Author: Trish

I have a PhD in Rhetoric. I have several times ended up running a composition program, which meant managing 20-60 people, and I now direct a thriving writing center, and that means managing a staff of about 100. I have never had a management class. I have never had training in what to do when your staff is worried they might be killed on the way to work.

And this is now my concern.

There were a lot of requirements for my getting a PhD in Rhetoric. I had to take six courses in the history of rhetoric, another six or so classes in various things (including an entire course on Victorian novels), pass a 90 minute oral exam that involved being able to describe in detail such thrilling authors as Geoffrey of Vinsauf or Pierre de la Ramee (Petrus Ramus to the Latinophiles among you), achieve translation fluency in two languages (at least one a “hard” language), and write a dissertation (about 50k words on a topic).

And, from that training, I went on to management positions. Along the way, I have tried to pick up skills involving performance management, giving useful criticism, onboarding, developing a performance improvement plan. But, let’s be blunt, achieving a translation fluency of German has not been something on which I’ve often drawn when trying to figure out how to fire someone, and so my training was less than ideal. Since most of my current staff is undergraduates, and I only manage them indirectly (I spend most of my time running around the university trying to persuade supportive but fiscally-strapped administrators to give us money), my current management style is mostly to help the people involved in direct administration to be as effective as they can. And I try to get more money. I’m not claiming to be an ideal manager, but I am saying I am giving it my best effort.

Several years ago, an undergraduate committed suicide in the main library on my campus. Since he used a gun, and since there was much confusion, that incident involved a lot of my day locked down in my office in a building that was rumored to have an active shooter (it didn’t). I was behind a 1950s desk that was up against a metal filing cabinet filled with papers and a metal double-walled mail chute. I spent the time cleaning out my files and updating Facebook because friends were worried. I was willing to grant that there might be an active shooter, but, other than working to get some undergrads in the hallway into a safe space, I was satisfied with my safety and so wasn’t especially worried.

Today there was a stabbing attack that was fairly random, several hundred feet from where I was, but it was in a space through my employees walk. And so I may not sleep.

I have never been trained for management, but I like to think I have done a lot to rectify that because I can see the value in giving useful feedback, knowing how to write an ask, making sure timesheets are correct. This year I have had to find out what to do if ICE comes to my workplace and tries to drag off a student or employee, and now I have to get more training on what to do with a staff that can reasonably be worried about their safety while walking through the center of a college campus.

This isn’t about whether guns should or shouldn’t be allowed on campus. This should not be another opportunity for people with serious mental health issues to rationalize their not getting help by yodelling false flag. This certainly shouldn’t be another salvo in the war as to whether they are better than us. It isn’t about whether the assailant is a person of color, or mentally ill, or a member of them.

When this kind of act happens, the impulse is to identify the group membership of the assailant, all in service of insisting that this incident proves that they are the cause of all evil. He’s a dem, or Muslim, or white, or not white, or conservative, or Christian. His having done this things proves that dems, Muslims, whites, non whites, conservatives, or Christians, or whatever are evil.

That kind of rhetoric, demagoguery really, doesn’t help. It’s the problem. He is a consequence of that kind of rhetoric. I don’t know anything about the assailant, but I’ll guess mentally ill. And I’ll guess that he has been hanging out in an informational enclave that is full of rhetoric about how evil THEY are, and how WE are in danger of extermination. Perhaps the people promoting that rhetoric meant it metaphorically, perhaps they didn’t think much about what exactly they meant, and they just wanted to get more clicks, viewers, or ad revenues. Perhaps they meant it.

But, perhaps he only consumed mainstream media. Is that really so different? How far does one have to go in mainstream media to find hyperbolic claims about a war on the ingroup? Whether or not he was hearing voices in his head, he could have heard voices in the media telling him that some group was trying to exterminate his kind. He certainly wouldn’t have to go far to find rhetoric saying that we are in a war against them, and the only solution is to exterminate them. And so, perhaps, he did.

That might not be what happened in this case, but it might be. It certainly is what did happen when Jim Adkisson shot up a Unitarian Church, or when Dylann Roof shot up a black church. We have an awful lot of media (including mainstream media like Fox) that are all “they’re trying to kill us” all the time. And that has to have a consequence.

Yet, instead of the media deeply invested (and profiting from) their rhetoric of “THERE IS A WAR AGAINST US” having to rethink their implicit promotion of violence, I have to think about what to do tomorrow to make my staff concentrate on their jobs when we all now know that they might have been killed today.

