President Donald Trump rings New York Stock Exchange opening bell
Rarely does President Donald Trump evoke bipartisan applause while delivering a State of the Union address, but he inspired just such a moment last February -- when he called out former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi over her husband’s history of stock trading.
"As we ensure that all Americans can profit from a rising stock market, let's also make sure that members of Congress cannot corruptly profit from using insider information," said Trump as members of both parties stood to applaud.
While Republicans and Democrats in both houses have long invested in markets, with some banking huge profits from such dubious trades, it is Pelosi who has endured the most flak. Republican members named a bill to restrict Congressional stock trades after her: the Preventing Elected Leaders from Owning Securities and Investments or PELOSI Act. During that speech a smirking Trump urged the former Speaker to stand up and demanded that Congress “pass the Stop Insider Trading Act without delay.”
Yet neither that bill nor any other reform legislation would have stopped the eye-popping orgy of recent stock trades by none other than Trump himself, with thousands of individual market transactions on his account revealed this week in disclosure documents. A new filing with the Office of Government Ethics, released on May 14, showed more than 3500 specific trades in Trump’s name during the first quarter of 2026, with a value between $220 million and $750 million. represents by far the largest series of securities transactions by a sitting president in American history.
As one observer noted on X, that adds up to 60 trades per day, while he issues executive orders, talks with foreign leaders, shifts tariffs, and gives policy directives that directly affect the value of his holdings.
Former White House ethics counsel Richard Painter told Forbes magazine that he had researched the financial history of every preceding chief executive. “I don’t think we’ve had any president trade in the stock market.” Previous presidents had blind trusts with index funds, if they owned any stocks at all.
What outraged ethics experts was not just the volume of Trump’s market activity, but the obvious overlaps between his actions and policies and the equities that he bought and sold. Although it is impossible to determine exactly how much he may have profited from what looks suspiciously like insider trading – exactly the crime he accused the Pelosis of perpetrating – there can be little doubt that he has made millions.
Not long before he delivered that State of the Union slap at Pelosi, Trump bought somewhere between $1 million and $5 million in Dell Computers stock. Then on May 8, less than three months later, he gave a public speech at the White House where he urged “everyone” to “go out and buy and Dell,” driving the company’s stock to an all-time high. Since he bought Dell stock in February it has gone up a whopping 96 percent.
Around the same time, Trump bought a big chunk of Nvidia stock, just before that firm announced a big chip agreement with Meta,and then purchased still more Nvidia a week before the Commerce Department permitted the sale of the company’s chips to Saudi Arabia. Ironically, Nvidia was among the stocks whose purchase by Paul Pelosi provoked Republican outrage, which he later sold before its value rose astronomically.
Praising such companies as Palantir and Intel on his social media platform has similarly inflated their stocks after he bought chunks for his account.
Trump increased his Palantir holdings just as the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security were awarding billion-dollar contracts to the company, whose principal shareholder is the fascist-curious, Trump-backing billionaire Peter Thiel.
During the same period, Trump invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in Robinhood, the financial technology firm. News reports indicate that those purchases occurred as the Treasury Department named Robinhood as the brokerage and trustee for the federally funded “Trump Accounts” to be set up for American kids. Those children don’t stand to earn much, but never mind -- Trump will do very well.
The list of sleazy transactions goes on and on, with many more examples no doubt to be unearthed in months to come. The response from the White House and the Trump family echoes their usual “move along, nothing to see here” refrain. Don Junior recently complained that charges of rampant corruption against his father were “getting old.” And it is true that the crooked misconduct dates back to the first Trump administration; it is simply more widespread, more encompassing, and more brazen now.
At least it would be better if the family and the administration flacks could get their stories straight. Eric Trump says that his family’s stock holdings are exclusively in broad market indexes like the Schwab 1000, a claim belied by Trump’s own filings, which show thousands of individual trades. Meanwhile, a White House spokesman told Fortune that all of Trump’s assets are in a trust “managed by his children” with no conflicts of interest, another obvious contradiction.
The Trumps – and the Kushners, and many others associated with the First Family – have gaslighted the American public with such bogus “explanations” of their grift-gorging for many years. Everybody associated with the Trumps, including Cabinet officers such as Secretary of State Marco Rubio, have long known that the president is a crook. Out of cowardice and personal ambition they have turned away from challenging his self-enrichment. The public, too, has largely ignored Trump’s corruption, believing that “both parties do it,” and there is plainly some basis for that cynicism.
But the scale of Trump’s exploitation of public resources, his stealing with both hands, is exponentially worse than any theft previously perpetrated by Democrats or Republicans. At a time when voters expected this president to look out for their pocketbooks, he does nothing but stuff his own, plundering them and profiting hugely. Polls suggest that they have at last begun to notice – and don’t like what they see.
- America First? Corrupt Trump Family Business Sold Our National Security ›
- How Trump Scammed Investors In His Last Public Stock Offering ›
- 'Corruption': Trump's Support Of Prediction Markets Protects Family Investments ›
- As Markets Plunge, CNN Supercut Shows Trump Warning Of Crash (Unless He Won) ›
- Wall Street Deems Trump A Major Risk Factor As Markets Sink ›
- Are Trump's 3,642 Stock Trades in Q1 the Clearest Case for Banning Politicians From the Market? - 24/7 Wall St. ›
- Eric Trump Defends President’s Stock Trades Of Nvidia, Palantir, Meta And More ›
- Trump Bought Corporations’ Stock as His Administration Boosted Their Business ›
- Here’s What Stocks Donald Trump Traded So Far This Year ›
- Trump misses deadline to disclose tens of millions of dollars in stock trades - The Washington Post ›
- Trump ethics filing reveals thousands of trades tied to U.S. stocks ›
- How Trump’s ‘unusual’ brokerage account traded around his own market-moving decisions—selling hyperscalers and buying energy stocks during the war | Fortune ›
Start your day with National Memo Newsletter
Know first.
The opinions that matter. Delivered to your inbox every morning
