title:  George Takei NAILS Republican Hypocrisy On Trump’s Conflicts Of Interest With A Single Fact
text: Donald Trump insists that he doesn t have to divest or sell his business empire to be president, but George Takei strongly disagrees.Throughout the campaign and ever since the election, Trump has been repeatedly criticized for desperately trying to hold on to his company.You see, past presidents have sought to avoid conflicts of interest by selling their businesses or putting them in a blind trust so that whatever decisions they make as president are for the good of the country instead of being for the profit of their business.But Trump not only wants to keep his business in the family while serving as president, he has openly used his status as president-elect to do business. For instance, Trump met with the leader of Japan and invited his daughter Ivanka to sit in.As Newsweek pointed out in a damning report on Trump s conflicts of interest, At the same time, officials with her clothing company were working on a licensing agreement with Sanei International. The largest shareholder of Sanei s parent company is the Development Bank of Japan, which is wholly owned by the Japanese government Trump s company is also seeking to build hotels in Taiwan at the same time Trump broke decades of policy to make a phone call to the Taiwanese president.The Trump Organization is also building projects in the Philippines, which is why Trump is getting cozy with Rodrigo Duterte despite the fact that he is committing human rights atrocities against the Filipino people.The list goes on, but it s clear just from these few examples that Trump is going to put his business interests ahead of the best interests of the country.Thus far, Republicans have ignored Trump s major conflicts of interest and seem to have no problem with Trump using the presidency for personal gain. Senate Democrats are proposing a bill that would force Trump to divest, but the GOP will almost certainly block it. Of course, if President Obama had been the owner of a business upon winning in 2008, Republicans would have initiated round after round of investigations. They would have turned it into a huge scandal.We know this because Republicans did exactly that to another beloved Democratic president. George Takei knows it, too, so he called out Republican hypocrisy by posting about it on Twitter.Remember when Jimmy Carter sold his peanut farm to avoid the appearance of conflict of interest, and the GOP investigated for 6 mos anyway?  George Takei (@GeorgeTakei) December 18, 2016Indeed, Jimmy Carter built that peanut business from scratch and it meant a lot to him but he parted with it anyway to guarantee that there would not be a conflict of interest during his presidency.What happened next was disgraceful as Republicans STILL brought in a special prosecutor and persecuted Carter for six months in a desperate effort to find a scandal. They found nothing.So this is how Republicans treat Democrats versus how they are treating Trump now, and Trump s business has done many shady things over the years that would likely get Trump impeached if a special prosecutor were to be brought in to investigate. But Republicans won t do that because they are dirty hypocrites who think the law and precedent don t apply to them.Donald Trump must be forced to divest or sell his business no matter what excuse or promise he makes. The presidency is too sacred and too important to risk tainted with conflicts of interest that are sure to become huge scandals over the next four years. Hell, Trump isn t even president yet and he is already demonstrating that he intends to use the office to pursue business deals for his company even it doing so violates or destroys American foreign policy or puts our national security in jeopardy.As Takei later wrote,The problem with conflict of interest isn t that Trump might make more money. It s that his decisions actually might be guided by that goal.  George Takei (@GeorgeTakei) December 18, 2016If Republicans allow Trump to do this, they can no longer whine if a Democrat does the same thing. In fact, Republicans should not be allowed to pursue investigations against any Democrat ever again if they let Trump flout our Constitution and decades of precedent. The presidency is not a corporate office created to make personal business deals. It s the office of the American people created to do what is in the best interests of our nation as a whole. By not selling or divesting, Trump is demonstrating that he only cares about himself.Featured image via Slaven Vlasic/Getty Images