This is not simply a matter of messing up President Trump’s baseless attack on former vice president Joe Biden regarding his son’s dealings with China. It is a textbook case of an emolument — money from a foreign government, which is explicitly prohibited by the Constitution.

“Ever since his now infamous January 2017 press conference in which Trump declared he would defy the foreign emoluments clause and keep his businesses, the danger to Americans was plain,” says Norman Eisen, who served as counsel for the House impeachment managers. “By keeping their business interests, he and his family have for three years tainted our foreign and domestic policy decisions with unconstitutional conflicts.” That said, Eisen thinks this is “a new low.” He asks, “Can anyone who has seen the president’s ruthless exploitation of his office for personal gain be confident that his financial dependency on China did not influence his judgment in dealing with coronavirus?”

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That’s not the only foreign conflict of interest. The covid-19 relief package explicitly prohibited Trump’s business from getting money from the U.S. government, so instead it reportedly turned to foreign governments. Bloomberg reports, “The Trump Organization is seeking U.K. and Irish bailout money to help cover wages for bartenders, bagpipers and other employees furloughed from its European golf properties because of the coronavirus lockdown.” It might not be illegal or improper under U.K. law, but it most certainly is a constitutional problem back home.

Constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe tells me, “Both of these situations illustrate the ongoing foreign financial entanglements — and the obvious conflicts of interest those entanglements create — that President Trump’s compliance with the foreign emoluments clause at the outset would have avoided and that his continuing violation of that fundamental constitutional requirement highlights.”

We have come to recognize in the course of the Trump presidency that emoluments (whether they’re Ivanka Trump’s receipt of trademarks from China or foreign governments booking rooms at Trump’s D.C. hotel) are simply one facet of a central problem that defines him and his presidency. He is incapable of separating his own interest from (let alone subordinating it to) the nation’s interest. We saw that in the Ukraine scandal (when he put his own interests in getting reelected above the nation’s national security interests) and we see it now in the coronavirus pandemic.

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This conduct is and was impeachable — the exact sort of corrupt intent and threat of foreign influence the Framers worried about. “It’s important to remember that the Foreign emoluments clause was designed not only to prevent outright bribery by foreign powers and demonstrable conflicts of interest but situations in which a president’s indebtedness to foreign powers makes it impossible for the public to know which of his decisions are influenced by a desire to reduce or service that debt and which are driven by the president’s genuine concern for the national interest,” Tribe tells me.

The Republicans have shown themselves unwilling to hold the president responsible for his conduct. The remedy, as they keep reminding us, is at the polls. In the words of Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.): “We must look at the history of this presidency and to the character of this president, or lack of character, and ask: Can we be confident that he will not continue to try to cheat in that very election? Can we be confident that Americans, and not foreign powers, will get to decide, and that the president will shun any further foreign interference in our democratic affairs? And the short, plain, sad, incontestable answer is no, you can’t. … He will not change, and you know it.”

And so we must throw him out in November.