“The stars have all aligned,” Eric Trump, who is Donald Trump’s son and executive vice president of the Trump Organization in charge of golf properties, told The New York Times. “I think our brand is the hottest it has ever been.”

As reporters Eric Lipton and Susanne Craig note, there are reasons for that, too. The Trump Organization has an extremely visible surrogate in the president, who continues to patronize Trump golf courses, from New Jersey to Florida. He also appeared, for example, on the cover of Golf Digest as “Golfer in Chief,” a nifty bit of marketing for Trump links.

Eric Trump told the Times that this was no different than the positive economic benefits that accrued to Crawford, Texas, when President George W. Bush visited his ranch there. But of course that analogy would only make sense if Bush had been the owner of the town of Crawford and stood to personally benefit from it, which he was not and did not.

Eric Trump then offered the paper a second defense, that the president is inextricable from his business interests, just the situation that conflict-of-interest rules are designed to answer. But the Trump family has in effect refused to reckon with those rules. Ostensibly, Donald Trump has stepped back from his businesses and turned them over to his children Eric and Donald Jr., as part of a plan to answer concerns about conflicts of interest. He claims that he will not speak to his sons about his business empire while in office. (Eric Trump posted a picture of himself at the White House Thursday, but you’ll have to take the Trump family’s word that business wasn’t discussed.)

Ethics experts have dismissed that arrangement as entirely insufficient, and the story of Trump’s golf properties prospering shows why, even if you take the Trumps at face value, the deal doesn’t work. Obviously, the president knows that if he gives Trump Organization properties lots of exposure, it will be good for them—and by extension good for him, since he didn’t divest from the company.

But are the claims of booming business believable? The golf profits are impossible to verify, since the Trump Organization is privately held and doesn’t have to make detailed disclosures—though the publicity is real. The president of Ivanka Trump’s line claims soaring sales, which is impossible to verify for similar disclosure reasons. (The Slice Intelligence figures quoted by CNBC provide a glimpse into the sales, but they cannot provide a full picture.) And the Trumps have a long record of misrepresenting the facts about their business. In The Art of the Deal, Donald Trump claimed to employ “truthful hyperbole,” which is an amusing phrase insofar as what he meant was that he was not being truthful. In a 2007 deposition about his business practices, he admitted to falsehoods 30 times.