It’s been less than ten days since President Elect Donald Trump won the presidential election, and according to Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, the 45th and soon-to-be 47th president is already breaking the law.
Trump and his team have been picking cabinet members lately, albeit slowly. So far, he’s tapped Susie Wiles as his chief of staff, Mike Waltz as his national security adviser, Gov. Kristi Noem (the dog shooting lady) as the homeland security secretary, and former Gov. Mike Huckabee as U.S. ambassador to Israel, to name a few notables.
Oh, and to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, Trump selected one of the most qualified climate protectors around. Just kidding, he would never do that. He picked New York Rep. Lee Zeldin, who shockingly has little experience in the field. Zeldin, a Trump loyalist, is expected to usher in a “radical” rollback of regulations regarding the climate. Yay.
If you’ve noticed that Trump seems to be hiring his buddies, so has Warren. She recently posted on X that Trump was already doing things he wasn’t supposed to be doing.
She said that when presidents are elected, they’re supposed to sign an ethics agreement that would prevent conflicts of interests, like oh, stacking your cabinet with your buddies. How does she know? Because she “wrote the law.”
That pledge to be ethical is included as part of the Presidential Transition Act. Trump not signing that means multiple other agreements for transition are currently in limbo. Per the act, the incoming team and the outgoing one are supposed to sign agreements so they can transfer over things like national security information and important documents.
Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) wrote a letter to Trump’s team last month that if Trump didn’t sign the agreements, it could affect the transfer of power in a negative way.
“Breaking the precedent set by every other presidential candidate since 2010, you have rejected these resources and refused to commit to a smooth transition,” Raskin said.
Raskin went on to say that the Trump team have intentionally not signed the agreements to get around certain fundraising and ethics rules. According to the law, candidates are not allowed to accept over $5,000 from anyone during the transition.
“It appears your decision may be at least partially driven by your intent to circumvent fundraising rules that put limits on private contributions on the transition effort and require public reporting,” Raskin wrote. “You may also be acting out of a more general aversion to ethics rules designed to prevent conflicts of interest in the incoming administration.”
As for Warren, this has been an issue since the first Trump administration back in 2016. When she was running for president in 2020, Warren talked about how Trump failed to confirm almost a third of “key government posts,” and of the ones he did fill, he stacked them with “with lobbyists, campaign donors, and cronies.”
After he took office, she said, “thirty-eight percent of those he picked for high-level government jobs were donors.” It looks like we’re going to get a lot more of that this go around.