Trump To Get Updates On How He's Getting Rich Sticking It to Taxpayers, Despite Pledge To Divest

Eric Trump sits behind a desk on the 25th floor of Trump Tower in New York City, dressed in a slightly less formal version of his father’s go-to power uniform—blue suit, white buttoned-down shirt, no tie. There are reminders of Donald Trump everywhere in this office, including the TV in the corner that beams out wall-to-wall news about the president any time his son turns it on. Amidst it all, Eric Trump, who now manages the Trump Organization with his brother Don Jr., wants to emphasize that the Trump business is separate from the Trump presidency.

“There is kind of a clear separation of church and state that we maintain, and I am deadly serious about that exercise,” he says, echoing previous statements from his father. “I do not talk about the government with him, and he does not talk about the business with us. That’s kind of a steadfast pact we made, and it’s something that we honor.”

But less than two minutes later, he concedes that he will continue to update his father on the business while he is in the presidency. “Yeah, on the bottom line, profitability reports and stuff like that, but you know, that’s about it.” How often will those reports be, every quarter? “Depending, yeah, depending.” Could be more, could be less? “Yeah, probably quarterly.” One thing is clear: “My father and I are very close,” Eric Trump says. “I talk to him a lot. We’re pretty inseparable.”

The apparent contradiction troubles ethics experts. “The statement that the president made earlier that he wasn’t going to talk to his children about the business sounded good, but the reality was there was no way to enforce it,” says Larry Noble, general counsel of the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center and a former chief ethics officer at the Federal Election Commission. “He is breaking down one of the few barriers he claimed to be establishing between him and his businesses, and those barriers themselves were weak to begin with. But if he is now going to get reports from his son about the businesses, then he really isn’t separate in any real way.”

George W. Bush’s former chief ethics lawyer, Richard Painter, expressed a similar sentiment. “It just means that a lot of what they say is malarkey because the president isn’t distancing himself from the business,” he says. “It doesn’t matter how much of the management is being delegated. Things are always delegated in business, down to who the hotel clerk is at the Trump hotel. But at the end of the day, he owns the business. He has the conflicts that come with it.”

The relationship between the president and his children has changed in some ways though. Don Jr. told the New York Times that he has barely talked to his father at all recently. Eric tends to stick to more serious conversations with his father today than he once did. “I also realize how big of a magnitude the decisions he makes and the things he has on his plate,” Eric Trump says. “I minimize fluff calls that you might otherwise have because I understand that time is a resource. And that resource is important, especially when you’ve got the biggest job in the world.”

Although their father’s promotion to president pushed the sons into bigger roles at the family company, they had already been central figures inside the Trump Organization for years. Even before Donald Trump began his bid for the White House, Eric Trump was managing the Trump International Las Vegas, a 50-50 partnership between his father and billionaire Phil Ruffin. Don Jr. struck the bond with Malaysian heir Joo Kim Tiah, who built the world’s newest Trump tower, a licensed deal in Vancouver. And both brothers have always had more contact than their father with the Trump Organization’s partner in Indonesia, Hary Tanoesoedibjo. Paulo Figueiredo Filho, who partnered with the Trumps in Brazil, worked mostly with the children as well. Donald Trump “gives his sons a lot of autonomy to make the company’s decisions,” he says. “They were already conducting 90% of the business, even before the presidency.”

The Trump Organization has curtailed some of its international work, pulling out of deals in Azerbaijan, Georgia and Brazil, while pledging to do no new foreign deals (though it has apparently resurrected an old deal in the Dominican Republic). Trump’s international hotel licensing and management business only makes up $220 million of his estimated $3.5 billion fortune, but it’s the most dynamic part of the Trump portfolio—and it throws off chunks of cash with virtually no risk. As the Trumps have winded down some international deals, they continue to push forward with new domestic agreements.

“From a business standpoint, is the presidency beneficial?” says Eric Trump. “We’re doing great in all of our assets. I would say that we also made great sacrifices and that the business made great sacrifices in that when you limit an international business to only domestic properties, when you put hundreds of millions of dollars of cash into a campaign, when you run with very, very tight and strict rules and the things that we do every single day in terms of compliance—I don’t know. You could look at it either way.”

Donald Trump will be keeping an eye on both the business and his children. “These papers are all just a piece of the many, many companies that are being put into trust to be run by my two sons,” the president said, standing next to stacks of documents at a January press conference where he announced he would hand over management to Eric and Don Jr. “I hope at the end of eight years I’ll come back and say ‘Oh you did a good job.’ Otherwise, if they do a bad job, I’ll say, ‘You’re fired.’”