Clinton’s loss against Trump was shocking to many people, as has been the loss of Congress and the governorships. There is a narrative about that loss that is circulating, and I think it’s simultaneously persuasive and harmful. Narratives imply policy, and if our narratives are wrong, we end up with the wrong policies. I think we’re in danger of that now. I think our narratives imply that “the left” should become more purely left, either by all agreeing on a set of core goals or a single political agenda. That policy agenda can also seem to be right—to motivate people you can’t have a wishy-washy agenda.

Here’s the narrative as to what happened:

• • The Dem establishment obviously bungled because it promoted Clinton instead of Sanders.
  • That claim has two sub-claims: that Clinton only won because of the DNC support, and that it’s absolutely clear that Sanders would have won.
  • The Dems have consistently lost at every level for twenty years because they have moved toward third-way neoliberalism.
  • The DNC needs to move toward a single motivating political agenda, and it should be a more democratic socialist one, or it needs to be a more neoliberal one.
  • Or, the DNC needs to create a big tent in which we treat one another with respect and compassion and find shared ground.

Those are plausible claims, and that’s why people believe them. I’m going to argue that these claims are untrue, but, when I say that, I’m often heard to be arguing that the opposite of these claims are true—that, if it isn’t obvious that Sanders was a better choice, then I’m saying it’s obvious that Clinton was. I’m not. I’m arguing for walking away from narratives about what some set of us being obviously right and some of us being obviously wrong. I think some of us are wrong, but not obviously wrong.

Even though I disagree with those claims, I think the people who believe them aren’t idiots, or bad or stupid people, and the people who refuse to believe those claims aren’t necessarily any better than the people who do. I think they’re bad premises, but I don’t think the people who believe them are bad people, and I’m willing to admit I might be wrong.

And, in fact, that’s my whole argument: I think Dems need to imagine a world in which we agree to disagree in an inclusive sense, in which we agree to disagree while working toward common policy goals—and those goals are ones on which we agree to disagree. That is, we all support some policies we don’t like, and we each get some policies we do like. It’s taken me a long time to come around to that point of view, as I think it’s counterintuitive, but I think it’s right.

Or, in other words, the space between those assumptions about the 2016 election seeming to be true and yet their being false is the space of very important political work among good people with good motives and good reasons. I’d like to help us do that work.

I think dems need to find a world in which we act on the bases of inclusion, fairness, compassion, and long-term consequences. It is not a world in which we like each other, or even agree on premises. It is a world in which people who really dislike each other agree to treat each other well. It is a democracy.

That is a world in which we try to transcend the call of putting the ingroup first, and in which we aspire to treat the Other as we would want to be treated. I think that is a world toward which lefties aspire, and so this is about how to achieve that, but it begins with a long discussion about how not to achieve it.

And my argument as to how to achieve it is so controversial that I think I have to plead for people to continue to read. There are, conventionally, four ways that political parties succeed:

• • they agree on a political agenda;
  • they agree on a set of principles;
  • they agree hating some group/s;
  • they decide to work together although they loathe one another.

I’m going to argue that lefties need to do the last.

Not a popular argument, I’ll grant, and not one I really want to make, but I honestly think it’s the right one. To make that argument, I first need to show what’s wrong with the five points listed above about 2016, and that’s complicated because those are all points of view that can seem really reasonable. They are, I think, reasonable, but wrong. They aren’t obviously wrong, and the people who make them aren’t idiots, but I still think they’re wrong.

Making that argument requires making arguments about arguments, and also about political deliberation, and about fallacies of niceness. So, here goes.

I. A premise about argument: Or, saying “You are not obviously right is not the same as saying you are obviously wrong.”

I think we need to begin by rethinking conventional American notions about policy argumentation itself, in three ways: first, we need to reject the notion that feeling certain that you are right necessarily implies everyone else being obviously wrong (that is, lefties should be smarter than appealing to naïve realism); second, we need to stop assuming that policies necessarily follow from group identity (and so the most important arguments are about identity); third, we need to stop thinking that the solution to failure is greater purity.

In the abstract, lefties reject naïve realism and endorse various epistemologies of skepticism. In fact, however, humans live our lives in a world in which things are generally as they look, and lefties are not immune to invoking a kind of naïve realist argument about how any kind of realism is obviously wrong. It’s not uncommon, for instance, for lefties to cite studies in science to say that it’s been proven that people always fall back on confirmation bias, and are never objective. Then why cite the science? Aren’t the scientists themselves prone to confirmation bias? It makes sense to cite science to show that science isn’t some direct and unmediated contact with a stable reality (that is, to make a negative or refutative case), but it doesn’t make sense to use science to make an affirmative case about rejecting science.

