Sales of Ivanka Trump's merchandise enjoyed a massive increase in sales after Kellyanne Conway hawked it from the White House on national TV, new statistics show.
The stats, which come from online marketplace Lyst, show sales for February 9 - the day Conway promoted the items - up by 10,700 per cent on the same date the previous year.
The new information comes on the same day that it emerged that Ivanka was given three trademarks in China, where sales of her products have skyrocketed, the same day that she met the Chinese president.
That has inevitably lead to complaints that she is exploiting her position to benefit her business.
“The stars have all aligned,” Eric Trump, who is Donald Trump’s son and executive vice president of the Trump Organization in charge of golf properties, told The New York Times. “I think our brand is the hottest it has ever been.”
As reporters Eric Lipton and Susanne Craig note, there are reasons for that, too. The Trump Organization has an extremely visible surrogate in the president, who continues to patronize Trump golf courses, from New Jersey to Florida. He also appeared, for example, on the cover of Golf Digest as “Golfer in Chief,” a nifty bit of marketing for Trump links.
Eric Trump told the Times that this was no different than the positive economic benefits that accrued to Crawford, Texas, when President George W. Bush visited his ranch there. But of course that analogy would only make sense if Bush had been the owner of the town of Crawford and stood to personally benefit from it, which he was not and did not.
Eric Trump then offered the paper a second defense, that the president is inextricable from his business interests, just the situation that conflict-of-interest rules are designed to answer. But the Trump family has in effect refused to reckon with those rules. Ostensibly, Donald Trump has stepped back from his businesses and turned them over to his children Eric and Donald Jr., as part of a plan to answer concerns about conflicts of interest. He claims that he will not speak to his sons about his business empire while in office. (Eric Trump posted a picture of himself at the White House Thursday, but you’ll have to take the Trump family’s word that business wasn’t discussed.
Some analysts were warning from the start of the campaign that Trump was running for president as a publicity stunt; once he won the presidency, ethics experts warned that he could use the presidency as a tool of self-enrichment, turning the White House into the headquarters of the Trump business empire.
First Lady Melania Trump on Monday revealed that she had intended to leverage the presidency into a lucrative venture for herself, with plans to establish "multimillion dollar business relationships" during her time as "one of the most photographed women in the world."
An attorney for the first lady filed a lawsuit arguing that Trump had missed out on a "once in a lifetime" opportunity to grab up "licensing, branding, and endorsement" deals because of a Daily Mail article that alleged she had once worked for an escort service.
The Washington Post reports:
The suit—filed Monday in New York Supreme Court, a state trial court, in Manhattan—against Mail Media, the owner of the Daily Mail, said the article published by the Daily Mail and its online division last August caused Trump's brand, Melania, to lose "significant value" as well as "major business opportunities that were otherwise available to her." The suit said the article had damaged her "unique, once in a lifetime opportunity" to "launch a broad-based commercial brand."
"These product categories would have included, among other things, apparel accessories, shoes, jewelry, cosmetics, hair care, skin care, and fragrance," according to the lawsuit, which was filed on Trump's behalf by California attorney Charles Harder.
It didn’t take long for Donald Trump to begin using the presidency for profit. Even before he was sworn in, his eldest sons were travelling the globe flanked with Secret Service details that doubled as sales props for the family business. His wife, Melania, has remained behind in New York City, a decision that means the U.S. government is now almost certainly a paying tenant in a building owned by the president. His White House advisers have served as TV pitch-people for Trump-branded products on more than one occasion. And all the while, Trump himself has used every free moment he has—and some he doesn’t—to raise the profile of his family’s real estate portfolio, from his hotel in Washington, D.C., to his private club in Palm Beach, Florida.
But while it’s important to keep an eye on the long con Trump is playing, let’s not forget about the more straightforward grift he has been running ever since he first stepped off a Trump Tower escalator and onto the main political stage nearly two years ago. Via the Wall Street Journal:
The new reports, filed late Friday with the Federal Election Commission, showed that Mr. Trump’s campaign directed more than 6% of the $6.3 million it spent in the first three months of 2017 to the president’s companies, including $274,013 in rent to Trump Tower, $58,685 for lodging to the Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Fla., and $13,828 for facility rental and catering to the Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas.
This is just more of the same from Candidate Trump. During the 2016 election, his campaign and the Republican National Committee combined to send more than $14 million to Trump family-owned businesses and to reimburse the Trump family for travel. The latest FEC filings suggests the president has no intention of giving up the lucrative revenue stream for his family even now that he’s found other streams to tap from within the White House.
