Now that Donald Trump has Won

I’ve made my displeasure with South Park known before, but I now lost all respect for Parker and Stone after they basically declared that they will essentially back off of satirizing the Trump administration.

Meanwhile on Saturday Night Live.

Yeah seriously. Who care what the tax implications are? Presidents before him liquidated their assets and put the money in a blind trust. He can do it too.

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It’s not that I don’t believe you , but for the sake of discussion can you provide some links / proof?

Here’s an article from the UPI archives on Jimmy Carter’s peanut farm sale. It was one of the more complicated instances, as he nearly broke some Georgian loan laws, but it was the first example that came to mind.

The Clintons have also both used blind trusts(though Hillary was obviously never president, but she liquidated her assets to a blind trust, AND liquidated the blind trust before her 2007 run, just to ensure no conflicts of interest), GWB liquidated a great deal of his personal assets and placed the results in a blind trust, even Nixon liquidated the vast majority of his personal assets and placed them in trust.

Edit - Oh, and I forgot, the Obamas liquidated a decent portion of their assets, but they didn’t place them in trust, instead choosing to invest them in treasury bills, college funds, etc, where it was unlikely to cause any conflicts.

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The Clinton Foundation was active while she was Secretary of State. If no issues were ever raised then why now regarding Trump? I believe the laws in place specifically exempt the President and Vice President, blind trusts and such are voluntary.

The Clinton Foundation is not a commercial enterprise and none of the money they take in goes to the benefit of any of the Clintons. There was no necessity to divest herself from it because there is nothing to divest…

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What they said. Even back in the Reagan Administration, most high level officials did. http://www.nytimes.com/1984/09/28/us/bush-s-blind-trust-guarding-against-conflicts-of-interest.html

Basically, 45 is the richest President ever as far as holdings in companies and foreign real estate goes. He doesn’t want to divest because “it’s hard.” Big fucking BOO HOO. You signed up for this job. Now you have to deal with the fact that it’s a BAD PLAN to have business holdings in a country where you might have to decide whether or not to impose sanctions. I don’t give a single flying fuck how many of them he would have to divest and how difficult it would be. He’s supposed to be super rich and a great businessman, right? So pay someone to handle it. It’s on HIM to figure it out.

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[quote=“chaosof99, post:365, topic:125, full:true”]
The Clinton Foundation is not a commercial enterprise and none of the money they take in goes to the benefit of any of the Clintons. There was no necessity to divest herself from it because there is nothing to divest…
[/quote]Foundation documents also show that they also didn’t take a Salary while on the board, as a point of interest. Nor did Chelsea, for that matter.

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Trump has stated any profits earned from foreign governments will be donated to the Treasury. Wouldn’t that be a similar situation?

I think we have a pretty good idea of exactly how much Trump’s word is worth.
And if he actually does do that I think other shareholders might be able to sue for giving the company’s money away?

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That’s still an incentive for him to avoid sanctioning a country that might need to be sanctioned. It’s basically saying, “Oh, the foreign government isn’t bribing me PERSONALLY, they’re bribing our whole country, so it’s okay!”

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Couldn’t the same charge be directed at Clinton when foreigners donated money to her foundation while she was SoS? Even if she didn’t directly get money from the foundation she was able to direct where foundation money would go. Money is power.

Steve, quit apologizing for fascists. His family is running his business. You think that isn’t corrupt?

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Who is apologizing?

Clinton’s family was running the foundation. Is that corrupt?

[quote=“hmtksteve, post:371, topic:125”]
Couldn’t the same charge be directed at Clinton when foreigners donated money to her foundation while she was SoS? Even if she didn’t directly get money from the foundation she was able to direct where foundation money would go. Money is power.[/quote]Nope. Because there’s a huge difference between the two - the Clinton Foundation is a 501©(3) rather than a for-profit corporation, and has to follow the transparency rules for said organizations. In short, we therefore know where the money goes.

There’s also the facts that 1)She very pointedly wasn’t involved directly with the Clinton foundation during her tenure as secretary of state, only formally joining the organization after she stepped down, and 2)She actually can’t direct where money from the foundation goes, nor can Bill, nor can Chelsea, and no, they do not have veto power, or really any more power than any other member of the board. The board as a whole decides, and again, we know exactly where it goes when they do. And that’s the same board that she wasn’t even on during her first presidential campaign, her tenure as SoS, and during her latest presidential campaign.

So, to answer your question, no, that isn’t corrupt, provably so, and anyone who tries to tell you it is, they’re probably trying to play you for a mug.

Edit - I will note one extra point, when she was heading projects for the foundation, mostly aimed at helping women and children, she was assigned a portion of the budget by the board, and had more say over where that went. But again, we know where it goes, didn’t go anywhere sinister, unexpected or unexplained etc, etc, that was all just normal high level project management stuff for a charity.

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With those contortions, you might fit in a suitcase. Someone cement down the goal posts already.

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Even though I don’t agree with hmtksteve, it is interesting to hear his opinions to prevent this from being too much of an echo chamber.

Steve, do you seriously think that these two things are equivalent, or are you equating the two simply as a rhetorical tactic?

If what you really want to do is to “get some of you (not all) to see past your political blinders” then you could at least start with open and honest disagreement. Pretending to be some kind of impartial Socratic questioner isn’t doing you any good here.

[quote=“hmtksteve, post:364, topic:125, full:true”]The Clinton Foundation was active while she was Secretary of State. If no issues were ever raised then why now regarding Trump? I believe the laws in place specifically exempt the President and Vice President, blind trusts and such are voluntary.[/quote]No issues were raised then because Hillary Clinton was operating pretty much entirely within Washington norms. There is a discussion to be had about the serious issues in how the interface between special interests and government power works, but (for the reasons stated above by other forumites) the Clinton Foundation just doesn’t rate as a major concern.

On the other hand, Trump’s actions go well outside of previous bounds, and in ways that are very worrying. To allow him to do this without any real resistance is to allow him to unilaterally establish new norms, with serious costs to the foundations of US democracy.

We can discuss the fundamental issues with how Washington operates, but when you attempt to make the issue completely black and white, and argue that because Washington itself operates in a morass of gray areas it thus follows that Trump is just as bad as every other politician since none of them are 100% spotless, you are completely playing into Trump’s hands on this issue.

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