Hey, history lovers. I'm Mike Rosenwald with Retropod, a show about the past, rediscovered.

If you follow politics, you might have heard a very hard-to-pronounce word that's been repeated over and over again recently.

Emoluments

Where does this word come from? The U.S. Constitution. And in that sacred document

as a clause, the so-called emoluments clause, and it states American officials cannot accept gifts or income from foreign governments.

The founding fathers saw the foreign amoluments Clause as a key defense against other nations

corrupting their new country.

Seems reasonable.

So here's why you've been hearing that word a lot, emoluments.

President Trump is facing three lawsuits concerning whether the Trump

organization's business dealings with foreign governments, including diplomats who have stayed at

Trump International Hotel, not far from the White House, violate the foreign emoluments clause.

While you may not have heard this term until recently, the clause is as old as American

history, and it's what has stopped many officials from accepting some really lavish gifts.

Like in 1830, Congress wouldn't let Andrew Jackson keep a gold medal given to him by the President of Columbia.

And just listen to some other gifts.

Abraham Lincoln had to reject from the King of Siam a sword, two elephant tusks, and pictures of the king and his daughter.

Congress ordered Lincoln to deposit those gifts with

the Interior Department. And he did, you know, honest Abe and all. But it wasn't Lincoln who had

to deal with what became the biggest emolument scandal of the 1800s. It was our eighth

president, Martin Van Buren.

In the summer of 1839, at the American consulate in Tangier,

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