In an interview with Forbes published Friday, Eric Trump described the setup as “kind of a clear separation of church and state that we maintain.”
“I am deadly serious about that exercise,” he said. “I do not talk about the government with him, and he does not talk about the business with us. That’s kind of a steadfast pact we made, and it’s something that we honor.”
But nearly two minutes later, Trump admitted that he will keep his father up to speed on some aspects of the business.
“Yeah, on the bottom line, profitability reports and stuff like that, but you know, that’s about it,” he said, adding that the updates will be “probably quarterly.”
“My father and I are very close,” he said. “I talk to him a lot. We’re pretty inseparable.”
.. “He is breaking down one of the few barriers he claimed to be establishing between him and his businesses, and those barriers themselves were weak to begin with. But if he is now going to get reports from his son about the businesses, then he really isn’t separate in any real way.”
.. “From a business standpoint, is the presidency beneficial?
.. “I would say that we also made great sacrifices and that the business made great sacrifices in that when you limit an international business to only domestic properties, when you put hundreds of millions of dollars of cash into a campaign, when you run with very, very tight and strict rules and the things that we do every single day in terms of compliance — I don’t know. You could look at it either way.”