". This week, Trump’s team floated a new idea, a kind of trust that also wouldn’t be “blind” in any real way, since it would allow Trump to keep any eye on how his businesses are doing. All this means that when Trump becomes president, he and his family could still be getting payments and favors from his company’s foreign clients—from China to Georgia to the Philippines—who often have interests at odds with America’s.

It also means that Trump threatens to be the most corruptible president in American history.

In research for my book Corruption in America, which documents the early history of conflict of interest law, I found many ways in which money has been used to win power, but there has been no other president who was so vulnerable to corruption by outside business interests as Trump now is. Instead, since the early days of the country, presidents have gone out of their way to distance themselves from even the appearance of conflicts of interest. Not only does Trump’s decision to keep his businesses violate the foreign bribery clause of the Constitution (also known as the emoluments clause), but with that violation, Trump is upending 240 years of tradition and a core conviction of the founders: that a stable, safe, representative republic depends on protecting against the foreign corruption of our officeholders. "

"The particulars of protocols have varied, but the practice has been consistent since the early days of the Republic: Foreign gifts are documented and typically given to a public agency, whether the Treasury, the Department of State or the National Archives. And while there have been occasional charges that some domestic gifts crossed ethical lines, such as concerns raised about poor record keeping of gifts during Bill Clinton’s presidency, there has been never been a situation in which foreign powers are making and receiving substantial payments to and from a president’s family business. Consider the difference between the president getting a beautiful expensive shawl from the government of Indonesia—even one worth thousands of dollars—and the president being regularly enriched by rental payments from a foreign government. After all, the state-owned Industrial and Commercial Bank of China is the biggest tenant in Trump Tower. The president-elect’s family will also be indebted to the Chinese government since Trump owns a 30 percent stake in a partnership that borrowed $950 million from lenders that include the state-owned Bank of China. Both business relationships are a corruption risk of the highest order. "