THE president of the US’ two eldest sons are getting into the mobile phone business.
Their company, Trump Mobile, is now offering a monthly plan, serviced by three existing telecommunications heavyweights – AT&T, Verizon Communications and T-Mobile US.
Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr, who are stewards of the family’s holding company, the Trump Organization, said they would also offer customers a “sleek, gold smartphone” that will be “Made In The USA”. They are pitching their new enterprise as “transformational”.
It really is not a transformational deal, however. Ryan Reynolds slapped his name on a similar service years ago, Mint Mobile, that added the magic dust of his celebrity and low rates to a service built on existing technology.
Reynolds did, however, score a big payday when he sold Mint to T-Mobile. That may be what the Trumps, who have no experience in the cellular business, had in mind with their new gig. They even flag Reynolds’ company in their press release announcing it.
What truly separates Trump Mobile from competitors, though, is that President Donald Trump looms in the background – around this venture and all others his sons are pursuing.
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While the sons note in their press release that the Trump Organization is not involved with selling, developing or distributing Trump Mobile service and products, none of their current dealmaking would be as accessible or as profitable if the paterfamilias was not sitting in the White House.
Besides, the sons go out of their way to invoke Donald Trump’s political movement by noting that Trump Mobile – a startup phone service, mind you – is “building on the movement to put America first”. Apart from the challenges the Trumps are likely to face fashioning a mobile handset from parts sourced entirely in the US, what they are really putting first is their wallets.
In theory, the Trump sons are private citizens and free to make coin however they see fit, along with reaping the rewards or consequences of doing so. But they are not flying solo. And the fruits of their labour flow to their father, as Donald Trump’s federal financial disclosure forms, released on Jun 13, showed.
The riches Donald Trump is harvesting as president represent a raw financial conflict of interest that shreds the integrity of his office and the bona fides of some of his core policy goals.
Presidents are not subject to ethics codes that govern other federal employees, because the Constitution’s framers felt a strict set of rules would invariably hamstring the executive. (They did try to prevent foreign bribery with the Emoluments Clause, which seems quaint now.)
Still, presidents in the modern era have typically placed their financial holdings in a blind trust managed by an independent third party, which I highlighted in 2016 when Donald Trump was pursuing his first successful presidential bid.
Despite numerous opportunities to do as his predecessors from both political parties had done, Donald Trump did not distance himself in substance or practice from the operations of the Trump Organization or Trump-affiliated entities during his first presidential term.
Even Nelson Rockefeller – heir to a fortune far more substantial and consequential than Donald Trump’s – sat for congressional grillings in 1974 about his family’s operations. And he was only seeking confirmation to be vice-president. But that was the post-Watergate 1970s, and holding elected officials accountable for their business dealings was a non-partisan measure of good government and good faith. Times have changed.
Although the Trumps and the White House emphasise that Donald Trump’s holdings are in a trust, it is a trust overseen by his eldest son, Donald Trump Jr, and is not, therefore, “blind”. There simply is not a meaningful firewall separating Donald Trump from his businesses.
Even the porous financial buffer between him and foreign entities seeking favours from the US, or domestic operators seeking federal deals or regulatory or tax relief, that existed in his first term has given way to no buffer at all. (Spend some time with Bloomberg News reporter Max Abelson’s account of the Trump financial locomotive for a thorough look at all of this.)
Some of the wheeling and dealing that used to take place at Donald Trump’s Washington hotel during his first term now just take place inside the White House itself.
Consider the private dinner Donald Trump hosted at his Virginia golf club, followed by a tour of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue the next day, for cryptocurrency players willing to invest enough money in the $Trump memecoin to be considered one of its top 25 holders. (A larger group of 220 investors got the meal but not the tour.) The value of the memecoin rose 56 per cent when Donald Trump’s Washington crypto fete was announced.
That came on the heels of Donald Trump’s own push to give federal regulatory blessings and support to the crypto industry. The president is not a detached observer of any of this. His financial disclosures show he personally earned at least US$57.7 million from his family’s crypto dealings last year.
Trump Media & Technology Group, a publicly traded firm that began as a holding company for a social media platform, Truth Social, has made a push into crypto that appears to have helped keep its valuation aloft. Donald Trump has moved recently to unload most of his majority holding in Trump Media – a stake now worth more than US$2 billion.
Donald Trump’s crypto machinations may be his most lucrative and glaring financial conflict, but it is far from the only one. The financial disclosure forms also showed tens of millions of dollars in royalty payments from Trump-branded watches, sneakers, fragrances, non-fungible tokens and a guitar.
A Save America coffee table book and a Trump Bible also contributed to the haul. Donald Trump has always been a human shingle, willing to license his name on almost anything to almost any bidder. But most of the flotsam he is selling now benefits from an Oval Office sales boost.
There is also old-fashioned pay-to-play mud baths that have always surrounded Washington.
Elon Musk, who donated lavishly to Donald Trump’s re-election bid, has lots of business with the government, and for a time oversaw the president’s federal downsizing efforts. There is the US$400 million Qatari jet Donald Trump has accepted as a budget-friendly replacement for the existing Air Force One, but it will revert to his presidential library when he leaves office.
He has weakened environmental regulations for oil companies, as he promised to do while fundraising with oil majors at a Mar-a-Lago gathering during the 2024 campaign. Business leaders are reportedly paying millions of dollars to a political action committee for the privilege of dining with him at the same Palm Beach resort.
Donald Trump’s state visit to the Middle East last month followed his two sons’ successful pursuit of real estate deals in the region before the president travelled there.
And so on.
So what are the chances that Donald Trump will use his sons’ new mobile venture as a reason to lean on AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile to give his children or the market they inhabit favourable treatment in exchange for some form of regulatory or business relief? Probably just as good as the chances of money from the cellular startup finding its way into Donald Trump’s coffers.
It is a sorry state of public affairs and, until the rules are changed and enforced, Donald Trump and his family will continue feathering their nest. BLOOMBERG
The writer, a senior executive editor of Bloomberg Opinion, is author of TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald
