Forecast Lookback

Here's a look back at a filing from mid-November 2016, soon after Election Day. How much came true?

The Apprentice President

Will America become a Trump family business?

Naming his children to his transition team and planning to leave them in charge of his many business ventures, without the assurance of a blind trust, Donald Trump as President will effectively treat the United States government as a family business. 

The world has a name for that. It's called a monarchy.

For the second time in five presidential election cycles, the candidate who collected the most votes failed to win through to the Oval Office.

What a weird system.

But unless the Constitution is changed, that's the system we're stuck with.

Meanwhile, like a seaman apprentice new to a sailing ship, the newbie must rely on seasoned hands to show him the ropes among the sails, until he knows the rigging and can easily work the system.

There are many old hands in Congress, and it remains to be seen how well the apprentice President learns the ropes on Capitol Hill so he can guide the ship of state toward his preferred destination.

That assumes that all the Republican hands in Congress follow the new captain's orders and there is no mutiny from Democrats.

Trump has been used to getting his own way throughout his business career. When his ventures fail and go bankrupt, he has already paid himself well, draining wealth from the projects before letting them sink.

Now, however, it is not just one or several business ventures that could fall apart, but the entire country. And if he carries out his threats to cancel international trade agreements, anti-pollution efforts, health care programs, defense pacts, economic assistance plans and other government ventures, especially anti-pollution efforts to deal with climate change, the entire world may suffer.

But not the family business. As members of the transition team, his children will have access to top secret information about all the nation's activities even as they continue to operate all the aspects of the Trump business empire.

What's to stop them from using that information to pressure competitors -- both business and political -- into yielding to Trump interests at the expense of their own? And if Donald Trump as President continues even a semi-active part in the family business, that creates a conflict of interest dangerous to government and consumer interests as well as international relationships with other sovereign nations, both friendly and otherwise.

So unless the new President backs away from his family business ventures and sets up a truly blind trust -- one in which his family members have no part and he, at minimum, never participates in business discussions -- there will remain the suspicion and the very real danger that the United States of America is becoming a Trump family business.

America once was part of such an arrangement, but declared its independence from the family business in 1776.