The 3 People Who Run Trump’s Company If He Wins

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Published
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The 3 People Who Run Trump’s Company If He Wins

© Wikimedia Commons (TonyTheTiger)

Who runs Trump’s empire if he wins the presidency? There are three options. Here they are, based on expert analysis or media reporting.

Trump himself, according to The Atlantic:

Donald Trump could become president of the United States and still keep his day job as chairman of the Trump Organization and impresario of all things Trump-branded. He could even promote policies that advance his business interests.

Historically, presidents have gone to great lengths to avoid these conflicts of interest, but there’s no law requiring them to do so. And Trump has said little about how he would separate his economic interests from his presidential responsibilities. When pressed, he has stated that he might hand control over to family members, but during his run for office he has funneled campaign money to his own companies and tweeted that his presidential prominence might give new life to the allegedly-fraudulent Trump University.

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His children, according to Bloomberg:

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump said Thursday (September 15) he’d cut ties to his company and have his children and executives run it if he wins the November election.

“I will sever connections and I’ll have my children and my executives run the company and I won’t discuss it with them. It’s just so unimportant compared to what we’re doing about making American great again,” the billionaire real-estate developer and TV personality said in a phone interview on Fox News.

“I would absolutely sever, I would have nothing to do with my company,” Trump added.

A blind trust, according to NPR:

It’s a legal arrangement sometimes used by elected officials to avoid potential conflicts. An independent trustee takes over an official’s investment portfolio; the official cannot direct or advise the trustee on investment decisions. Most presidents have had blind trusts since Lyndon Johnson in 1963. President Obama is an exception to this practice. He doesn’t have a blind trust because his assets are primarily held in plain vanilla index funds and Treasury notes.

A blind trust works for liquid assets: stocks, bonds, other financial instruments. Trump has plenty of those, but his biggest assets are all about the Trump brand. The golf courses, high-rises and so forth can’t be easily unloaded. Dropping the Trump name would very likely reduce their value.

Based on these options, he might be able change the name, unofficially, of the presidential residence to The Trump White House.

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Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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