President-Elect Taps Top Donors, Prominent Lobbyists To Set Up Administration
After campaigning against the power of special interests in Washington, President-elect Donald Trump has stacked his transition team with corporate lobbyists and major donors to his campaign.Â
Four of the 16 members of an executive committee on Trump’s transition team were top donors to his campaign, according to The Washington Post, and several prominent lobbyists will oversee the staffing of federal agencies in which their clients have a direct interest.Â
Moreover, Trump has scrapped ethics rules instituted by President Barack Obama in 2008 for his transition team. Those rules  barred lobbyists from contributing money to the transition or overseeing fields of policy in which they had lobbied in the previous year.Â
In addition to top donors and lobbyists, Trump has appointed his three oldest children to his transition executive committee, even though they’ll simultaneously be running his real estate empire through a “blind trust.”Â
Peter Wehner, who served in the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George Bush, told The New York Times that Trump “is failing the first test, and he should be held accountable for it.â€
“This whole idea that he was an outsider and going to destroy the political establishment and drain the swamp were the lines of a con man, and guess what — he is being exposed as just that,†Wehner said.
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