Morning Agenda: Big Promises and Family Businesses

CreditCreditKevin Hagen for The New York Times

Chaos continues to swirl around the Trump administration.

Anxiety is particularly focused on the National Security Council, where staff members read President Trump’s Twitter posts in the morning and struggle to make policy to fit them.

The job of the national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn, is also hanging in the balance.

Investigators are examining what he told the Russian ambassador to the United States about the lifting of sanctions imposed in the final days of the Obama administration.

At the same time, the economic cabinet is mostly empty, making Gary Cohn, the director of the National Economic Council, the go-to figure on jobs, business and growth. Mr. Cohn has been tasked with regulatory relief and managing tax reforms, improving infrastructure and helping revamp the Affordable Care Act.

While positions on the cabinet are waiting to be filled, Asia’s biggest deal makers have been trooping over to make big promises to Mr. Trump.

It is partly because they identify with Mr. Trump’s way of doing business.

“It plays directly into their style,” said Alberto Moel, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein. “These guys are political animals. They live in Asia, where things are different. There’s more autocracy and more connected transactions. In the U.S., people still expect things to be fair.”

The Asian executives also have plenty at stake — they come from a region that Mr. Trump has accused of using unfair trade practices and stealing jobs.

American firms, by contrast, have made largely symbolic or modest promises to keep a small number of jobs in the United States.

And some are facing defiance from their own employees over Mr. Trump’s executive order on immigration. Workers are agitating for an explicit corporate morality even as Mr. Trump considers signing another executive order on immigration.

Here’s a conundrum: How do you run a business built entirely off the brand of a man whom you’ve promised to distance yourself from?

This is the task facing Eric and Donald Trump Jr. as they assume control of their father’s empire.

And the answer for them, it seems, is to forge ahead.

They are expanding the Trump Organization’s footprint, both overseas and in the United States, while insisting that they have taken sufficient steps to avoid conflicts of interest.

It was laughable, Don Jr. said, to suggest that their father was using the presidency as a way to enhance family profits. And anyway, the family would face heat whatever it did.

The brothers also maintain that their father was right to wade into a dust-up over Nordstrom’s decision to stop selling their sister’s clothing line.

“He’s Papa Bear,” Eric said.

• Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada meets with Mr. Trump. The two leaders are expected to discuss trade and Mr. Trump’s decision to conditionally approve the Keystone XL oil pipeline.

• The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries publishes members’ oil output numbers for January. Producers agreed to cuts in production late last year with the aim of propping up prices, and members are expected to have made the agreed trims.

Follow Amie Tsang on Twitter @amietsang.