Only Congress Can Intervene on Trump’s Truth Social Profiteering

Let’s not pretend this is some noble crusade against corruption. The reporting on the president’s Truth Social arrangement is an honest look at a very unseemly deal, but the calls for action are mostly noise. The real story here is that the legal system has no clean answer for this, and the people shouting for a prosecutor are going to be disappointed.

What we know is that the president’s campaign is paying his own company for rally logistics and other services. It looks bad. A private citizen doing this with a publicly traded company would be in front of a board, or a judge, very quickly. But the president isn't a private citizen, and the company isn't public. The arguments that this violates the Constitution's emoluments clause are creative, but they stretch a clause written in the 18th century to cover a situation no one could have imagined. The courts are not going to want to define the outer limits of a president's business dealings, especially when the conduct is so brazen.

That leaves us with politics. And that's exactly where this should be settled. If the voters in the Republican primary don't like the fact that their donations are lining the pockets of the Trump Organization, they have the power to say so. If Congress wants to shut it down, they can pass a law. They won't, because the political cost outweighs the benefit for most of them. So instead, we get hand-wringing from the left about a situation they are helping to create with their endless legal warfare. The grift is legal because the law is broken. The solution isn't a judge; it’s a law, and the only people who can write that law are the ones in Washington who benefit from the status quo. Don't hold your breath waiting for them to act. This is a problem for the voters to fix at the ballot box, if they even care to.