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President-Elect Donald Trump is, in some respects, a family man. During his first term in the White House, his children regularly surrounded him, appearing in important meetings and at major public events. Ivanka Trump served in an unpaid advisory role to the president, along with her husband, Jared Kushner, and his two elder sons ran the family business while their father served in office.

Ivanka was notably absent during her father’s 2024 campaign, having retreated to a semi-private island in the Miami area with her family. And in 2023, Trump told Fox News’s Bret Baier that his family members would not serve in his administration should he return to the White House: “It’s too painful” for them, he said. But as he prepares for Inauguration Day, a new set of more distant family members is stepping in. Trump has already bestowed official positions upon the fathers-in-law of his daughters: Massad Boulos, Tiffany’s husband’s father, has been named a senior adviser to the president on Arab and Middle Eastern affairs, and Charles Kushner, father-in-law of Ivanka, was nominated to serve as U.S. ambassador to France.

Having family members serve in key government positions presents such clear opportunities for conflicts of interest that most government officials avoid it altogether. And there are legal barriers too: After President John F. Kennedy selected his brother for attorney general, Congress passed an anti-nepotism law in 1967 restricting presidents from appointing relatives to agency jobs. White House roles are still permitted, but most presidents don’t go near the line. Trump, however, happily did so in his first term.

Trump’s family benefitted from this arrangement. As my colleague Franklin Foer wrote in 2020, “Both the Kushner and the Trump families have tried to turn the White House into a vehicle for self-enrichment.” Jared Kushner, he argued, had become his father-in-law’s “most dangerous enabler” as he led some of the country’s pandemic-response strategies. What Kushner “lacked wasn’t competence, but the courage to challenge his father-in-law’s fantasies,” Foer wrote. In this case, familial appointments weren’t just unseemly; they hindered the government’s capacity to function well in a moment of crisis.

Trump’s potential entanglements extend beyond his family’s role in the White House to his businesses. After winning the presidency in 2016, he promised to avoid conflicts of interest introduced by his involvement in the Trump Organization, though he ultimately just transferred control of the company to his two older sons. The Trump Organization’s 2017 ethics plan said that it would restrict dealings in foreign countries. It is apparently not planning to do so to the same extent this time: The New York Times reported earlier this month that Eric Trump, who leads most of the Trump Organization’s operations, was preparing to limit deals done directly with foreign governments, but not to restrict deals in foreign countries altogether.

Eric has openly justified a looser approach, telling the Times that “the first term, we did everything imaginable to avoid any appearance of impropriety, and frankly, we got crushed anyway … We can’t just sit out in perpetuity, and I won’t.” (Donald Trump racked up some 3,400 conflicts of interest during his first term, according to a nonpartisan ethics watchdog.) In recent months, per the Times, Eric has struck deals in Vietnam, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. Jared Kushner, who has said he will not return to an official White House role, in recent years has gone into business with the governments of Saudi Arabia (which contributed roughly $2 billion to his private-equity firm) and Serbia (with whom his firm plans to share profits from a hotel on the site of the former Yugoslav Ministry of Defense).

Trump’s business interests have only gotten more varied and complex since his first term: Trump and his sons—including the youngest, Barron—helped launch a cryptocurrency project in the fall. (None of the Trumps is an officer of the company.) Trump’s social-media app, Truth Social, debuted on the public markets in March. Both welcome foreign investments. His team has waved away criticism, saying that Trump didn’t get into politics to make money and that he would follow ethics guidelines in his next term in office, but Trump has not promised to divest from his business interests, and the ethics code that his team issued last month for the transition period notably appeared to exclude restrictions on the president-elect himself.

Trump’s first term was rife with apparent and actual conflicts of interest. This time, it seems, there will be fewer constraints. And his loyal advisers and family members will remain disinclined to raise questions if he crosses ethical lines, given that many of them stand to profit—be it financially or politically—from his success. Writing shortly after Trump endorsed Lara Trump, the wife of his son Eric, for RNC co-chair earlier this year, my colleague David Graham noted that the president-elect ran both his companies and his White House by stocking them with questionably qualified “ultra-loyalists.” This approach, he wrote, helps “ensure that the only thing that matters, and the only person who decides, is Trump.”

Related:

• Republicans are no longer a political party.
• The good son (From 2020)

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• Good on Paper: An American-style housing crisis in New Zealand

Today’s News

1. Luigi Mangione, who was charged with murder in the UnitedHealthcare-CEO shooting, is fighting extradition from Pennsylvania to New York.
2. Israel said that its air strikes have destroyed Syria’s navy. After ousted Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s government crumbled over the weekend, Israel’s forces entered Syrian territory for the first time in more than 50 years.
3. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu testified in his corruption trial, which began four years ago. He is charged with bribery, fraud, and breach of trust, all of which he has denied.

Dispatches

• Work in Progress: Democrats have spent more than a decade tacking left on immigration to win Latino votes, Rogé Karma writes. It may have cost them the White House—twice.

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Evening Read

The Celebrity Machine Never Dies

By Michael Waters

Humphrey Bogart—best known as the swaggering nightclub owner from Casablanca and the scotch-slinging private detective from The Maltese Falcon—has been dead since the 1950s. But his legacy is big business. As the face of a fountain pen, a Gucci sweatshirt, and formerly a gin brand, he’s also just one of many celebrities who have been resurrected to sell products.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

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• How Trump can win the peace in Ukraine
• The most hyped bot since ChatGPT
• Conor Friedersdorf: The problem with the government’s Pansexual Pride Day post

Culture Break

Examine. America can’t break its wellness habit, Shayla Love writes. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is the latest in a long lineage of Americans who have waged battle against conventional medicine.

Watch. A new adaptation of The Piano Lesson (streaming on Netflix) updates the playwright August Wilson’s convictions about how legacies are passed down through generations.

Play our daily crossword.

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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