President Donald Trump has found a conspiracy the likes of which we have never seen in history. Apparently, anti-Trump time-travelers went back, became founding fathers, and changed the constitution to harass him.
Here’s roughly what he says:
Other Presidents if you look.. other presidents were wealthy. Not huge wealth. George Washington was actually considered a very, very rich man at the time. But they ran their businesses. George Washington, they say George Washington had two desks. A presidential desk and a business desk. I don't think you people with this phony Emoluments Clause, and by the way, I would say it has cost me between 2 and 5 BILLION dollars to be president, and that is OK. Between what I lose and what I could have made.
Trump’s assessment that he is a good president because he “gave away” a potential $5 Billion dollars he believes he would have made over the last 3 years — I guess under a Democratic presidency if those are the terms? — is a reminder that Trump keeps track of exactly how much money he could make. Sure, it may be fantasy — we have no proof in the real world he could accomplish that task — but keeping score matters for the orange one.
More interesting is Trump’s assertion that the Emoluments Clause is “phony”, and that he should be able to operate as he wants. This is an interesting contrast to his attacks on former Vice President Biden, but who says hypocrisy is a thing Trump considers?
Still, the claim of phony clauses in the constitution indicates that either the president believes the founding document of our nation is a conspiracy against him or he just thinks, well, he doesn’t have to obey it at all.
What is interesting is that he cites George Washington as proof he can do both. In an amicus brief to support President Trump in 2017, conservatives alleged that the emoluments clause has to be tightly constrained and that the office of the Presidency isn’t, in fact, an office at all. Slate took this argument to task:
First, there is no historical text hinting that the Framers shared Tillman’s and Blackman’s idiosyncratic interpretation. In fact, Edmund Randolph—who would go on to be the nation’s first attorney general—explained at the Constitutional Convention of 1787 that the clause was meant “to exclude corruption and foreign influence” and “to prohibit any one in office from receiving or holding emoluments from foreign states.” During the Virginia ratifying convention, Randolph was even more explicit about the problem of “the president receiving emoluments from foreign powers.” He described the reasoning behind the clause, saying that “it is impossible to guard better against corruption” than by having a president who “is restrained from receiving any present or emoluments whatever.”
We’ve heard this claim made before:
Trump, however, takes it to a whole new level. Not only are unconstitutional acts not “illegal”, he goes farther to justify why he is the one harmed by such rules — after all, we should all pity him for the $5 Billion dollars he could have made but didn’t.
The founding fathers created the clause to avoid someone like Trump. It isn’t phony, they weren’t time travelers out to get him, they were people who tried to look out for the future of our nation.
Oh well, though, for Trump, i guess they are just another obstacle in the way of his success.