Imagine, for a moment, that Hillary Clinton were president-elect. Imagine further that she announced that her daughter, Chelsea, was taking over the Clinton Foundation – but would sit in on the president-elect’s meetings, including with foreign leaders who might have dealings with the foundation. Imagine – and this one isn’t difficult – the howls you would hear from Republicans.

That is, roughly, a mirror image of how the Trump enterprise is behaving, except the case of the real president-elect is more worrying. More worrying because Donald Trump’s company is for-profit, unlike the Clinton Foundation, and far less transparent than the foundation about its dealings, including overseas. Yet Trump is resisting the only ethical solution – selling his properties and putting the proceeds in a blind trust. Instead, he says he will leave company management to his adult children – even as he involves those children intimately in setting up his new administration.

Blithe assurances from Trump’s associates that he will scrupulously follow the law are not reassuring, because – as Trump himself noted in his meeting with The New York Times on Tuesday – conflict-of-interest laws generally do not apply to the president. Some constitutional experts argue that if he does not divest he would be at risk of violating the Constitution’s emoluments clause, which bars U.S. officeholders from taking anything of value from foreign governments. Certainly he would subject the country to four years of unseemly mingling of personal and national interests, and himself to four years of distracting accusations and second-guessing.