Speaker Paul Ryan said Donald Trump is free to handle any potential conflicts of interest how he wants to. | Getty Ryan: Trump should handle conflicts ‘however he wants to'

House Speaker Paul Ryan is unbothered by President-elect Donald Trump’s business conflicts.

The Wisconsin Republican has no qualms about Trump’s potential conflicts of interest with Trump’s vast business empire, advising him to handle them “however he wants to.”


“This is not what I’m concerned about in Congress,” Ryan said Wednesday during an interview on CNBC. “I have every bit of confidence he’s going to get himself right with moving from being the business guy that he is to the president he’s going to become.”

Ryan praised Trump for “basically saying let’s just go unify this party, unify this country, get things done.”

“That’s exactly what I think people want to see,” he said. “What we’re seeing is what everybody was hoping to see, which is this is gonna be a business guy who becomes president who’s just gonna focus on getting the job done and fixing this country’s big problems. I’m excited.”

That business guy, however, has a multi-billion-dollar empire that could present numerous conflicts of interest as president. Trump has said he will leave his business to his adult children in a so-called “blind trust.”

But his children have served as close advisers to the president-elect and his campaign, sitting in on meetings and calls with foreign leaders and holding formal roles on Trump’s transition into the White House. By no definition would Trump’s children taking over his business empire constitute a blind trust.

But Ryan said his focus is on passing a conservative agenda that tackles the country’s big problems and turns it around. “That is what I’m focused on,” he said, “and not the legal details of how he divorces himself from his business, which I know he will.”

In a statement to POLITICO, Ryan’s office clarified his comment regarding Trump’s potential conflicts. “All the speaker said is he doesn’t know the mechanics of fire-walling a multi-billion dollar business,” Ryan spokeswoman AshLee Strong said. “He’s made clear many times that the president-elect should and will guard against any conflicts of interests.”

For his part, Trump said Wednesday morning during a telephone interview on NBC’s “Today” that he sold all of his stock holdings in June “because I felt that I was very much going to be winning, and I think I would have a tremendous — a really conflict of interest owning all of these different companies.”

Trump claimed he “let everybody know at the time” and argued that it would be inappropriate for him to own stocks when he’s making deals for the country that could help one company but adversely impact another.

“So I just felt it was a conflict,” Trump said.

The president-elect hasn’t held a news conference since July but announced late last month that he would hold a mid-December news conference “to discuss the fact that I will be leaving my great business in total in order to fully focus on running the country in order to MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”

“While I am not mandated to do this under the law, I feel it is visually important, as President, to in no way have a conflict of interest with my various businesses,” he wrote in a series of tweets. “Hence, legal documents are being crafted which take me completely out of business operations. The Presidency is a far more important task!”