“There’s no way that someone dealing with a Trump business doesn’t think, the guy behind the name is sitting in the White House,” said Veronique de Rugy, a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, who has long fought the Ex-Im Bank and the general issue of crony capitalism.
Writing in the Wall Street Journal’s opinion pages this week, conservative columnist Holman W. Jenkins Jr. said Trump’s administration could “swirl down a drain of cronyism.”
“Foreign and domestic business interests will be lining up to partner with the Trump children believing it buys favor with the Trump administration,” he wrote. “It can’t be otherwise on our human planet.”
Trump’s policy initiatives pose a second threat, de Rugy says, including an infrastructure spending push that could be steered toward the president’s friends or business associates. Ronald Klain, a former aide to President Obama, warned Democrats recently that Trump’s funding plan for infrastructure, which relies heavily on tax credits for private industry, would amount to “a massive corporate welfare plan for contractors.”
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