Donald Trump meets Kanye West at Trump Tower — hours after canceling a presser on his business

President-elect Donald Trump met with rapper Kanye West at Trump Tower Tuesday morning, and the two briefly greeted reporters afterward.

Trump also announced Monday night that he was canceling a planned press conference on how he aims to extricate himself from his business empire while in office.

The extent of the potential conflicts of interest Trump faces is mind-boggling, as Libby Nelson has written. They span from his many projects in at least 17 other countries to the vast amount of money he owes Deutsche Bank to the labor and regulatory issues affecting his operations in the US and beyond. Foreign countries are already trying to curry favor with the president-elect by patronizing his US businesses or helping his foreign businesses with permit issues.

Trump’s plan to address this — leaving the business in the hands of his children and executives — seemed comically inadequate, since letting his children run the business is hardly a “blind” trust separating him from involvement or knowledge of the business’s actions, and since the very visible nature of Trump’s businesses will ensure the president-elect is well aware of many of their activities.

Furthermore, Trump has long refused to publicly release his tax returns, and has given a nonsensical justification for refusing to do so — so we still lack a clear picture of where his money is and how he might be influenced.

After a rash of negative press coverage on this topic, Trump promised to hold a “major news conference on December 15 to discuss the fact that I will be leaving my great business in total in order to fully focus on running the country in order to MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”

But on Monday night, Bloomberg Politics reported that Trump would cancel the press conference, likely pushing it back into January. Trump later obliquely confirmed this on Twitter, repeating again his vague plan to leave his businesses in his children’s hands and saying he would hold “a press conference in the near future to discuss the business, Cabinet picks and all other topics of interest. Busy times!”

There is no longer a specific date for this press conference, and it will likely be pushed until after the Electoral College casts the votes that will technically make Trump president on December 19.

Naturally, it would make sense that Trump wanted to hand the press a shiny object to distract from all this. The meeting with Kanye soon ensued.