So This Is What They Meant by 'Run Government Lik

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So This Is What They Meant by 'Run Government Like a Business'

Today in So Much Winning, conflict of interest edition.



BY CHARLES P. PIERCE
FEB 16, 2017

Since, in one way or another, we are all essentially stockholders in The American Presidency LLC (a division of The Trump Organization), we should probably take some time every now and again to check on how our national portfolio is doing.

First, it seems we've had something of a setback in Florida. The family of Jared Kushner, the president*'s son-in-law and chief Middle East troubleshooter, was seeking to buy the Miami Marlins baseball team from Jeffrey Loria, one of the towering villains in professional sports, famous for yanking the Expos out of Montreal, blackjacking stadium revenues out of the taxpayers of south Florida, and assembling World Series champions only to sell them off for parts. Loria and the Kushners are a match made somewhere south of heaven.

Unfortunately for everyone involved, it seems that obvious anagram Reince Priebus freed himself from the shackles holding him to the wall in the Blue Room and got in the president*'s ear.

He persuaded Himself to consider naming Loria ambassador to France, a job Loria apparently really wants, perhaps to sell the Eiffel Tower to Asheville for a right-fielder currently laboring in A-ball.

Anyway, this spoiled it for the Kushners because this would have been seen as a quid pro quo so glaring that even the extended Trump family couldn't stand the gaffe.

So somebody else gets to own what's left of the Marlins. The Kushners go shopping for another baseball team. And the United States is represented in la belle France by a guy The Washington Post describes thusly:

The 76-year-old Loria is a widely despised figure in South Florida for keeping the Marlins' annual payroll among the lowest in MLB, often by purging the team of talented players on the verge of paydays, while getting hundreds of millions in public funding for a new stadium.

He went from being a New York art dealer to the owner of the Montreal Expos in the early 2000s, then sold that team, which became the Washington Nationals, in a multiparty transaction that eventually landed him the Marlins in 2003 for $158.5 million.

Bonne chance, Mr. Ambassador. Try not to move the embassy to Bulgaria, OK?

Despite that setback, our investment in this presidency is paying off elsewhere. Remember how tough the president* was on China throughout the campaign, and how the bluster continued once he was sworn in? Well, you're probably already tired of all this winning. From The Washington Post:

The news has also been used to reignite the debate about whether his business interests conflict with his role as president, and about whether his success in securing trademark rights violate the Constitution's bar on receiving benefits from a foreign state.

Under Trump, U.S. relations with China have already been on something of a roller-coaster ride, with early tensions over policy toward Taiwan eased last week when Trump spoke by telephone to Chinese President Xi Jinping. The trademark case, though, appears to have proceeded independently of this process.

The decision to back Trump's trademark claim for construction services relating to residential, business and hotel real estate was first flagged by China's Trademark Office back in September, when a long-standing rival claim by a Chinese man called Dong Wei was invalidated.

We are again assured that the president* will receive no material benefit from this decision in his favor. So much winning. Business as usual in the White House didn't used to be, well, business as usual. But now, so much winning.

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