sleepilytinyjester

[sleepilytinyjester]

Donald Trump exploited loopholes to build a White House rife with nepotism.

On the 2016 campaign trail, Donald Trump told voters that if they elected him, he would surround himself with the “best” and “most serious” people — a dubious claim given that he had long associated with fraudsters and crooks during his turbulent career in the private sector. Quickly after he was elected, however, it became clear that Trump planned on running the government the same way he ran his business: Hire his family to top positions and flood the White House with loyalists. The result was corruption, incompetence, and what clearly did not come close to meeting the bar of “best” or “most serious.”

In fact, two of Trump’s earliest White House appointments were glaring examples of his willingness to engage in petty corruption: On Jan. 9, 2017, Trump hired his son-in-law Jared Kushner as a senior White House adviser, which, only a few months later, was followed by the new president giving a similar role to his daughter Ivanka Trump.

These appointments were troublesome for several reasons. First, neither Kushner nor Ivanka Trump had prior qualifications for the work they were assigned, meaning that their appointments were made on the grounds that they had a close relationship with the president. (That relationship would later allow them to get special treatment and give them the ability to flout certain ethics rules.) Second, though both Kushner and Ivanka waived their White House salaries, they still stood to profit from their role in the administration — expanding the Trump family’s use of the presidency as a for-profit operation. And third, such clear displays of nepotism by public officials are illegal — a law that technically applies to the president as well, but in which Trump managed to find loopholes.

While serving in the Trump White House, Ivanka and Kushner did indeed leverage their positions to bolster their profits. Like Trump, neither of them had fully divested from their businesses, and Kushner sold his stake in one of his businesses only after it directly benefited from the tax bill that his father-in-law signed into law. Kushner’s family’s real estate company came under scrutiny on several occasions because his family members appeared to lean on their relationship with the administration. At one business event in Beijing, Kushner’s sister promoted an EB-5 visa program — which grants immigrants a path to citizenship if they invest substantially in a company that creates jobs in the United States — and essentially implied that her relationship with her brother would help expedite a pathway to citizenship for investors in a Kushner-owned property before the visa program rule was set to change the minimum investment from $500,000 to $900,000. And Kushner’s family company had business dealings in Israel even as one of his chief responsibilities included Middle East policy.

Given just how many conflicts of interest consumed the Trump family while they were in the White House, it’s time to ensure that no future president will follow Trump’s example. Because if nepotism is not seriously addressed, then Trump’s presidency would only serve as a blueprint for other corrupt business families to run for office to expand their wealth in the future.