Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Conflicts of interest of President-elect Donald Trump


 * The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review).  No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was delete. Consensus is against a list dedicated to this topic at this point. This does not rule out including such material in appropriate articles about Donald Trump, subject to editorial consensus, and continued discussion about whether to create a spinoff article about his conflict of interest issues, should there be grounds to do so in the future.  Sandstein  18:20, 10 December 2016 (UTC)

Conflicts of interest of President-elect Donald Trump

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This appears to be a very WP:POV, WP:UNDUE piece, which also has elements of WP:COATRACK. I highly suggest a merge to a more appropriate Trump article if there is one. Parsley Man (talk) 05:43, 2 December 2016 (UTC)
 * Delete I agree with nom; this is heavily WP:POV and WP:UNDUE. Some of the topics in this article deserve coverage somewhere on Wikipedia, but building a list of every possible conflict of interest Trump might arguably have just comes across as an attack. - Iago Qnsi (talk) 06:32, 2 December 2016 (UTC)
 * Delete smear piece.--Kintetsubuffalo (talk) 11:35, 2 December 2016 (UTC)
 * Not sure - if we're going on the usual standards of notability, then this topic seems to be fairly well covered in the media.  etc. JMWt (talk) 11:59, 2 December 2016 (UTC)
 * Keep it is well covered by many reliable news sources - not POV or UNDUE because it's an unprecedented situation, which is what the news outlets are covering.. Victor Grigas (talk) 12:05, 2 December 2016 (UTC)
 * Parsley Man (talk) 12:13, 2 December 2016 (UTC)
 * @Parsley Man What I'm saying is that George W. Bush and other presidents never had articles like this, neither should Trump
 * @Parsley Man- thank you for noting.Victor Grigas (talk) 12:17, 2 December 2016 (UTC)
 * @Parsley Man Trump is not the first politician/American president to be accused of having numerous conflicts of interest MagicatthemovieS (talk) 19:53, 2 December 2016 (UTC)


 * Delete Certainly an important topic, and notable. However WP:NPOV and WP:BLP seem to be against this presentation of the issues. Especially when we get into things like the Bank of China renting office space in a Trump building.  Is there an article on the Trump transition process where this could be a section?  Note that there are no conflicts of interest yet, only that some people have raised concerns there might be when he becomes president.Kitfoxxe (talk) 13:55, 2 December 2016 (UTC)
 * The article should be titled "Potential conflicts of interest..." Kitfoxxe (talk) 13:57, 2 December 2016 (UTC)
 * I would change the title but that might be seen as a conflict of interest on my part. :-) Kitfoxxe (talk) 13:58, 2 December 2016 (UTC)
 * @Kitfoxxe I started a discussion on the talk page for the transition - Talk:Presidential_transition_of_Donald_Trump. This should be well discussed on the talk page I think, so that it's not an attack or in violation in any way. I didn't expect this page would be flagged as an attack page, my apologies to everyone for the extra headache.Victor Grigas (talk) 14:42, 3 December 2016 (UTC)
 * No problem about the "headache" whatsoever, wikipedia is supposed to take things slowly and carefully, with an eye to writing neutral history-of-everything-that-matters. The page-title is the root cause of the trouble:  within the topic-universe of Donald Trump, the president-elect thing is a modifier which is primarily chronological, aka only talk about stuff that pertains to him being the president-elect (and not stuff that pertains to his time in real estate or to his time in hollywood or to his time in pre-presidential political activism), but the kicker is the "conflicts of interest of" modifier which inherently says to talk about negative stuff (similar to a page-title like Trump Scandals or maybe Lies of Trump or similar such all-negative-all-the-time modifiers... compare with Awesome Things Trump Has Done and also Best Ideas of Donald Trump).  Better to intermix these factoids with the broader coverage of other things in his topic-universe, so that we give the reader a properly-weighted and properly-neutral perspective on the WHOLE of the material under discussion.  47.222.203.135 (talk) 15:13, 9 December 2016 (UTC)


 * Keep. Given the press coverage, I wouldn't call it undue or POV by itself. Ziko (talk) 16:43, 2 December 2016 (UTC)
 * @Ziko Just because a topic receives massive press coverage does not make it Wikipedia-worthy; if that were the case, every major event in Kim Kardashian's life would have its own Wikipedia article MagicatthemovieS (talk) 19:53, 2 December 2016 (UTC)


