According to multiple media reports Wednesday morning, President-elect Donald Trump has announced he is fully divesting himself from the Trump Organization, the company he built from the ground up.
The transition from Trump to his adult children—Donald Jr., Ivanka and Eric—will be announced next month at Trump Tower in Manhattan. He made the following announcement via Twitter:
“I will be holding a major news conference in New York City with my children on Dec. 15 to discuss the fact that I will be leaving my great business in total in order to fully focus on running the country in order to make america great again! While I am not mandated to do this under the law, I feel it is visually important, as president, to in no way have a conflict of interest with my various businesses.
“Hence, legal documents are being crafted which take me completely out of business operations. The presidency is a far more important task!”
The announcement fulfills a campaign promise he made to transfer his company to his children if he won the White House. Traditionally, a president’s assets are placed into a blind trust for the duration of his term in office.
If he doesn’t use a blind trust element in the arrangement, or some visible sign of ethical separation from the company, liberals will argue the president-elect is still able to have influence on the company, and that conflicts of interest will continue to exist if his children are running the Trump Organization. In fact, left-leaning Politico was already making that claim less than hour after the announcement.
Incoming White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, currently the chairman of the Republican National Committee, admitted the nation is now in uncharted territory with a billionaire president during an interview with MSNBC’s Morning Joe program. He said:
“This is the first president we’ve had at least in modern history that’s had so many successful businesses and so many diverse areas across the country and in many cases retail and hospitality business that is dependent on people’s business. So it’s not the easiest thing to work out.
“You should know that he’s got the best people in America working on it. And I think what you see in those tweets is a person at the top that understands and is willing and showing the American people that he’s working hard on it and he’s taking it seriously.”
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