March 31, 2018
A Washington Post article on the possibility that Donald Trump will have to disclose his finances may have misled readers. The piece told readers:
“Company officials argue it would have been impractical to untangle and sell all of Trump’s real estate holdings, and that doing so might have created additional conflicts of interest.”
It neglected to point out that this assertion by Trump’s employees is a lie. It is easy to design schemes under which Trump could disassociate himself from his business without creating conflicts of interest.
As I pointed out shortly after the election, this could be accomplished through a three-step process.
1) Donald Trump arranges to hire three auditors from an independent accounting firm. Each one does an independent assessment of Trump’s holdings and assigns it a value.
2) The middle assessment becomes a benchmark. Donald Trump buys an insurance policy that will guarantee him that he will get this amount of money when all assets are sold. If the total take is less than the benchmark, he collects on the insurance policy. Any money received in excess of the benchmark goes to a charity of Trump’s choosing (not the Trump Foundation).
3) All the proceeds from the sales are placed in a blind trust.
This would be a very straightforward process. We know that Trump has a hard time finding competent people to work for him, but the rest of us would have little difficulty solving his conflict of interest problem.
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