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> Restructuring of Facebook stock trough the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. In the SEC filing it says that he can take a leave of absence from Facebook and still retain voting control of the company if he goes to work for the government.

It can't possibly be kosher for him to be President with this arrangement, can it? If Carter had to divest his peanut farm, why would we let a President retain a massive interest in the biggest media/marketing/surveillance platform in the country? It would make Berlusconi look like an amateur.

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Just a year ago I'd have thought it'd obviously land him in hot water, and probably get him impeached in short order if he refused to divest.

I no longer think that. Even massive, wholly overt corruption is apparently fine now. Along with a bunch of other stuff. There are no rules now as long as you can get elected, you're useful to one party or the other, and that party retains enough seats to block impeachment.

Berlusconi is precisely the kind of person who's in power now, and it's taking months of slow, grinding work to maybe, maybe catch him on something bad enough he can't ignore it, while he's plainly profiting from the office and hasn't attempted to avoid actual conflicts of interest, let alone the appearance of them, and that's not even the thing we're trying to throw him out over.

At the highest levels of American power, you can now openly be as corrupt as Berlusconi and... no one cares enough to do anything about it.

So yes, Zuck totally can. Which makes the prospect of his presidency all the more worrisome.

Republicans seem quite content with Trump billing the secret service to stay in his own hotels while protecting him, so I think that's your answer.

Yeah and Zuckerberg pays himself every time he uses Facebook, so are we going to make him delete his account?

If he were to win I think he would be pressured to structure some kind of trust that prevents him from leveraging Facebook's political power in conjunction with the government.

But in truth there is absolutely no way Facebook is not going to become his private political action committee. There's no way to separate the two.

He already partners with organizations like WaPo and Politifact to be 'fact-checkers', paying them large contracts I assume.

Once these groups determine something to be 'fake news' they are set up to censor as they see fit. Pretty smart if it wasn't so evil.

> Yeah and Zuckerberg pays himself every time he uses Facebook, so are we going to make him delete his account?

> If he were to win I think he would be pressured to structure some kind of trust that prevents him from leveraging Facebook's political power in conjunction with the government.

That's the point, isn't it? It's happening right now without consequence, so why should it be different then?

That's actually normal and has been in place for quite some time now.

What's normal, the president owning a hotel chain? Or taking so much holiday it breaks the secret service budget? http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/08/the-trumps-trav...

It is normal for a President to own a hotel chain. I didn't realize he's breaking some long-standing rule with that. Just because no previous President happened to own a hotel chain doesn't make it abnormal.

The holiday thing is something to complain over.

But...

Since the original statement of the Secret Service paying for property they make use of has absolutely nothing to do with either of your questions, I believe you are a bit misguided.

It is completely normal for the Secret Service to pay for usage of property and/or services during their duty. It has been in place for some time and payments have been made to numerous persons of both parties for years.

The complaint is not about the Secret Service paying for what they use. Of course they have to pay to stay in a hotel room.

The complaint is that money is going into Trump's bank account. It directly benefits him financially to go on vacations as often as possible when he stays at his own resorts, because he makes a cut off the tax dollars used to pay for his vacations.

Again, this is a long-standing protocol that many people over the years have benefited from within both parties. It is nothing new. People complaining about it today should be willing to condemn every single one of those that benefited from it. Of which, I never hear anyone doing that.

IIRC, there is a law/policy that the Secret Service has to pay the going rate for any accommodations or services they consume from businesses (which Trump's properties are).

Trump is kind of paving the way for this type of corporativism, no?

No.

Are you saying you disagree with the notion that it SHOULD be normalized, or are you disagreeing with the fact that he is doing it?

I'm disagreeing that he's doing it.

Although, I wouldn't mind it being explained to me how he is.

That is by far the biggest red flag for his political aspirations. I cannot even fathom the conflicts of interest, the potential to misuse/abuse Facebooks front page rankings, and the massive data and insight he would have access to.

The President and Vice President are exempted from conflict of interest laws. The reason for this is interesting -- the Constitution sets out the requirements for being president, so the concern was that the laws would be challenged as unconstitutional and invalidated entirely if they applied to POTUS.

Of course, at the time presidents were in the habit of divesting themselves of their conflicts.

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