The stats, which come from online marketplace Lyst, show sales for February 9 - the day Conway promoted the items - up by 10,700 per cent on the same date the previous year.
The new information comes on the same day that it emerged that Ivanka was given three trademarks in China, where sales of her products have skyrocketed, the same day that she met the Chinese president.
That has inevitably lead to complaints that she is exploiting her position to benefit her business.
“The stars have all aligned,” Eric Trump, who is Donald Trump’s son and executive vice president of the Trump Organization in charge of golf properties, told The New York Times. “I think our brand is the hottest it has ever been.”
As reporters Eric Lipton and Susanne Craig note, there are reasons for that, too. The Trump Organization has an extremely visible surrogate in the president, who continues to patronize Trump golf courses, from New Jersey to Florida. He also appeared, for example, on the cover of Golf Digest as “Golfer in Chief,” a nifty bit of marketing for Trump links.
Eric Trump told the Times that this was no different than the positive economic benefits that accrued to Crawford, Texas, when President George W. Bush visited his ranch there. But of course that analogy would only make sense if Bush had been the owner of the town of Crawford and stood to personally benefit from it, which he was not and did not.
Eric Trump then offered the paper a second defense, that the president is inextricable from his business interests, just the situation that conflict-of-interest rules are designed to answer. But the Trump family has in effect refused to reckon with those rules. Ostensibly, Donald Trump has stepped back from his businesses and turned them over to his children Eric and Donald Jr., as part of a plan to answer concerns about conflicts of interest. He claims that he will not speak to his sons about his business empire while in office. (Eric Trump posted a picture of himself at the White House Thursday, but you’ll have to take the Trump family’s word that business wasn’t discussed.
Some analysts were warning from the start of the campaign that Trump was running for president as a publicity stunt; once he won the presidency, ethics experts warned that he could use the presidency as a tool of self-enrichment, turning the White House into the headquarters of the Trump business empire.
First Lady Melania Trump on Monday revealed that she had intended to leverage the presidency into a lucrative venture for herself, with plans to establish "multimillion dollar business relationships" during her time as "one of the most photographed women in the world."
An attorney for the first lady filed a lawsuit arguing that Trump had missed out on a "once in a lifetime" opportunity to grab up "licensing, branding, and endorsement" deals because of a Daily Mail article that alleged she had once worked for an escort service.
The Washington Post reports:
The suit—filed Monday in New York Supreme Court, a state trial court, in Manhattan—against Mail Media, the owner of the Daily Mail, said the article published by the Daily Mail and its online division last August caused Trump's brand, Melania, to lose "significant value" as well as "major business opportunities that were otherwise available to her." The suit said the article had damaged her "unique, once in a lifetime opportunity" to "launch a broad-based commercial brand."
"These product categories would have included, among other things, apparel accessories, shoes, jewelry, cosmetics, hair care, skin care, and fragrance," according to the lawsuit, which was filed on Trump's behalf by California attorney Charles Harder.
It didn’t take long for Donald Trump to begin using the presidency for profit. Even before he was sworn in, his eldest sons were travelling the globe flanked with Secret Service details that doubled as sales props for the family business. His wife, Melania, has remained behind in New York City, a decision that means the U.S. government is now almost certainly a paying tenant in a building owned by the president. His White House advisers have served as TV pitch-people for Trump-branded products on more than one occasion. And all the while, Trump himself has used every free moment he has—and some he doesn’t—to raise the profile of his family’s real estate portfolio, from his hotel in Washington, D.C., to his private club in Palm Beach, Florida.
But while it’s important to keep an eye on the long con Trump is playing, let’s not forget about the more straightforward grift he has been running ever since he first stepped off a Trump Tower escalator and onto the main political stage nearly two years ago. Via the Wall Street Journal:
The new reports, filed late Friday with the Federal Election Commission, showed that Mr. Trump’s campaign directed more than 6% of the $6.3 million it spent in the first three months of 2017 to the president’s companies, including $274,013 in rent to Trump Tower, $58,685 for lodging to the Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Fla., and $13,828 for facility rental and catering to the Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas.
This is just more of the same from Candidate Trump. During the 2016 election, his campaign and the Republican National Committee combined to send more than $14 million to Trump family-owned businesses and to reimburse the Trump family for travel. The latest FEC filings suggests the president has no intention of giving up the lucrative revenue stream for his family even now that he’s found other streams to tap from within the White House.