It comes from the top. We've never had a president with the kind of conflicts of interest that Donald Trump does. And it's not just that he's wealthier than past denizens of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. It's that other presidents have either sold their assets and had someone else buy them new ones without telling them what they are—an actual blind trust—or only had a vanilla portfolio of Treasury bonds and mutual funds that didn't create any potential for self-dealing. They didn't do this because they were required to by law. They're not. They did it because it seemed required by good governance.

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Trump, though, has so far refused to. He claims his conflicts of interest are "not a big deal," and that the only reason they seem like one is "you people are making it a big deal." Never mind that as long as he's getting paid by foreign entities, which will be pretty hard not to as long as he owns hotels, golf courses, and office buildings around the world, he may well be violating the Constitution. Or that having so many properties gives foreign governments just as many ways to try to influence him, whether or not there's an explicit quid for every quo. Indeed, that already seems to be happening with foreign diplomats who are already making a point of staying at Trump's Washington DC hotel—or feel like they have to.

But this is more than just a matter of saying that that's a nice event you've got there, and it'd be a shame if anything happened to it. It's the Orwellian idea that conflicts of interest are almost a good thing, since they align the government's incentives with everybody else's—just like stock options are supposed to do for CEOs. It's the abductio ad Trumpum of running the government like a business.

You can see hints of this in what billionaire investor Carl Icahn has said about his own conflicts of interest. Now, he's been named Trump's special adviser on regulatory issues, which you'd think would require him to sell off all the big stakes he owns in big companies. Otherwise, how would we know Icahn wasn't just trying to deregulate his own businesses to make his returns, and not necessarily America, great again. We wouldn't. Despite that, though, Icahn will not have to give up any of his holding. And he thinks it's "crazy" that anyone says he should. "That's like saying," he told CNBC, that "I cleaned up and saved Texaco, I did Reynolds Tobacco, I did Forest Labs" and "shareholders made hundreds of billions of dollars ... but nobody complained that Carl Icahn owned stock." In other words, the American people are like the shareholders in the American economy, so why should they care if Icahn enriches himself as long as he makes them richer too?

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This is a novel defense. The problem, of course, is that what's good for Icahn isn't always good for America. Not to mention that graft isn't good for the economy, either. We don't want success to be even more about who you know than what you know. Even Icahn seemed to admit as much when he conceded that "I can understand saying I shouldn't be involved in owning these if I were making policy." The distinction he's trying to draw is that picking regulators with obvious policy preferences (his job) doesn't create conflicts, but actually implementing those preferences (other people's job) does. He might be able to convince himself of that, but probably not anyone else.

But in a government of, by, and for billionaires, this isn't a deal-breaker. How could it be in an administration where Trump's own communications director has asserted that the president-elect "cannot and does not have a conflict" over selling tickets to a New Year's party that sure looked like selling access to himself? Or when the first thing House Republicans considered doing in the new term, before perhaps reversing course, was to neuter the independent ethics office that had been overseeing them? (Trump, for his part, has said they shouldn't prioritize this—not that they shouldn't do it—even if the watchdog is, as he puts it, "unfair").