Wild loophole lets President Trump get away with Dell promotion that would get federal workers fired
U.S President Donald Trump has drawn criticism for an alleged conflict of interest once again due to his promotion of tech company Dell, yet his position as the nation's leader affords him a wild loophole, making the process entirely legal yet arguably unethical.
If the same declarations were made by any other federal employee – including some of the highest ranking political figures in President Trump's cabinet – then they would likely lose their jobs, but ethics watchdogs have highlighted that anyone serving as president is exempt from all conflict of interest laws, after an amendment was codified by congress into the federal ethics code in 1989.
While pretty much every president since then has attempted to avoid all possible conflict of interests while in office – including Jimmy Carter's decision to place his family's peanut farm into a blind trust during his time in the White House – Trump has been a little less subtle.
President Trump's Dell connections explained
While it's far from the first time these questions have emerged throughout Donald Trump's time in office, the latest incident has once again left people puzzled as to how the president continues to get away with allegedly blatant conflict of interest sparking behavior.
Speaking at a recent rally, President Trump urged his supporters to go out and buy a Dell computer — an odd call to make without context, but it suddenly made sense when people discovered Trump's personal investments in the PC manufacturer.
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"People are loving it, and you know what I say? Go out and buy a Dell computer," President Trump proclaimed, "because as far as I'm concerned, that's great stuff."
Trump's own 'personal' investments in Dell appear to exceed $6 million across this year alone — although a spokesperson for the Trump Organization has asserted that the president doesn't control his own stock purchases.
Additionally, as per The Hill, the Pentagon awarded Dell a five-year contract worth $9.7 billion in order to provide Microsoft software and cloud services to the Department of Defense, with the company's CEO, Michael Dell, sitting on the president's science advisory council after pledging $6 billion to Trump Accounts.
Will anything be done about a potential conflict of interest?
While you might think this seems a little concerning for the president to outwardly encourage people to buy into a company he himself has significant financial investments in, the aforementioned amendment to the federal ethics code leaves him exempt from any legal action, resulting in nothing being done.
That's not to say that he's exempt from impeachment, as that process is purely legislative and requires no crime to be enacted, although it does need at least two-thirds of the Senate in order to pass and that seems unlikely without a significant Democrat swing in the November midterms.
Trump himself is doing everything he can to reduce that possibility with a wild new potential act, requiring people to prove their own citizenship in order to vote, yet that looks increasingly unlikely to go through before the elections take place later this year.