In addition to other concerns about how Trump conducts himself in office, we can also add financial conflicts of interest that border on corruption. In one of his newest displays of
using the presidency to advance his own personal gain, he bought up to
$2 million in bonds for corporations that are currently
requesting government permission to merge into one mega-corporation.
Sign the petition to demand Congress intervene immediately and ban future transactions like this!These companies, Netflix and Warner Bros, would create one giant platform for TV and film. And
Trump himself said he'd "be involved" in this merger. As
he explained: "They have a very big market share. When they [Netflix] have Warner Bros,
that share goes up a lot. ... I'll be involved in that decision, too."
This means that Trump has
drawn a very clear connection between these giant companies' merger, the values of their stocks and bonds, and
his own involvement in approving the merger. This was five days before he and his financial team first began purchasing the bonds for these corporations.
This isn't subtle.
It doesn't take much to see what an obvious conflict of interest this is. As Ann Skeet, an expert in ethics at Santa Clara University, said: "This sets up the potential for a conflict of interest due to [Trump's] involvement in regulatory oversight of the deal.
The president should be making decisions prioritizing the interests of the public solely."
For a president to have the position of power to decide when companies can merge, and then to
make money off of their own decisions to approve or deny that merger - that is quite clearly an
abuse of public power for their own private gain. And
that is corruption.
Yet, strangely, this isn't outright illegal yet in the U.S. How could that possibly be true? The U.S. Congress must act immediately to prevent the highest public offices in the land from being abused for personal financial gain.
Sign the petition to demand that Congress immediately strengthen ethics and anti-corruption laws to ban any U.S. president from purchasing investments related to policies or deals they are involved with!