There is a certain kind of person who cannot simply hold a job. This person also needs to flip a meme coin at midnight, license his face to a fragrance company, and sell pardons the way an airline upsells seat upgrades. In his first year back in office, that person made an estimated $2.2 billion, and almost none of it came from being president. It came from everything adjacent to being president.
The revenue streams keep multiplying. There are the crypto ventures, and the Truth Social trades that seem to know things before the market does, and the pardons that arrive with the tidy efficiency of a loyalty program.
Why chasing every hustle is the wrong fight
We could spend the next three years cataloguing every new moneymaker this White House invents, and some ethics watchdogs (not to mention a minority of Congress) have certainly tried. The trouble is that this approach is exhausting, and it is also the wrong fight. Ban one scheme on Monday and three more will appear by Thursday.
A growing coalition of nonpartisan reform groups has a better idea, and it is refreshingly simple. Instead of trying to name every hustle, just say that the president gets a salary, and that the salary is the entire compensation package. That’s it - no other business deals.
What the rule would actually look like
Under this approach there would be no outside income and no stock portfolio quietly padded by regulatory decisions. A president would divest before taking the oath, the same way every cabinet appointee already has to. When the term ends, that person is free to go make millions in peace. While in office, though, the job is to work for the country rather than for one’s self.
None of this is radical. If anything, it is wildly old-fashioned. Every senior government appointee already lives by some version of this rule, so all we are really asking is that the most powerful person in the country follow the same ethics standards as an assistant deputy secretary at the Department of Commerce. It is hardly revolutionary stuff.
Why Bright America is signing on
Bright America is joining this coalition because the case for it barely needs making. Voters across the spectrum, including plenty who voted for this president twice, are tired of watching public office get treated like a content monetization strategy. This is not a partisan grievance. It is a rule of law problem, and rule of law problems eventually become everyone’s problem.
Will this pass the current House? It will not, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling something, quite possibly a meme coin. Leadership that benefits from the current arrangement has no incentive to end it.
Writing rules for the next fifty years
Laws like this are not written for the next six months. They are written for the next fifty years, for the president after this one and the one after that, of any party, who looks at the norms we let collapse and decides to test how far they stretch. If we codify the rule now, while everyone can still remember why it mattered, we spare the next generation the trouble of relearning this lesson the hard way.
Rebuilding trust in government does not happen with a press release. It happens when the rules are simple enough that a ten-year-old could explain them and strict enough that no amount of clever lawyering can get around them. Salary in, side hustles out. That is the entire pitch.
We are in this for the long game. A brighter America is still worth building, one boring, unglamorous, overdue reform at a time.
What you can do right now
Ask the candidates running for U.S. House and Senate — including the incumbents — in your area if they support banning current and future presidents, regardless of party, from profiting off the presidency while in office. Their answers will be telling about what degree of corruption they’re willing to tolerate, particularly when it comes from their own party.
What about the emoluments clause?
While at it, what about tackling term limits for Congress, too?