I was particularly confused in the summer of 2016 by people whom I knew endorsed a social construction of knowledge epistemology, and who also said that Sanders or Clinton would OBVIOUSLY win and everyone who disagreed with them was an idiot. They weren’t just an idiot, but a dupe of someone or something, or doofusly ignoring their obvious best interest (if you’re really a progressive, if you’re really a feminist), often coupled with “How could you support THAT person?” arguments. If we really believe that there is not unmediated perception, and we believe that biases are inherent, and that we are all subject to our own constructions of ourselves, what does it mean to characterize every person who disagrees with us as obviously wrong?

I’m not arguing that we are obligated to say all points of view are equally valid. I am saying that, if we really believe the epistemology we claim to believe, then we are obligated to admit that we exist in a range of certainty/uncertainty, and that we are always obliged to argue about where we are on that range. We are obliged to argue with one another, and that means engaging their evidence, and not either simply repeating our own assertions or accusing them of bad motives.

There is also the problem that lefties are not always immune to the notion that the degree to which one feels certain is a sign of how much evidence we have, and that we should only enact policies about which feel certain. In addition, it’s common for us to think that, if you feel strongly about something, you must feel equally strongly that the people who disagree with you are bad and wrong. And, so, the first point is to try to distinguish between believing that other people are wrong and those same people are obviously wrong and bad. The notion that policies are either obviously right or obviously wrong assumes that decisions fall into a binary.

Thinking that someone else is reasonable and being what we think is right aren’t necessarily the same thing. We can be passionate, certain, and wrong. And, in fact, we’re always wrong, in some way or about some thing, but we are still certain. Saying that we are (perhaps have to be) certain and wrong at the same time isn’t endorsing the notion that all points of view are equally valid. It does mean that making any decision involves assessing the relevant information, like figuring out whether to take an umbrella on a given day. Important decisions are never questions of absolutely clear or random choice; we live in a world in which we’re always making decisions on the bases of various probabilities, and so there is rarely a binary between whether one should take an umbrella or not. Decisions aren’t binaries—they’re about the probabilities.

If the weather prediction is a 60% chance of rain, I would be a jerk to make fun of someone who made a different decision from me—whether I chose to take an umbrella or not. It wouldn’t necessarily be unreasonable to take an umbrella or not. Politics is always a realm in which we are making decisions between 30% and 70%. We should think about politics as questions of probability, like taking an umbrella. But we don’t. And, really, lefties of all people should be especially open to the argument that no single person can see things from all perspectives, and that nuance is important. Let’s not be jerks.

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Trump supporters who are defending his recent actions are, as per usual, wickedly and strategically misinformed.

They believe:

• • these deportations are only of illegal immigrants;
  • Trump is relying on a bill that Obama signed to identify the countries;
  • their objections to Obama’s executive orders and actions were principled–they objected to his actions on the basis of principles about constitutionality.

So, first, it can help to explain that he is detaining and deporting people with permanent residency status.

I’ve stayed away from NYTimes and other sources they’ve been trained to reject without reading:

From ABC http://abc7.com/politics/federal-judge-in-ny-puts-halt-to-deportations-ordered-by-trump/1726167/

UPI http://www.upi.com/Top_News/Voices/2017/01/26/Trumps-policies-will-affect-four-groups-of-undocumented-immigrants/8641485437900/

McClatchy http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politics-government/white-house/article129406279.html

The proof that they included legal immigrants, initially, is that Trump backed off on that. So, either he was incompetent at issuing an order, or he intended to keep permanent residents out. (If they balk at clicking on the link, tell them to watch the video.) https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/29/us/politics/white-house-official-in-reversal-says-green-card-holders-wont-be-barred.html?smprod=nytcore-iphone&smid=nytcore-iphone-share&_r=0

These deportations include Christians: http://www.nbcphiladelphia.com/news/local/Two-Syrian-Families-Detained-at-Philadelphia-International-Airport-Told-to-Fly-Back-Family-Member-Says-412047173.html

Don’t mention this unless they bring it up, because a lot of the sort of people who support Trump just remember nouns and not claims. They’ll remember “Obama bill” and not “this has nothing to do with that.” Here’s the actual bill: https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/house-bill/158