 * Delete seems to be nothing more than a selective list of Trump's business interests, whose selectivity was done on a basis of a speculation or causal mention in a small number of sources that in some day in the future / in some unspecified way / under some unspecified circumstances / etc., having those particular business interests might be a COI. For a COI to be real, actual COI circumstances have to have arisen, such as some person or organization connected to the issue involving the alleged COI stating that such and such is a COI. Tiptoethrutheminefield (talk) 17:13, 2 December 2016 (UTC)
 * Delete as a major WP:BLP violation. A political POV-pushing WP:COATRACK article is not something that this project needs. -- Millionsandbillions (talk) 18:51, 2 December 2016 (UTC)
 * Delete this is more of an attack ad than a good Wikipedia article.--MagicatthemovieS (talk) 19:50, 2 December 2016 (UTC)
 * Delete - Trump (as a businessman) had businesses around the world before he ran for president. Violates WP:BLP, especially when Trump isn't even the president. Yoshiman6464 (talk) 20:46, 3 December 2016 (UTC)
 * Merge While I'm not comfortable with inherently negative articles, there is enough well sourced material here to warrant a place in the main Donald Trump article, perhaps with some mitigating material included - there's a section there on sexual misconduct allegations - there should probably also be one for conflict of interest allegations, again given the extensive sourcing. Nwlaw63 (talk) 21:22, 3 December 2016 (UTC)
 * Delete/Merge - It is impossible for an article like this to be neutral, especially when it deals with recent, controversial events. However, some of the content might be appropriate for inclusion in other Trump-related articles. -- LWG talk 16:03, 5 December 2016 (UTC)
 * Delete - This is about the biggest POV piece of garbage I've ever seen, and in fact the only article I have ever seen on a politician's conflicts of interest; this just screams bias. While his alleged conflicts of interests have been reported a lot, they are not nearly enough to justify an article on it. Plus, the president is exempt from conflict of interest laws. SuperCarnivore591 (talk) 00:07, 7 December 2016 (UTC)
 * Merge Sourced Stuff Upstream. The portions of the content which are well-sourced ought to be (per WP:ATD-M and WP:DEL5) merged into places where it will not suffer from perceived non-neutrality.  Whilst it seems clear to me that good-faith user Victor Grigas did not intend to cause a headache (and clearly the topic *could* satisfy WP:GNG) the problem here is that the *segregation* of entirely negative content aimed at a specific individual into a *dedicated* article is inherently non-neutral.  (See the WP:CONTENTFORKING guideline which says that article-titles / article-topics should not be constructed so as to "avoid or highlight negative or positive viewpoints or facts... [a]ll POV forks are undesirable on Wikipedia, as they avoid consensus building....")  Some of the particulars in the article might also be non-encyclopedic, if they depend on weak sourcing, but there are at least three encyclopedic topics here that reliable sources are covering:  #1, topic nepotism e.g. children playing a role in the administration (suggest merging into an appropriate paragraph of Presidential transition of Donald Trump, with a sentence or two at List of Donald Trump political appointments, and iff needed eventually perhaps also into Presidency of Donald Trump; after upmerging, the perceived-as-negative factoids will thus be contextualized by the vast majority of the non-nepotism-appointees.  #2, topic of patronage e.g. major donors or supporters being given administration roles, again merge into those same articles.  #3, topic of the Foreign Emoluments Clause e.g. potential financial gain to the officeholder via foreign governments which the Constitution explicitly prohibits (this definitely belongs in Presidency of Donald Trump and likely deserves a dedicated subsection with a neutral title along the lines of Presidency of Donald Trump within the broader topic of foreign affairs, and concentrating on giving the historical context (Trump's campaign focus on the Clinton Foundation of course but I'm also talking about Martin Van Buren's gift of stallions from the sultan and other potus-conflicts) to show via context that this is a newfound twist on an old, old problem.  So as a specific criticism, currently the Conflicts of interest of President-elect Donald Trump article says that Trump owns stock in Goldman Sachs, but in our other Trump-articles we report that Trump owned stock in lots of businesses prior to selling it all off in June 2016, a month after securing the presumptive nominee title and a month prior to formally becoming the nominee.  Similarly, Trump is reportedly in the process of divesting his less-liquid business interests, an ongoing process that will likely not be finished in 2016, and we need to cover the chronology in one place, rather than bunching all the negative bits together into the COI-of-Trump fork.  #4, topic of personal lawsuits and such unrelated to broader encyclopedic concepts of presidential politics, but which are still historically relevant as the person in question is both a billionaire and a president, should be merged into Donald Trump and/or Legal affairs of Donald Trump (although that latter one sounds pretty non-neutral to my ears -- the title is 'better' but the content is still inherently all-negative).  I may be missing some other merge-targets (Donald Trump presidential campaign, 2016 for pre-transition conflicts of interest and The Trump Organization for post-inauguration business-related conflicts come to mind), but this should give a general idea of what I think makes sense.  Save the well-sourced content, but put it into existing broader-titled articles where it won't be a collection of negative-only-factoids, but rather a set of facts in correct context(s).  Finally, although wikipedia does not pay attention to precedent since common sense is preferred, delete *is* the usual result of this sort of thing, and some of the arguments held at one of the Hillary Clinton deletion-discussions touched on Trump content, if anyone cares to have a look.  47.222.203.135 (talk) 15:02, 9 December 2016 (UTC)
 * Strong Delete. Looks like a smear propaganda to me. Fails WP:NOTPROPAGANDA big time. Also fails WP:COATRACK...Rameshnta909 (talk) 20:21, 9 December 2016 (UTC)


 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.