What If China Paid Trump While In Office But The Supreme Court Said The Question Was Moot?
It did, and they did? Well how about that.
On Thursday, Yr Wonkette closed out the day with a brief review of some of the top-line findings of House Democrats’ big report on some of the foreign government money that flowed to Donald Trump’s businesses while he was “serving” as “president” of these United States. The report, by Democrats on the House Oversight Committee, found that Trump raked in a minimum of $7.8 million from foreign governments and entities (he wasn’t so much into keeping “records”) at just four of Trump’s trash palaces: Trump Tower in New York, plus his Trump hotels in Las Vegas, New York, and Washington DC — the last of which he sold after losing the 2020 election, and which has been steam cleaned and reopened as a Motel 6 Waldorf Astoria.
Now, by popular demand (Yr Editrix is popular, and she demanded it), we bring you a closer look at some of that filthy foreign lucre and why it friggin’ matters in an alleged constitutional republic like ours.
For starters, we need to emphasize again that Trump’s getting money from foreign sources is not simply a paperwork detail, it’s a flat out violation of the US Constitution, which Republicans used to say was a pretty big deal. The “foreign emoluments clause” ( Article I, Section 9, clause 8) is pretty clear on the matter:
“[N]o Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under [the United States], shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.”
“Emolument” is simply a ye olde word for an “advantage, profit, or gain received as a result of one’s employment or one’s holding of office,” and it has generally been interpreted as a ban on taking any gifts or payments from a foreign. The clause very much applies to presidents, and prior to Trump, it was taken quite seriously. As the report notes, John F. Kennedy had to turn down Ireland’s symbolic offer of honorary Irish citizenship, and Barack Obama was allowed to accept the Nobel Peace Prize “only after the DOJ determined that the selection process was independent from the influence of the Norwegian government.” (It was a 20-page decision.) And even then, he donated to charity the $1.4 million that went with the honor.
Even Abraham Lincoln — many people don’t know it, but he was a Republican — reported to Congress in 1862 the King of Siam’s personal gift of a “a ceremonial sword and two elephant tusks,” but Congress didn’t vote that he could keep them. Instead, he had to send them to the Department of the Interior. The report did not mention whether Lincoln was impressed by the King’s children’s rendition of “Getting to Know You.”
Trump just bulldozed right past such petty concerns, and because he was such a tornado of chaos and scandal (way off the Fujita scale, what with the bulldozer being tossed around in the whirlwind too), his Constitution-defying business operations never got him in any trouble. Even when good government groups tried to sue to get federal courts to pay attention, the suits got thrown out of court because judges said the plaintiffs lacked standing to sue, since Trump’s defiance of the Constitution hadn’t directly harmed them.
Once Democrats took control of the House, they sued to get Trump’s financial records, and succeeded in getting some — the documents on which the report is based — but as the Washington Post points out,
The issue eventually landed at the Supreme Court, but there was no definitive ruling on whether Trump illegally profited from his presidency. Instead, the justices in 2021 said the cases were moot because Trump no longer held office.
We can’t hear “the question is moot” without Jesse Jackson orating in our earholes. So one good thing has come of this story at least!
But back to Trump, that lucky ducky. Last year the Republicans won their narrow House majority, and the new Oversight chair, Rep. James Comer (R-Kentucky), shut down the investigation into Trump’s finances, preferring instead to pretend he would find lots of Chinese money going to Joe Biden via Hunter. Golly, Mr. Chairman, you want evidence of a president getting illegal money from China, the Democrats finished up their report, and there it is, with at least $5.6 million from the Chinese government and entities it controls, making China by far the largest known source of Trump’s foreign funds. As the Post summarizes,
The Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC), one of China’s biggest state-owned banks, was among Trump Tower’s largest office tenants during the Trump presidency. The report notes that during Trump’s first year in the White House, several Chinese banks — including ICBC — came under scrutiny for financial ties to North Korea, causing the administration to weigh sanctions against them.
Despite calls from members of his own party to implement maximum pressure against these banks to halt the North Korean nuclear program, “then-President Trump and his Administration did not take any formal action against Trump Tower tenant ICBC,” the report concludes.
That seems like a pretty good case for some kind of law against presidents getting income from foreign sources, to “avoid even the appearance of impropriety” as they say. Oh, hey, we have a law just like that! It’s the Constitution of the United States, but goddamned if anyone can seem to enforce it.
Oh, but a Trump Organization spokesperson explained it was no big, because ICBC had been renting the space since 2008, long before Trump ran, and also he did those tariffs on China, so no foreign influence, no foreign influence, YOU’RE the foreign influence.
Also, the Trump Organization claimed in 2018, during Trump’s presidency, that when the Great Man donated $151,470 to the Treasury in 2018, that sum “fulfills our pledge to donate profits from foreign government patronage at our hotels and similar business during President Trump’s term in office.”
They were only off by at least 7.6 million or so. Probably far more, because as the report points out, the records the House was able to get, after years of legal fights, covered “only a small fraction” of his total business dealings while he was in office.
Maybe some future Congress will have enough Democrats (we almost typed “and honest Republicans” but had a coughing fit) to pass a real law requiring that presidents divest themselves of their business holdings while in office, along with instituting other mechanisms for making the emoluments clause mean something. Norms and conventions only worked until January 20, 2017.
[White House for Sale: How Princes, Prime Ministers, and Premiers Paid Off President Trump / WaPo / ABC News]
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They don't want him to be INNOCENT.
They want him to COMMIT CRIMES AND GET AWAY WITH IT.
Personally, I feel like the president bears more responsibility to follow the law than the average person, not less.