Nobody's giving out medals for the smartest Trump kid, but it did seem like Eric was in a good position for a while. Unlike Junior, he did not get himself a hair's breadth away from indictment by Special Counsel Robert Mueller for his activities in the 2016 election. (This is surely the kind of thing that caused Trump the Elder to say Junior has "the worst judgment of anyone in the world," at least according to Michael Cohen.) If it's what you say, I love it. While Eric was cast as The Dumb One on Saturday Night Live, it seemed he'd been hard done by.

Ah, but give it time. Now that Democrats in the House of Representatives are exercising the powers allocated to Congress in the Constitution to provide oversight of the Executive Branch, Trumpworld is on an all-out offensive to prevent the public from learning anything about the president's businesses, or the incredibly suspect White House security clearance process, or whatever Don McGahn might say. This, of course, is because there's nothing to see here. Right. The strategy seems to be a legal-slash-public-relations campaign around the idea this is all PRESIDENTIAL HARASSMENT!, and also that Congress is requesting things from private citizens and it's unfair.

This was accomplished, in typical fashion, by sending Eric on the president's favorite teevee show to lie about what's happening.

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WOW -- Eric Trump throws Tiffany Trump under the bus here pic.twitter.com/7VvJdBAtI0 — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 30, 2019

Why'd he have to do Tiffany like that? His half sister is in law school, yet he casts her as a drunk on national TV as part of the family's Escape From Accountability Tour? But notice how he slid seamlessly from the fact that, as Executive Vice President of the Trump Organization, his financial information may be subpoenaed, to the idea the Democrats want to know how much his wife "spent on baby formula" for their newborn son.

This is obviously insane and dumb, but the intent is clear: make everything partisan and personal, even though the Trumps have brought unprecedented conflicts-of-interest into office by refusing to divest from their businesses, and Trump the Elder is quite clearly trying to monetize the presidency. Fox & Friends helpfully spelled out the strategy by changing the chyron identifying Eric from "Executive Vice President of the Trump Organization" to "Son of President Donald Trump" as his rhetoric shifted. Ah, suddenly he's an innocent Son, a private citizen being subjected to Democratic Harassment.

This is the strategy on the legal side, too.

The president might be trying to file this suit as a private citizen, but he isn't one. He's the President of the United States. He is the most public figure, holding the highest office of the public trust. That entails that your activities will be subjected to the utmost scrutiny, and that if you bring complex financial entanglements into office which may affect your decision-making, those will be scrutinized, too. But the entire premise of the Trump presidency is that you can hold onto your private business interests—which take cash from foreign actors and special interests, at least some of which are surely seeking to curry favor with the world's most powerful man—and hold public office without any friction or conflict.

In fact, as the filing for Ivanka in the lawsuit to keep Deutsche Bank from releasing Trump Organization records shows, they believe you can switch between being a public official and a private citizen whenever it's convenient. Ivanka Trump is an Assistant to the President. She works in the White House. She is not just the First Daughter, though that is how she gets herself portrayed in news reports when it is convenient. She also brought possible conflicts into office, because she also did not divest from her private business holdings. But like her father, she believes she can pursue private grifts while getting involved in picking the next leader of the World Bank.

This is the operating principle of The Great American Heist. Enjoy the benefits of being a high-level public servant while relentlessly monetizing your position on the side, all while switching back and forth between your roles depending on what's convenient in the situation. Of course, this is a recipe for betraying the public interest in favor of whatever benefits your bank account, which is why the House Democrats are interested in learning about the infrastructure of Trump's businesses. After all, nearly every organization he's ever run is under investigation or has already been shuttered amid allegations of fraud. Nobody cares about beers or baby formula, which Eric well knows. But Donald Trump and his crew are hoping to stretch out the process, probably over years, so that the public does not learn what they're up to before the president can finish his reelection bid.



Jack Holmes Politics Editor Jack Holmes is the Politics Editor at Esquire, where he writes daily and edits the Politics Blog with Charles P Pierce.

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