I think Trump has accumulated enough fame, fortune, power, etc. that he is not interested in garnering more through his position as president. On the contrary, those are what got him to be the president. I think he now wants the challenge of running a country, testing his intelligence and knowledge against the impossible task of making the country prosperous, safe,, and respected abroad. I think that his ego and narcissism and desire to be "the best ever" would preclude his using his power for mere business success. Once you have enough material stuff, it's enough. I voted third party, not for Trump. Still, I think he is motivated by his sense of anger at government that has been corrupt and stupid and his sense that he can fix it.

When I was a New York State employee, I had to have permission to work a small part-time job. I actually had to have it approved by the ethics division. If they had disapproved my receiving a small amount of pay for this job, I offered to volunteer to do the job. They said that if I had been turned down to do the job, they could also turn me down to volunteer for the job. My NYS job was not and elected position; my outside job, which is six to seven hours per week, provides no conflict of interest at all. I have since retired from my NYS job and just do the small PT job.

And, just like every other person at my level, I had to file an extensive annual financial disclosure.

I was not the governor or a cabinet secretary, and yet, I was under that kind of scrutiny. But the chief executive of the entire United States does not have to report his potential conflicts of interest? My financial dealings pale by comparison; yet he is immune? He claims to care about the average American. What would he even know about what day-to-day issues the average American faces, vis-a-vis ethics? The people who voted for him are so uninformed about what even a conflict of interest is, and they seem to care even less. They have been conned by the epitome of a Barnum and Bailey sleight-of-hand Ponzzi schemer. The country will suffer immeasurably because of their nonchalance about these issues. Trump's lying hypocrisy and his liaison with Russia is incomprehensible to me.

There are likely hundreds of conflicts-of-interests associated with the many Trump business entities. What's most concerning is potential violations of the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution which prohibits the President from receiving "gifts" from foreign states.

I may be the only one who voted "No" -- 3% of the total votes.

There's a lot about Trump not to like if these were normal times, so I'm not sure that some need to stretch quite so far to demonize him on conflicts, which will be watched with gimlet eyes by every reporter on the planet looking for a byline.

But, of course, these aren't normal times -- if they were, the recent election would have been between Mrs. Clinton and Jeb Bush, and the likelihood is high that Jeb would have walked away with it. The times are decidedly ABnormal, with politics that for six out of the past eight years were frozen solid and immense middle-and-working-class cohorts that had been ignored utterly by the establishmentarians of BOTH parties.

Trump's bare win was a populist reaction to ALL that malaise. Yet the notion that he would blow this at 70 and billionaire status by seeking some kind of pecuniary benefit from his imminent office is patently absurd. He will dedicate himself to doing the very best he can for AMERICA, just as Barack Obama sought to do, just as Mrs. Clinton would have sought to do, just as EVERY president seeks to do.

But a lot don't remember how Ronald Reagan was reviled by the left for his entire time in office, and WISH they could forget the hosts of lifelong Democratic hard-hats screaming at the end "FOUR MORE YEARS!"

Trump's methods will be outré to most of us, but we elected him to shake things up, and you don't do that by same-ol'-same-ol'.

Give him his chance.

Absolutely not. As a lifetime Democratic voter who voted for Trump for the possibility of a complete outsider with no lobbyist puppet strings, with the promise of filling much of his administration with independently successful business people, I'm quite pleased.

And I hope the New York Times keeps the narrative concerning the Presidency objective, because I read the paper for the factual information, not interwoven conjecture.

The President-elect tells us he has been advised that there are no conflict of interest provisions that apply to the President. One has to wonder why. My best guess is that the Founders believed that no one elected to the highest office in the land would conflate personal and governmental interests. High-mindedness was assumed. That was then and this is now. There is every reason to question the morality of the President-elect. His lies to voters and to the American people are tools of his political methods. But his personal and professional history indicate a different and more powerful set of values. These all center on financial gain. What he understands best and cherishes most is money. His nominees for cabinet positions share this pattern with him. It is not realistic to predict that public values will benefit under his and their stewardship. They bear close watching. Congress needs to do this for us.

I'm not concerned about the money. I'm concerned about all the avenues that can and will be used to incur favor from a man driven to seek adulation. What country would stop a Trump real estate deal now? Who would choose a non-Trump property for an event?
I'm also concerned with the loss of a tradition of ethical standard. I don't thing Trump is going to divest anything; I think he will continue to run his businesses using the power of the POTUS for competitive advantage; and I think no law, short of impeachment, will stop him from doing anything he wants.

Mitt Romney was right when he stated that Donald Trump was a phoney and a fraud. We will never know the extent of Mr. Trump's conflicts because he will never release his tax returns and never provide the full detail of his business holdings. I predict four years of obfuscation and obstruction by the Trump team with no meaningful disclosure so that conflicts can even be identified. Conflicts of interest, however, pale in comparison to other issues on the horizon, including nuclear proliferation, global warming, and a tweeter with his finger on the nuclear trigger that threatens all of humanity. I pray that we are all still around to expose the emperor four years down the road.