This is the additional change that was made. I still see no connection. (And people who are repeating this talking point won’t be able to come up with one–neither Trump nor the Right-Wing Noise Machine has tried to make clear what the connection is.) https://www.dhs.gov/news/2016/02/18/dhs-announces-further-travel-restrictions-visa-waiver-program

Oops, now he’s claiming it’s another thing. Here’s the refutation of that point: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2017/01/29/trumps-facile-claim-that-his-refugee-policy-is-similar-to-obama-in-2011/?utm_term=.0893f3634502

The DHS is violating the court order. Either they’re out of Trump’s control, or he told them to do that. If it’s the latter, would they be okay if Obama had done that? If not, then their objections to Obama’s actions weren’t based on principle, but on faction.

Here’s the court order: darweesh.v.trump_decision.and.order.document-3.pdf

After I wrote this, the defense of Trump’s actions changed again. First, they were claiming this came from a 2015 bill, then a 2011 action, now I think something else. There are two ways that all that shifting around is important: first, these actions were initially praised by Trump supporters and his media outlets on the grounds that he was finally doing something that Obama hadn’t done, and was finally securing our borders, unlike Obama–the whole theme was that this was a huge break with Obama. Now the talking point is that the outrage is the consequence of liberal media hype, and this is no different from Obama. They can’t play it both ways. Either this is good, and the same thing Obama did, so Obama’s policies were good; or, Obama’s policies were weak, and this really is a big change. It can’t be both.

Second, the EO was extremely unclear and created a lot of confusion–that isn’t decisiveness. It included people with permanent residency status, and the WH continued to insist that those people be included, then walked that back. Making a lot of different and unclear decisions about major issues in a 72 hours isn’t decisiveness–it’s being a loose cannon.

There is a tendency for pundits to say “Trump supporters were all motivated by this” or “Trump supporters are all like that,” but I don’t think those generalizations are very useful. I think about the only accurate generalizations would be “Trump voters were motivated by the sense that he was the better person for the job,” and “Trump supporters are all Trump supporters.”

I think a lot of Trump supporters believe that the government has been on the wrong track for years, with politicians doing nothing other than line their own pockets, pandering to special interests and lobbyists, and creating a government that does little other than waste money and get in the way. Politicians are cynical careerists who say whatever they need to say to get elected, and look down on the regular people who are actually paying their wages. Our lives are filled with unnecessary regulations enforced by petty bureaucrats who just want to protect their own cushy jobs. The supposed elite—professors, doctors, supposed experts—don’t actually know what they’re doing, have very little common sense, and no real experience with the things about which they’re pontificating. The problems that face us are crucial, but not complicated, and the solutions are straightforward but politicians (and experts generally) don’t want to go for the simple solution. If they did, they’d be out of a job.

Take, for instance, a doctor. You have a recurrent complaint, and the doctor keeps giving you different medications (or maybe does nothing at all), and they don’t actually work. And, perhaps, you changed a minor thing in your life (in my case, I changed toothpastes, which got rid of the metallic taste that had completely confused the doctor) and all is well. You might come to the conclusion that doctors act as though they’re all-knowing, but they’re just guessing. Or, you might decide that the doctor is not really fixing you because then he’d lose the money from your visits and tests. Certainly, there are cases of doctors who were ordering unnecessary surgeries in order to get the money—that’s just a fact.

It isn’t just doctors, of course. It’s anyone who claims to have special knowledge. I once had a guy at a gas station claim I needed a new alternator belt because the one I had was all cut up. (This was in the 70s, when alternator belts were notched.) There are “resume services” who will, for free, look at your resume. They’ll tell you it’s awful, and you need their services. Some people have paid for the resume revision, then resubmitted that revision for the “free” review of your resume—the service said that resume was awful, and they needed to revise it.

There are definitely politicians who just liked the prestige and power it provided, and who had no intention of doing any actual work. I’ve known people in minor positions of power who behaved that way, so I’m certain it’s true of people with as much power as even a state legislator has. And we have all been on committees or teams with people who enjoyed the process so much that they never actually wanted anything to get done. We all work in institutions that have rules and processes that have no obvious explanation other than a perverse desire to see that no really good work gets accomplished at all.

