Eric Trump said "we're doing great in all of our assets" for the Trump Organization. | Getty Eric Trump will share business updates with father 'probably quarterly'

Eric Trump will keep his father, the president of the United States, abreast of the family business profits.

Opting against selling his business or placing it in a blind trust, President Donald Trump left management of the Trump Organization in the hands of his older two sons, Eric and Donald Jr.


In an interview with Forbes published Friday, Eric Trump described the setup as “kind of a clear separation of church and state that we maintain.”

“I am deadly serious about that exercise,” he said. “I do not talk about the government with him, and he does not talk about the business with us. That’s kind of a steadfast pact we made, and it’s something that we honor.”

But nearly two minutes later, Trump admitted that he will keep his father up to speed on some aspects of the business.

“Yeah, on the bottom line, profitability reports and stuff like that, but you know, that’s about it,” he said, adding that the updates will be “probably quarterly.”

“My father and I are very close,” he said. “I talk to him a lot. We’re pretty inseparable.”

Trump and his White House have argued that the commander in chief is exempt from any conflicts of interest but that he handed over management of his company to fully focus on his administration.

Lawyers for the president have said the company won’t enter any new foreign deals and that any new domestic deals must be approved by an ethics adviser. Ethicists, however, have repeatedly criticized the arrangement, which they contend doesn't go far enough to separate the president from his massive business empire.

“The statement that the president made earlier that he wasn’t going to talk to his children about the business sounded good, but the reality was there was no way to enforce it,” Larry Noble, general counsel of the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center and a former chief ethics officer at the Federal Election Commission, told Forbes. “He is breaking down one of the few barriers he claimed to be establishing between him and his businesses, and those barriers themselves were weak to begin with. But if he is now going to get reports from his son about the businesses, then he really isn’t separate in any real way.”

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The General Services Administration ruled Thursday that Trump’s Washington hotel, Trump International, “is in full compliance” with its lease, which bars members and delegates of Congress and other elected officials from benefiting from the property.

“From a business standpoint, is the presidency beneficial? We’re doing great in all of our assets,” Eric Trump said. “I would say that we also made great sacrifices and that the business made great sacrifices in that when you limit an international business to only domestic properties, when you put hundreds of millions of dollars of cash into a campaign, when you run with very, very tight and strict rules and the things that we do every single day in terms of compliance — I don’t know. You could look at it either way.”