The oldest temptation in public life

I am told — as the NPR report has it — that President Trump's financial disclosure documents show earnings exceeding one billion dollars from cryptocurrency businesses, and that a former White House ethics lawyer, Richard Painter, has been called upon to comment on what that figure means for the Republic. I cannot speak to the mechanics of digital currency; I freely confess ignorance there. But I know something about the temptation that attaches itself to high office, and I know that a republic does not survive it without vigilance.

The danger is not new. It was old when our compact was written. The moment a person charged with the public trust begins to accumulate private wealth through instruments that his own decisions can move — through policy, through regulation withheld or extended, through the sheer gravitational pull of the presidency itself — the public interest and the private interest become impossible to untangle. The citizen cannot know which master is being served. That uncertainty, allowed to fester, is corrosive to the very idea of self-government.

When I left office, I returned to private life and to my farm. That was not modesty alone; it was a statement about the nature of the office. The presidency belongs to the people who confer it. It is held in trust. A trustee who enriches himself from the estate he administers has broken faith with those who placed the estate in his care — regardless of whether any single transaction can be proven corrupt. The appearance of a conflict is itself a wound to public confidence, and public confidence is the foundation on which the whole structure rests.

Mr. Painter, as reported by NPR, has raised exactly these concerns in the language of our own ethics law. I cannot evaluate the legal specifics — those belong to lawyers and to courts. What I can say, with the full weight of what I learned across eight years in the executive chair, is this: the law alone is never sufficient. Law sets the floor. Character, and the willingness of a citizenry to demand character, must set the ceiling. When we rely entirely on statute to restrain the ambitions of the powerful, we have already conceded more ground than we can afford.

I would also counsel those who would make this a purely partisan matter to stop and reconsider. The precedent being set here does not belong to one faction. A precedent once established becomes available to every successor, of every party, in every future administration. The question of whether a sitting president may profit enormously from industries touched by his own regulatory and diplomatic power is not a Republican question or a Democratic question. It is a constitutional question. And constitutional questions, answered carelessly in one era, bind all the eras that follow.

My counsel, then, is this: the citizens and their elected representatives in the legislative branch — the branch I served under before I commanded armies, and the branch I always understood to be the first expression of the people's will — must insist on transparency that is not merely formal but substantive. Disclosure is only the beginning of accountability, not its end. The Republic deserves to know, with clarity and without ambiguity, whose interests are advanced when the most powerful office on earth makes its decisions.