It’s Just Business, and It’s Personal
President Trump’s rejection of government ethics makes sense for his “business model” presidency.
Earlier this week, Jack and I explained how the Trump administration has completely abandoned the norms that once kept the White House at a distance from Department of Justice law enforcement decisions. The administration has also effectively repudiated the once-established norms that past administrations have followed in guarding against using public office for private gain.
The aggressive steps so far taken to weaken executive branch conflict-of-interest protections include abandoning even the standards Trump adopted in his first administration. He has hobbled ethics enforcement overall by firing the director of the agency that monitors and advises on senior officials’ compliance with ethical rules and issues. And Trump’s choice for his replacement on an acting basis is the secretary of veterans affairs—who has a full time cabinet position and no expertise in government ethics. Meanwhile the president’s personal lawyers have established a highly permissive structure for the Trump Organization’s conduct of his financial affairs, including allowing deals pursued overseas with foreign government-connected parties and interests.
It is a mistake to envision this thorough rejection of ethical standards as no more than opening up possibilities for Trump and other senior officials to exploit power for financial gain—as just a shift to more grift. These are intentional and significant policy changes, and they establish what may be labeled Trump’s “business model” conception of the presidency.
The Road From Trump 1.0 to the Trump 2.0 “Business Model” Presidency
An understanding of the genesis of this “business model” conception requires a look back at the changes from Trump 1.0 to the present.
One week after he took office in 2017, the newly elected president issued an ethics policy for the executive branch. He was following in the path of his predecessors. Every president since John F. Kennedy, with the apparent exception of Gerald Ford, has issued some form of administration ethics policy. With variations over time, those policies have established safeguards against conflicts of interest among those appointed to work in the administration and among those who later return to the private sector and potentially “cash in” on their prior public service. Beginning with the Clinton Administration, the executive orders (EOs) have required appointees to pledge their commitments to these standards and empowered the attorney general to seek injunctive relief to enforce them.
Having campaigned to “drain the swamp,” the Trump of 2017 adopted this model and imposed controls that were in some respects even stricter than those of his immediate predecessor, Barack Obama. One such tightening: a lifetime ban on any Trump 1.0 official acting after government service as the agent of a foreign government or other foreign interest, as defined by the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA).
Trump 1.0 did not, of course, escape controversies about the president’s ethics: His refusal to release his tax returns, to place his assets and holdings in a blind trust, and to refrain from promoting patronage at his resort properties, received scrutiny. But with the issuance of an ethics EO and in some aspects of the structure of the “trust” to hold his financial interests, Trump was nodding in the direction of conflict-of-interest concerns. The question, a real one, was whether this was much more than a gesture.
The Trump 2.0 governmental ethics policy is dramatically more lenient—because, so far, it does not exist. The administration has unleashed a flood of other EOs in its first month. But it has not issued one to establish an administration ethics policy. It did, however, rescind the Biden ethics EO but left nothing in its place.
On another front, the president fired the director of the Office of Government Ethics (OGE). The OGE mission ranges from “[m]aking and interpreting ethics laws and regulations” and “[m]onitoring senior leaders’ compliance” with them, to advice and training on ethical requirements and “[e]nsuring agencies comply with ethics program requirements.” In making Doug Collins, a former Republican congressman and the secretary of veterans affairs, the acting director, Trump is sending a clear message: This is not a full-time job, no expertise is required, and a political ally will do.
And last month, the Trump Organization, which manages his core business interests, adopted a new ethics policy far more permissive than the one it claimed to follow during Trump’s first term. Among new allowances, it clears the way for the Trump Organization to engage actively with foreign government-related or -connected businesses overseas. A short time later, the Trump administration issued directives useful to these overseas business interests. Attorney General Pam Bondi downgraded as a priority and set limits on the enforcement of FARA—once the subject of a tough ethics standard in Trump 1.0—and President Trump issued an executive order restricting enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which prohibits U.S. businesses from paying bribes to foreign government officials.
