When Donald Trump steps from his golden elevator in Trump Tower to address the assembled ranks of the world’s media later today, it will be 167 days since his last press conference – the one, you’ll remember, when he encouraged Russia to hack Hillary Clinton’s emails. After November’s election he did say he would announce how he planned to reconcile his business interests with holding the post of world’s most powerful man on December 15. But that was cancelled and since then the accusations, concerns and questions have simply piled up.
Another bombshell came last night when reports emerged that US intelligence officials believe Russia may have collected compromising information about the President-elect. But whether sensitive American hacks will today bring up the alleged goings on at the centre of these reports is anyone’s guess.
Then there are those business entanglements. This week his transition team announced that Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, would take up a role of senior adviser, thus exposing a fresh range of potential overlaps between policy and commerce. For his part, Kushner says he will resign from his real estate business, sell off his foreign investments and recuse himself from any White House dealings that might affect his remaining holdings.
Yet no previous president has ever had such a level of potential conflicts, nor anything like the same number of billionaires in his administration.
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