The Trump Family’s Many
Entanglements
Donald Trump’s first term was rife with conflicts of
interest. This time, it seems, there will be fewer constraints.
By Lora
Kelley
December 10, 2024,
5:52 PM ET
President-Elect Donald Trump is, in some respects, a family
man. During his first term in the White House, his children
regularly surrounded him, appearing in important meetings and at major public
events. Ivanka Trump served in an unpaid advisory role to the president, along
with her husband, Jared Kushner, and his two elder sons ran the family business
while their father served in office.
Ivanka was notably absent during her father’s 2024
campaign, having retreated to a semi-private island in the Miami area with her
family. And in 2023, Trump told Fox News’s Bret Baier that his
family members would not serve in his administration should he return to the
White House: “It’s too painful” for them, he said. But as he prepares for
Inauguration Day, a new set of more distant family members is stepping in.
Trump has already bestowed official positions upon the fathers-in-law of his
daughters: Massad Boulos, Tiffany’s husband’s father, has been named a senior
adviser to the president on Arab and Middle Eastern affairs, and Charles
Kushner, father-in-law of Ivanka, was nominated to serve as U.S. ambassador to
France.
Having family members serve in key government positions
presents such clear opportunities for conflicts of interest that most
government officials avoid it altogether. And there are legal barriers too:
After President John F. Kennedy selected his brother for attorney general,
Congress passed an anti-nepotism law in 1967
restricting presidents from appointing relatives to agency jobs. White House
roles are still permitted, but most presidents don’t go near the line. Trump,
however, happily did so in his first term.
Trump’s family benefitted from this arrangement. As my
colleague Franklin Foer wrote in 2020, “Both the Kushner and the
Trump families have tried to turn the White House into a vehicle for
self-enrichment.” Jared Kushner, he argued, had become his father-in-law’s
“most dangerous enabler” as he led some of the country’s pandemic-response
strategies. What Kushner “lacked wasn’t competence, but the courage to
challenge his father-in-law’s fantasies,” Foer wrote. In this case, familial
appointments weren’t just unseemly; they hindered the government’s capacity to
function well in a moment of crisis.
Trump’s potential entanglements extend beyond his family’s
role in the White House to his businesses. After winning the presidency in
2016, he promised to avoid conflicts of interest introduced by his involvement
in the Trump Organization, though he ultimately just transferred control of the company to
his two older sons. The Trump Organization’s 2017 ethics plan said that it
would restrict dealings in foreign countries. It is apparently not planning to
do so to the same extent this time: The New York Times reported earlier this month that Eric
Trump, who leads most of the Trump Organization’s operations, was preparing to
limit deals done directly with foreign governments, but not to
restrict deals in foreign countries altogether.
Eric has openly justified a looser approach, telling the Times that “the
first term, we did everything imaginable to avoid any appearance of
impropriety, and frankly, we got crushed anyway … We can’t just sit out in
perpetuity, and I won’t.” (Donald Trump racked up some 3,400 conflicts of
interest during his first term, according to a nonpartisan ethics watchdog.) In recent months, per
the Times, Eric has struck deals in Vietnam, Saudi Arabia, and the
United Arab Emirates. Jared Kushner, who has said he will not return to an
official White House role, in recent years has gone into business with the
governments of Saudi Arabia (which contributed roughly $2 billion to his
private-equity firm) and Serbia (with whom his firm plans to share profits from a hotel on the
site of the former Yugoslav Ministry of Defense).
Trump’s business interests have only gotten more varied and
complex since his first term: Trump and his sons—including the youngest,
Barron—helped launch a cryptocurrency project in the fall. (None
of the Trumps is an officer of the company.) Trump’s social-media app, Truth
Social, debuted on the public markets in March. Both welcome foreign
investments. His team has waved
away criticism, saying that Trump didn’t get into politics to
make money and that he would follow ethics guidelines in his
next term in office, but Trump has not promised to divest from his business
interests, and the ethics code that his team issued last month for the
transition period notably appeared to exclude restrictions on the president-elect
himself.
Trump’s first term was rife with apparent and actual
conflicts of interest. This time, it seems, there will be fewer constraints.
And his loyal advisers and family members will remain disinclined to raise
questions if he crosses ethical lines, given that many of them stand to
profit—be it financially or politically—from his success. Writing shortly after
Trump endorsed Lara Trump, the wife of his son Eric, for RNC
co-chair earlier this year, my colleague David Graham noted that the president-elect ran both his
companies and his White House by stocking them with questionably qualified
“ultra-loyalists.” This approach, he wrote, helps “ensure that the only thing
that matters, and the only person who decides, is Trump.”