Given this ever-expanding web of conflicts, it seems clear that one of the biggest mistakes of 2016 was the lack of any kind of pressure -- from the public, the media, or Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party -- on Trump to promise either a real blind trust or, even better, to liquidate his business empire. There's no legal requirement to do so, and it seems certain he would have resisted such calls. But the enormity of Trump's ethics problem didn't really come into focus until the nation was stuck with him, for better or worse, for the next four years. This should have been vetted. Who knows?...maybe a handful of voters in Michigan or Wisconsin would have been swayed.