The following commentary by the Washington Post Editorial Board was posted on their website July 27, 2018:
SET AGAINST other past and present items in President Trump’s bulging portfolio of legal problems — reported payoffs to a porn star and a former Playboy model; allegations of fraudinvolving his onetime university; charges that he defamed a woman who accused him of groping her; the ongoing criminal probe into Russia’s intervention on his behalf in the 2016 presidential election — the question of the Constitution’s emoluments clauses and whether he has violated them, is arcane. It seems a stretch to suppose that the president might be imperiled by a case that turns partly on definitions of the word “emolument” gleaned from 18th century dictionaries.
Or maybe not much of a stretch for anyone who has spent time in the lobby of the Trump International Hotel, a few blocks from the White House. There, to the tune of $40 million in revenue last year, it’s possible to glimpse just the sort of influence-peddling the framers may have intended to prohibit by those clauses.
The hotel has been the lodging of choice for an unknown (but not unknowable) number of state and foreign officials, some of whom, it is a fair bet, thereby hoped to curry favor with the president. According to the attorneys general of Maryland and the District of Columbia, both Democrats, who have sued to stop it, that favor-currying falls squarely within the “emoluments” the framers meant to forbid.