Donald Trump reaped US$5.5 million from China and its state entities during presidency: US House report

China far and away led countries in making such payments, with the total from foreign entities tied to 20 countries reaching US$7.8 million, according to the report.

“It is true that US$7.8 million is almost certainly only a fraction of Trump’s harvest of unlawful foreign state money, but this figure in itself is a scandal and a decisive spur to action,” wrote Jamie Raskin, Democratic congressman of Maryland and the oversight committee’s ranking member, in the report’s foreword.

The former Republican president violated the US Constitution when his businesses accepted these payments without the consent of Congress, the report stated, citing the emoluments clause of the Constitution.

“These countries spent – often lavishly – on apartments and hotel stays at Donald Trump’s properties – personally enriching President Trump while he made foreign policy decisions connected to their policy agendas with far-reaching ramifications for the United States,” the report said.

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It accused Trump of failing to disclose such payments to Congress as other presidents have done, and actively preventing Congress from obtaining information about them.

A businessman before his election to the White House in 2016, Trump broke with American precedent and neither divested from his businesses nor put them into a blind trust after becoming president.

Following the 2016 election, Congress started looking into Trump’s possible conflicts of interests and his potential constitutional violations.

The investigation led to a court dispute that ended in a settlement in 2022. Soon thereafter, Trump’s accounting firm, Mazars, began producing the requested documents that formed the basis of Thursday’s report.

Democrats on the oversight committee also accused the former president of warming up to Chinese President Xi Jinping in bilateral meetings and claimed that the ability of the Trump family business to secure trademarks in China improved “markedly and rapidly” after he entered office.

The 156-page report found Donald Trump’s businesses received at least US$7.8 million from foreign governments during his presidency, most of it from China.

In findings that identify spending by foreign governments and entities at Trump-owned properties “all in violation of the Constitution’s Foreign Emoluments Clause”, the report documents conduct that Republicans now accuse President Joe Biden of in their impeachment inquiry.

The report further recommended that Congress toughen requirements for a US president to notify the body of emoluments.

The committee’s Republican chairman, James Comer of Kentucky, dismissed the report’s findings.

“It’s beyond parody that Democrats continue their obsession with former President Trump,” Comer said in a statement to Reuters. “Former President Trump has legitimate businesses but the Bidens do not.”

Trump leads polling in the 2024 Republican nomination race and appears likely to face off against Biden in a rematch of the 2020 election.

South China Morning Post