Short version of the article. Nordstrom dept store dropped Ivanka Trump’s product line. They claim this was due to sagging sales. It is worth noting it came after an anti-Trump boycott. Trump tweeted about it and here’s where it gets interesting both on his personal account and the official PotUS account. Using the official account seems to my eyes to be a violation of the “Conflicts of Interest” rules from the US Office of Government Ethics.
Sean Spicer has since said that no this was just a father defending his daughter and he has a right to do so.
So, let’s start with the obvious: By using the official PotUS twitter account has Trump committed an ethics violation?
And as a bonus discussion: If someday the GOP decides they’ve extracted all the value they can from Trump, will it be this sort of behaviour that gets him impeached?
I also think that intentionally ignoring an ethics violation that has been brought to Congress’ attention is also the basis for impeachment.
If you ignore a breach of ethics, you are an accomplice to that breach of ethics.
I’m not a lawyer so I can’t say if it’s an ethics violation. It’s certainly unethical and an abuse of power. As is Kellyanne Conway telling Americans to go out and buy Ivanka’s stuff.
So far, it seems like the emoluments clause may be the only ethical restriction which actually applies to the President. (And only relevant if someone can find a way to establish standing in court - which seems difficult to accomplish.)
Ethical and legal are two distinct and only occasionally tentatively linked concepts.
As was discussed in some detail earlier, the conflict of interest laws explicitly exclude the President and Vice-President, as laid out in 18 U.S. Code § 202(c).
So from a legal perspective, I’m unaware of any statute that is being violated. I certainly welcome correction on this point.
In simpler language:
Those rules don’t legally include the President, so, no.
This is a point that’s been made many times before on this board.
And for whatever it’s worth, President Truman (in pre-Twitter days) was furious when Paul Hume, a music critic for the Washington Post, gave Truman’s daughter a terrible review of her vocal performance at a December 1950 performance at Constitution Hall. Hume wrote that Margaret Truman simply could not sing well, was flat most of the time, and “cannot sing with anything approaching professional finish.”
In response, Truman used official White House stationery to reply to Hume, saying in major part:
This did not violate any laws either.
I leave it to your informed analysis how morally unethical Trump is, or Truman was, but from a legal perspective, nope.
No. This behavior is eye-rollingly petty, but since no ethics rules were broken, not worth the enormous effort of impeachment. Especially by the president’s own party.
While it is true that the fact that the president is legally immune to the consequences of conflict of interest, that is something that is so antithetical to how most people think govt officials should act, that it is still a surprise. And not everyone has participated in all the threads, so may not have come across this interesting tidbit of political trivia.
In any case, the difference between Truman and Trump (apart from one using twitter to reach instantly to millions of people, and he other using whit house stationary, which goes to who, exactly?) is that Truman wa responding to criticism, in kind. The critic actually said rather unkind things to which truman responded, using similar language, while nordstrom made a business decision that caused the so-called president to lash out.
Hume was a music critic. He was employed by the Washington Post to review musical performances and offer his professional evaluation of them. I’m not sure I agree his words are fairly described as “unkind;” so far as I am aware, they were a good-faith evaluation of Margaret’s singing. And he certainly did not threaten violence. Truman’s response was not “in kind,” and did not use similar language. Hume wrote a critique of a musical performance; Truman threatened to punch Hume.
In your opinion, should the rules be amended to include the president and vice-president? It would of course require a blind trust for any assets and I don’t know how you’d handle family interests. Is that even workable?
I didn’t read the review, so I assumed it was a typical harsh and insulting criticism that critics like to do sometimes. If Truman was a harsher critic critic than the critic was a music critic, then I find that is still in the same venue, just apparently Truman was better at it.
I have no idea how important white house stationery was at the time. Quick googling doesn’t really tell me much about it, other than now some white house stationary with his signature is collectible. How many people would have read this response?
The threat of violence is a bit of an escalation, but he had relatively recently dropped a coupla nukes, so warning that he was going to need a steak for his black eye and a new nose struck me as more of puffery than honest aggression, and the first reading it didn’t even register to me as an actual threat, but more of a “why, I oughttta…”
The problem is, is that anyone else in the govt could recuse themselves and have a peer or higher office take over the issue, if it was found that there was a conflict of interest between their personal interests and the interests of the country. It is impossible to truly distance yourself from any and all possible conflicts of interest, and so if the case comes up, then the president doesn’t need to recuse himself from that rare event, which is good, because who does a president recuse themselves to?
Most presidents (all maybe) worked their way up through other offices that would have had them put their stuff into blind trust already, and the people are supposed to vote for someone trustworthy enough to not use this loophole in the law for unethical behavior.
This. Being the President of the United States is a full-time job (and then some), and the current holder of the title comes across as spending too much of his time and energy on things like this issue, obsessing about his old TV show, obsessing about Saturday Night Live, etc., etc.
I am reminded of Trump supporters frequent claims that Clinton’s email server was a bad idea regardless of whether the rules prohibited it or not, and that if any other government employee did the same, the employee would be subject to some type of administrative punishment that could be anything from an admonishment to firing.