“It stinks,” said Norman Eisen, who was the chief White House ethics lawyer for President Obama from 2009 to 2011. Because there is no specific law prohibiting public officeholders from financially beneficial self-promotion, what Mr. Trump is doing is probably not illegal, Mr. Eisen added.

“But that doesn’t make it right,” he said. “It’s part and parcel of the unsavory marketing of his brands that he also did during the campaign.”

Unsavory or not, it is all part of the stagecraft and spectacle that Mr. Trump has directed from his 26th-floor office in Trump Tower — all of which is being ravenously consumed by the news media and his loyal followers.

Most days since Mr. Trump became the president-elect, the lobby of Trump Tower has been a public staging area for aspects of the transition that Mr. Trump most wants people to see.

Potential cabinet appointees march across its buffed marble floors, past the cameras that stream the scene live to C-Span, and into the gold mirrored elevators. This week there were people like Gov. Mary Fallin of Oklahoma and Rick Perry, the former Texas governor, who disparaged Mr. Trump as “a cancer on conservatism” when they were battling for the Republican nomination.