For instance, a friend worked as a computer programmer at an institution that had this process for changing anything in a program:

1. 1. someone submits a change request;
   2. it is reviewed by a team;
   3. if approved, the change is assigned to a programmer;
   4. the programmer comes up with a plan for responding to the request;
   5. that plan is presented to the team;
   6. the team sends that plan up the ladder for approval;
   7. if approved, the change is made;
   8. the change is tested by a quality control group;
   9. the team meets again to determine the change was good;
   10. that information is sent up the ladder.

As you can imagine, that took a long time, and a lot of meetings, and could be irritating if there was some urgency. There was a different process, however, if it wasn’t a change request, but correcting an error. So, my friend’s team took to identifying all change requests as “correcting error” requests. The result was that users were much happier, and more empowered in their jobs. They felt ownership over the programs they were using, as they could have an impact on how those programs functioned. This process was more efficient, since there were fewer meetings, and requested changes happened faster.

They were all called on the carpet because their team was producing programs with too many errors, and had to go to the less effective and less efficient process.

Every interaction with the government is like that. What should be simple—getting a driver’s license—involves forms, lines, not having the right document and so having to come back another day and stand in more lines, filling out the forms again, and then dealing with some grumpy person who makes us jump through every hoop required by a fifty-page set of regulations we’re convinced was written by legislators with nothing better to do.

I think a lot of Trump supporters were motivated by the notion that all of this nonsense is unnecessary, and a really good leader would get rid of it.

But why Trump?

Here is the narrative in which Trump seems like a good choice:

• • politicians refuse to solve the problems, so get a non-politician;
  • politicians don’t solve things because they pander to lobbyists, so get someone who is already rich and powerful enough that he doesn’t need to pander to anyone;
  • he has shown himself in ­the apprentice shows to be decisive, and to be able to make good judgments about people quickly;
  • his success in business shows that he knows how to solve problems without a lot of drama.

Added to this was the sense that

• • Obama had violated the constitution, and Democrats didn’t seem to care, so Dems are generally suspect—Trump insisted he would the constitution.

I want to focus on just three points: 1, 2, and 5.

Are there politicians who don’t really want to solve problems, but stay in office? Yes. Just as there are doctors, auto mechanics, hairdressers, therapists, lawyers, investment advisors, pet sitters, and members of every single profession who are just trying to keep getting money out of you. But, to return to the medical example: if there were, for instance, a simple solution to back pain, and all the things your doctor is making you do are just to line his pocket, then there must be some doctor out there who actually cares about patients, right? It can’t be 100%? And, really, if there were a simple solution to back pain, a doctor who patented it, or wrote a book about it, would be a millionaire, so, it would be out there.

And, of course, those books and videos are out there. There are magazines, links, books, articles that all claim “this housewife discovered the cure your doctor doesn’t want you to know about” (by the way, that selling strategy is at least a hundred years old), but those don’t work either.

So, in fact, there isn’t a simple solution to back pain. It’s complicated. It really is. And when your doctor tells you it’s complicated, she’s telling you the truth. Maybe you have a good doctor who will ensure you get the best treatment possible, and maybe you have a bad doctor who is just stringing you along, but they aren’t distinguished by which one tells you it’s complicated versus which one tells you it’s simple.

Back pain is a good example because it connects to a vexed political problem—use/abuse of painkillers. It’s absolutely clear that some people claim to have chronic pain who don’t, but they use that claim to get doctors to prescribe pain medication which they then sell to people who are just using it to get high. But it’s also clear that the regulations we set to stop those people end up creating a huge number of hoops for people who legitimately need a lot of pain medication because they really are in a lot of pain.

For my job, I have to fill out a ridiculous amount of paperwork to do something because someone else really did recently use that process to rip my employer off for $50k.

If there were an obvious solution to the problem of making sure that people who really need pain medication got all the medication they legitimately need without abusers getting any, a politician who figured that out would be the hero of all the TV shows. Perhaps some politicians would decide to take payoffs from Big Pharma or the Mafia or whoever not to go with the obvious solution, but, if it’s really obvious, at some point someone too ethical (or too ambitious) to get bought would have figured out that being The Politician to solve this problem is a golden ticket to Bigger Things.

No one has stepped forward with the obvious solution because there isn’t one. Setting huge penalties for abuse of painkillers isn’t a solution because it isn’t objectively clear whether someone is really in pain or just pretending.

There are politicians who don’t want to solve problems but just keep getting reelected. There are mechanics who don’t want to fix your car but want to bring it back. But in neither case should we assume that getting an outside will solve the problem. Get a different mechanic, but get someone who knows something about cars.

