Transcript: Expert Stunned as Trump Picks 9th Billionaire for Top Job
It now looks like he’s got no particular interest in doing that. I’m hopeful that he’ll see the light in the next month or two and divest from his companies and commit to ethics, but we certainly haven’t seen anything to date that gives us a lot of confidence. When you have a president who has chipped away at ethical safeguards coming in without any stated regard for those safeguards and surrounding himself by very, very wealthy people who stand to benefit from their government posts unless they adhere to the strictest ethical standards, there’s a lot of cause for concern here.
Sargent: To underscore your point about how he actually made some show of being in compliance with certain ethical standards the first time: It’s lost on a lot of people that this time Trump openly campaigned on a promise to enrich wealthy elites. That sounds crazy when you say it that way, but he did tell a room full of big oil executives that he’d carry out their policy bidding specifically if they raised $1 billion for his campaign. He told roomfuls of rich donors that he’d keep their taxes low, provided they raised money for him. Now, obviously an old story in Washington elite influence peddling and so forth, but this is really something else. It’s much more explicit, and it’s basically a direct declaration to the world that he can get away with whatever the hell he wants. That’s how I see it.
Bookbinder: It is certainly a long tradition in Washington that wealthy donors give money to candidates and get greater access, and candidates will listen to them on policy issues. But this takes it to a whole different level where you had a candidate very explicitly saying, If you give me a lot of money, I will do what you want in terms of policy, and in some cases also explicitly, If you give me support, I will give you a direct role in my government. Again, donors get posts pretty regularly, but that level of explicit trade is really new and different and suggests that we’re going to have a government that is for the benefit of those people who helped Donald Trump and particularly who helped him financially. That’s a troubling place to be.
