"People will support you even more now,” Donald Trump said before encouraging Americans to snap up the company’s preppy products. | Getty Trump tweet on L.L.Bean would break White House rule Current policy prohibits the president from endorsing specific companies.

Donald Trump on Thursday morning put his presidential-elect seal of approval on L.L.Bean, thanking one of the heirs of the company’s founder for her support, and tweeting that people should “Buy L.L.Bean.”

If he does the same when he becomes president, he could get in hot water.


That’s because the Office of Government Ethics prohibits executive officials from using their position to endorse an organization, product or person. While this regulation technically does not apply to the president, President Barack Obama put in place a White House policy that expanded it to also apply to the Oval Office.

"We strictly forbade this when I was in the White House for the President and everyone else,” Norm Eisen, Obama's former ethics czar, told POLITICO. “How can you ask others to follow it if he doesn’t?”

Trump urged supporters to patronize L.L.Bean after the retailer’s founder’s granddaughter, Linda Bean, illegally donated to a PAC supporting Trump, leading to calls for a boycott. (Her $60,000 donation exceeded the amount that the PAC could accept from any one contributor.)

"People will support you even more now,” Trump said before encouraging Americans to snap up the company’s preppy products.

Trump also included a link to Linda Bean’s personal company, which sells lobsters to vacationers.

The tweet on Thursday didn’t break any rules — Trump isn’t covered by the policy as president-elect, and his incoming White House counsel, Don McGahn, could change the rule once Trump is sworn in next week.

But even if Trump changes White House policy, he could still run afoul of other laws if he hawks companies and their products as president.

Specifically, he could risk violating a federal insider-trading law called the STOCK Act if he or people around him use knowledge of upcoming tweets to trade securities. The STOCK Act does apply to the president.

Eisen said Trump will trip the STOCK Act or the anti-bribery law, which also includes the president, if his behavior doesn’t change.

“It is inevitable if this freewheeling style of violating long established norms continues,” Eisen said. “The concept that we are a government of laws, not men, does not mean doing the bare minimum and looking for loopholes — it means living up to the spirit of the law.”

The same ban on officials endorsing products prevented the author of “The Revenant” — Michael Punke, who is U.S. ambassador to the World Trade Organization — from participating in promotions for the Oscar-winning film based on the book.

George W. Bush's White House didn’t address product endorsements because it never came up, but his ethics lawyers did scrutinize gifts for the appearance of favoritism, according to one of them, Richard Painter.

