite transparent and level-headed with you about this.

In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

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