Bangle that became a Trump PR bungle
IT’S just a bracelet. But it’s Ivanka Trump’s bracelet. A backlash is brewing against president-elect Donald Trump’s eldest daughter because a pricey accessory her fashion company makes was turned into marketing fodder a day after she sported a version of the piece during a 60 Minutes interview.
A “style alert” about one of her brands, Ivanka Trump Fine Jewelry, was sent to journalists on Monday. It featured a photo from her TV appearance and explained she was “wearing her favorite bangle from the Metropolis Collection on 60 Minutes”.
Some critics thought Ivanka was piggybacking on her father’s post-election-day notoriety to boost business. Although her company blamed an overzealous employee for drawing 60 Minutes into the campaign, it’s not the first time her team has drawn attention to its marketing. Good for her. She has admirable entrepreneurial flair, and self-promotion is a storied pastime in the Trump family. And, after all, it’s just a bracelet.
Yet the episode underscores how often the Trumps are likely to encounter financial and business conflicts in the months and years ahead.
As time goes on, it will be the bigger things that count: sizable property transactions, hotel and golf course developments, lucrative global licensing deals whose value is derived in large measure from the Trump name itself.
All this raises concerns about the ways policymaking in the White House could overlap with commerce in Trump Tower.
Although they’ve been the first family-elect for just more than a week, the Trumps haven’t done much to assuage those concerns. The future president has said his children will run the Trump Organization, and that having them do so without his input will amount to a “blind trust”. (It doesn’t, and the Office of Government Ethics precludes family members from overseeing blind trusts anyway.)
Trump has also undermined the notion that his children will steer clear of the federal government by putting his three eldest progeny, and his son-inlaw, on his transition team. In fact, Trump may have gone a step further. CBS and CNN have reported that the president-elect had inquired about security clearances for his children, although a Trump representative denied that an official request had been made.
The conflict of interest laws that are meant to keep politicians from taking advantage of the federal government and the public have never applied to presidents. There’s wisdom behind this: given the number of issues a president touches, any conflict of interest law would be bound to come up short.
Presidents, in recognising
Policy could overlap with commerce in Trump Tower
that responsibility accompanies this latitude, have traditionally turned their business and financial interests over to a disinterested third party. There are some understandable hurdles for Trump in pursuing that course.
His father founded the Trump Organization and Trump helped him expand from a small office in Brooklyn into Manhattan real estate. So the prospect of turning over what is now an interwoven collection of property holdings and licensing deals to a true outsider is bound to feel bittersweet.
Still, had the outcome of this month’s election been different, Hillary Clinton and her family would have been under pressure to consider dissolving their foundation, or radically changing their relationship to it.
Now that Trump has won, the same ethical burden falls to him. Otherwise, bracelets will be the smallest of his problems. — Bloomberg View