The Ruse of Blind Trusts

Despite calling them an “age-old ruse” in his 1994 U.S. Senate campaign, Mitt Romney now assures voters that a “blind trust” gives him no control over his assets.

Todd Purdum looks at the history of blind trusts in politics — first used by President Lyndon Johnson — and notes Barack Obama set one up when first elected to the U.S. Senate “but sold all of his stocks and closed the trust because he decided that even such an arrangement could not protect him from the appearance of a conflict.”

But the blind trust “has another enduring meaning in American politics, a sarcastic one coined by Garry Trudeau in 1984, when, in his comic strip Doonesbury, he accused then vice president George H. W. Bush of depositing his manhood in one. The slam stung — and stuck — which is something Mitt Romney would do well to remember as he charts his investment in the presidency.”