Donald Trump, the president of the United States of America, has been under spotlight for quite some time in the past couple months with his ethics and morals under questioning. In a recent lawsuit filed in January, Mr. Trump had been accused of “violating the Constitution by allowing his hotels and other business operations to accept payments from foreign governments.” In other words, his decisions and actions as POTUS might have been compromised by the dealings of his former business, which is currently being run being run by his kids Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump. The lawyers of this lawsuit have accused Trump of violating the Emoluments Clause provision in the Constitution. The Clause states that “no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.” With his business accepting payments from foreign government entities, the plaintiffs believe that he is in direct violation of the law. The fact that Mr. Trump holds the most powerful position in our government only exacerbates the problem, with him setting the precedent for all other politicians.

I’m pretty sure that almost everyone could relate with president Trump and understand why he doesn’t want to simply give up what he has worked on his entire life. Trump’s business has been his life’s work and he is obviously attached to it. When a person invests so much time and energy building something from scratch and watching it grow, it’s difficult to just blindly hand it over to others. In addition, surrendering his assets could potentially have  numerous insidious effects including significant losses in the real estate values of his properties. In addition, if the lawsuit wins this could be seen unfavorably by other potential presidential candidates  that have international business ties. In the larger picture this could deter business people from running for candidacy.

Although we could relate to Trump and understand why detaching himself from his assets is problematic, this is a far-reaching matter that has the potential to affect the entire world. We can not risk our president’s decisions being influenced by his deals with foreign countries. We’ve already seen some foreshadowing of the problems that could arise from this with Trumps Travel Ban of several countries. Although the official reasoning behind this ban was to attempt to prevent further terrorist breaches, in reality his ban only included muslim majority countries that he had no business ties with. There are countries that are terror-prone and pose a significant risk to the United States which were all excluded from the ban, all of which just happened to have business dealings with Mr. Trump. I don’t like to point fingers and put unsubstantiated accusations on others,  but this is one of those areas where i’d rather be safe than sorry, and force the president to cut his connections to his business through a blind trust.