People have a tendency to assume that judgment applies across fields, but that isn’t really how it works out. You can be brilliant at math, and unable to write a check, or great at fixing computers but terrible at fixing cars. The whole point about eggheads who might be brilliant at their field is that brilliance doesn’t apply to other things.

But even setting that aside—whether Trump was, actually, successful at business (something we can’t know because we don’t know his debt load), or if such success would translate—we can know something about the “above corruption” claim.

What everyone wants—Trump supporters and their opponents—are politicians who can’t be bought, who will make decisions on the basis of what’s best for the US, and not for what will line their own pockets. We disagree about how to do that, but we agree it’s an important value.

Trump supporters believe that Trump being so rich means he doesn’t need more money. I’m not sure I’ve ever known anyone who didn’t want more money. But, ignoring that, it’s easy to tell whether Trump is that sort of person: is he trying to use his position as President to make more money?

If he is, then everything about the “he’s above special interests” collapses. If he is going to use his position to profit himself, then he is a special interest, and he will corrupt policy to make more money.

This was a major issue for the Founders, and that’s why they put into the Constitution the “emoluments” clause. This is what the conservative site, The Heritage Foundation, has to say about that clause:

Similarly, the Framers intended the Emoluments Clause to protect the republican character of American political institutions. “One of the weak sides of republics, among their numerous advantages, is that they afford too easy an inlet to foreign corruption.” The Federalist No. 22 (Alexander Hamilton). The delegates at the Constitutional Convention specifically designed the clause as an antidote to potentially corrupting foreign practices of a kind that the Framers had observed during the period of the Confederation. Louis XVI had the custom of presenting expensive gifts to departing ministers who had signed treaties with France, including American diplomats. In 1780, the King gave Arthur Lee a portrait of the King set in diamonds above a gold snuff box; and in 1785, he gave Benjamin Franklin a similar miniature portrait, also set in diamonds. Likewise, the King of Spain presented John Jay (during negotiations with Spain) with the gift of a horse. All these gifts were reported to Congress, which in each case accorded permission to the recipients to accept them. Wary, however, of the possibility that such gestures might unduly influence American officials in their dealings with foreign states, the Framers institutionalized the practice of requiring the consent of Congress before one could accept “any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from…[a] foreign State.”

Like several other provisions of the Constitution, the Emoluments Clause also embodies the memory of the epochal constitutional struggles in seventeenth-century Britain between the forces of Parliament and the Stuart dynasty. St. George Tucker’s explanation of the clause noted that “in the reign of Charles the [S]econd of England, that prince, and almost all his officers of state were either actual pensioners of the court of France, or supposed to be under its influence, directly, or indirectly, from that cause. The reign of that monarch has been, accordingly, proverbially disgraceful to his memory.” As these remarks imply, the clause was directed not merely at American diplomats serving abroad, but more generally at officials throughout the federal government. (http://www.heritage.org/constitution/#!/articles/1/essays/68/emoluments-clause)

The politically conservative Economist explains the application to Trump:

DIPLOMATS from various countries have spent the past few weeks booking suites at the Trump International Hotel in Washington in the hope of ingratiating themselves with president-elect Donald Trump. The Industrial and Commerical Bank of China, whose majority stakeholder is the Chinese government, rents office space in New York City’s Trump Tower. The 35-storey Trump Office Buenos Aires development is awaiting approval from that city’s government. These are just a few of the unprecedented conflicts of interest presented by Mr Trump’s decision to retain his business empire and hand its management over to his children.  No law obliges Mr Trump to sell his assets or place them in a blind trust, though nine of the 12 presidents since the second world war have done so. But when his businesses accept money (or anything of value) from foreign governments or state-owned entities, Mr Trump may nevertheless be breaking the law. In fact, he may be violating the Constitution of the United States—and specifically, a section known as the Emoluments Clause. http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2016/12/economist-explains-2

Thus, traditionally, Presidents have been required to take any assets they have and sell them (Carter and his farm) or put them into blind trusts. It’s useful to remember that one of the main points of the “Clinton is corrupt” argument was that she and her husband had violated this clause with their Foundation.Were Trump to do something like give favor to some countries because he has business interests with them, or require that countries trying to get political favors use his hotels, then he would have violated the emoluments clause.

More important, he would have violated one of the major arguments for voting for him—he would have shown that he can be bought, that he will use the position to line his pockets, and that he will make political decisions on the basis of what benefits him personally.

He would have shown himself to be the opposite of the person for whom Trump supporters voted. That matters.