Trump Says Kids Will Help Run His Company If He Wins Election

(Bloomberg) -- Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump said Thursday he’d cut ties to his company and have his children and executives run it if he wins the November election.

“I will sever connections and I’ll have my children and my executives run the company and I won’t discuss it with them. It’s just so unimportant compared to what we’re doing about making American great again,” the billionaire real-estate developer and TV personality said in a phone interview on Fox News.

“I would absolutely sever, I would have nothing to do with my company,” Trump added.

Prompting the questions was a Newsweek cover story published Wednesday examining the Trump Organization’s foreign business dealings. The story concluded that if Trump becomes president “and his family continues to receive any benefit from the company, during or even after his presidency, almost every foreign policy decision he makes will raise serious conflicts of interest and ethical quagmires.”

Of Trump’s five children, three of the adults -- Ivanka, Donald Jr., and Eric -- have taken on particular prominence in his campaign and have roles at the New York-based Trump Organization.

Trump was then asked, if sanctions were imposed on a foreign country that would hurt his business, whether he would “hesitate,” though it was unclear exactly what that meant or how Trump understood the question.

Trump responded that he would “absolutely get out in some form.”

“I wouldn’t want to be involved and then nobody else is able to. But I don’t think we have too many of those companies frankly.”

Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton responded to the Newsweek story by tweeting 20 questions at Trump about his foreign dealings and potential conflicts of interest, asking how much his foreign policy would be “dictated by potential financial benefits for” his partners.

Trump, who has sharply criticized companies including Ford Motor Co. that move operations out of the U.S., also said in the interview that the auto company may have recently confirmed it would move small-car production to Mexico “because they think I’m going to win and I’m going to stop them.”

To contact the reporter on this story: Ben Brody in Washington, D.C. at btenerellabr@bloomberg.net. To contact the editors responsible for this story: Elizabeth Titus at etitus2@bloomberg.net, Elizabeth Wasserman