This sharp change in direction from Trump 1.0 to 2.0 has been accompanied by the president’s open involvement in activities that serve his business interests. The New York Times has reported on his recent Oval Office meeting to facilitate a merger between LIV Golf, created and funded by Saudi Arabia, and the PGA tour. The Trump Organization is an LIV business partner, hosting LIV tournaments at its golfing venues, including “one planned in April at the Trump National Doral in Miami for the fourth year in a row.”
At the same time, the administration is also actively engaged with the Saudi government on critical national security policy issues. This week, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and other administration officials traveled to Riyadh for meetings with the government on a range of issues, including the situation in Gaza and the negotiations Trump has opened with the Russian government on an end to the war in Ukraine.
Trump has charged ahead in his domestic policies with the same indifference to conflict-of-interest standards. He has notably deployed Elon Musk, the world’s wealthiest man with extensive interests in government contracts, in some very influential but obscurely defined role. Trump said on Tuesday, “[Y]ou could call him an employee, you could call him a consultant, you could call him whatever you want.”
Yet this administration appears to be leaving it to Musk, with assistance as needed from none other than the president, to police his own conflict issues as he and his team burrow into agencies, engineering mass firings and recommending spending priorities and cuts. In a joint interview with Musk on Tuesday, Trump said, “If there’s any conflict, he … will stop it. But if he didn’t, I’d stop it. I’d see if there’s a conflict.” Musk added, “I’ll recuse myself if it is a conflict. … I’m getting a sort of daily proctology exam here. You know, it’s not like I’ll be getting away from something in the dead of night.”
When Musk recently visited India and met with Prime Minister Narendra Modi, it was not clear in what role—key adviser to the president or international businessman—he was acting or speaking. Trump, when asked, was unsure about the purpose of the visit, though he acknowledged that his adviser might have interests beyond Musk’s still-undefined public capacity: “I assume he wants to do business in India.”
Sources of the “Business Model” Presidency
What explains this anti-ethics policy at the heart of the Trump 2.0 administration?
One possibility is that Trump, who prides himself on his success as a businessman and never hides his appetite for money, has concluded that he can get away with using his presidency for self-enrichment. His “drain the swamp” messaging in Trump 1.0 no longer constrains him. The war he wages now is no longer against the “revolving door” and traditional conceptions of government corruption. Instead, it is an ideological battle against progressive notions of good and big government and associated policies of DEI and culture “woke-ism.” And he may judge that he gained nothing politically from the adoption of these standards in Trump 1.0 but suffered harm to his business interests because he was president, as he has said openly.
Trump’s rejection of conflict-of-interest concerns are also compatible with his belief in what his nominee for solicitor general, John Sauer, has referred to as his “consummate dealmaking expertise.” A shrewd businessman always has an eye on his piece of the deal; he communicates to other partners that he has real “skin in the game.” In the end, the parties can come together in a “win, win.” And if advisers like Musk serve him well, while serving themselves, this, too, is a “win-win.”
As Rubio put it, Trump “approaches these issues from a transactional business point of view,” and his refusal to rule out coercive tactics in foreign policy is “a tactic that’s used all the time in business – it’s being applied to foreign policy.” Professor Hal Brands has characterized this business-focused policy as one in which Trump seeks to “create something like a global bidding war for America’s favor – which means Trump’s favor.”
This thinking can inspire the vision Trump has articulated for a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which is to replace Gaza with a beachfront resort, a “Riviera of the Middle East” that attracts an international clientele. The Trump Organization, prominent in international luxury hotel and resort development, also happens to have significant interests in the Middle East. And the list goes on. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, in an interview that aired earlier this week, characterized Trump’s proposal for an economic deal with Ukraine that would include billions in mineral transfers from Kyiv to Washington as a “win-win situation.”
The recent golfing summit led by the president exemplifies the blurring of the boundaries separating public purposes from personal profit. The PGA Commissioner Jay Monahan, and Player Directors Tiger Woods and Adam Scott, put out a statement after the meeting to express appreciation for Trump’s “long-time support of the game of golf,” which the Trump Organization has expressed through its commercial development and promotion of “the most iconic golf properties and championship courses in the world.” The PGA statement goes on to praise the president’s involvement in the PGA-LIV Golf merger discussions as “for the good of the game, the good of the country, and for all the countries involved.” What was good for the game and the country was good, too, for Trump and his “long-time support of the game of golf.” Here were public and private interests all wrapped together, hard to distinguish.
Another conceivable element in Trump’s calculations and those of his legal advisors is the relative freedom that they imagine he may enjoy from any liability for public corruption under the Supreme Court’s presidential immunity decision in Trump v. United States. The Court hinges the immunity on the character of a president’s acts: fully immunized exercises of exclusive presidential powers; presumptive immunity for official actions outside the core but within the outer perimeter of official responsibility; and no immunity for unofficial, private conduct. Trump is scrambling the official and the private in ways that will eventually test the lines the Court, however vaguely, drew.
And what of any adverse reaction that might be expected from the public? Whatever the public did or did not notice about golf merger negotiations, many would have noticed, through radio and other advertising, the promotion of Trump products, and the heavily covered release of his meme coin. Over time, we will see if this behavior cuts into his approval ratings or his support. Among Trump’s allies in Congress, all is quiet: They are not uttering a critical word. The New York Times and the community of experts on government ethics may disapprove, but Trump can live with opprobrium from these quarters and may even relish it.
It all comes down to this: Trump’s zealous transactionalism is fundamentally at odds with ethics rules and standards on the model of those adopted in prior administrations. The whole point of this kind of regulation is to help focus official decision-making on the merits of public policy alternatives by controlling the potential influence of personal self-interest. By definition, ethics imposes limits on the cutting of deals. And for this reason, Trump could well believe—apparently does believe—that if good government is dealmaking in which self-interest will pave the way to agreement, ethics rules are just dysfunctional, and therefore bad policy.
Are There Any Constraints?
Even in the absence of an ethics executive order on conflicts of interest, federal law does contain a Code of Ethics for Government Service, enacted by joint congressional resolution in 1958 and on the books ever since. It is hortatory in nature: It imposes no specific legal obligations but articulates standards that the OGE and agencies incorporate in their guidance on the character of ethical government service. Among other principles, the code calls on public officials to—
“[N]ever accept, for himself or his family, favors or benefits under circumstances which might be construed by reasonable persons as influencing the performance of his governmental duties”;
“Engage in no business with the Government, either directly or indirectly, which is inconsistent with the conscientious performance of his governmental duties”; and
“Never use any information coming to him confidentially in the performance of governmental duties as a means for making private profit.”
The code remains on the books, highlighting long-accepted ethical principles this administration has, as a matter of policy, declined to embrace. Measured by these principles, the ethics of Trump 2.0 are severely lacking. But from the perspective of the business model presidency, they are irrelevant or counterproductive, or both.
Conclusion
As the Trump administration and Russia continue to have discussions about the war in Ukraine, the Putin regime has brought along its “top investment manager” to explain how much U.S. businesses were losing from pulling out after the invasion. One Russian observer suggested that because the U.S. president “doesn’t care much about long-term strategic goals,” Putin “is trying to play on this feeling and get him interested in very quick material gains that are immediately clear to Trump.” But the observation may have missed the key point: The acquisition of “material gains” is Trump’s strategic objective.
Perhaps Donald Trump can continue on the current course if the public concludes that he is otherwise getting the job done that they elected him to do. They may give him plenty of freedom to use his office for personal gain if they think he’s using it for their gain as well. He can profit from the Trump Organization’s business dealings if he is also credited with a strengthened, low-inflation economy and foreign policy successes.
But if core living standards are not perceived as improving and if the foreign deals do not pan out for the nation, it will appear he’s doing better than his voters. Public acceptance of the business model presidency may melt away, and he may pay a steep political price. A win-win is fine until the voters conclude that they are not among those in the winner’s circle.