The leaders of France, Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom, Canada, Japan, and the United States gather each year to discuss world affairs. As you might imagine, these world leaders each bring a large entourage of personnel and security. For the location lucky enough to host this annual summit, it is no doubt a very lucrative event.
The G-7 summit is slated to come to the U.S. in 2020 and after careful consideration of the vast number of U.S. locations capable of holding such an event, the Trump administration has settled on one: Donald Trump’s own Trump National Doral resort in in Miami, Florida.
This has to be one of the most (if not the most) blatant violation of the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution, which says:
No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States: And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.
In short, it is illegal for Donald Trump or any other elected official in the U.S. to receive any sort of gift, payment, or anything of value from a foreign leader, officers, or foreign representatives. It is nothing short of outrageous that Trump would flout this blatant disregard for this law. As Rep. Jamie Raskin wrote in an op-ed for The Washington Post, the founders specifically addressed this to prevent someone from profiting directly off the presidency:
Alexander Hamilton, in the Federalist No. 72, warned that a day might come when a president treated the government as a get-rich-quick opportunity: “An avaricious man, who might happen to fill the office, looking forward to a time when he must at all events yield up the emoluments he enjoyed, would feel a propensity, not easy to be resisted by such a man, to make the best use of the opportunity he enjoyed while it lasted.”
The framers wrote the foreign emoluments clause — the original and true “America First” policy — in Article I, Section 9, Clause 8 of the Constitution, to prevent the president and other federal officials from accepting, without congressional consent, “any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.” And they wrote the domestic emoluments clause in Article II, Section 1, Clause 7, which authorizes a fixed presidential salary that may be neither increased nor reduced by Congress during a president’s term, and which specifies that the president “shall not receive within that Period any other Emolument from the United States, or any of them.”
This cannot stand. The location of the G-7 must change or Donald Trump must be held accountable for breaking the law. We are either a nation of laws, or we are not.