Donald Trump Is The Unabashed King Of Insider Trading

 

Donald Trump has said the members of Congress should not be allowed to trade stocks while in office. But now we learn that Trump has traded more stocks in the first 17 months of his second term than all of the members of Congress combined.

Trump supporters try to defend Trump's stock trades by saying they are done by a third party and Trump has nothing to do with them. If you believe that, then I have some oceanfront property in the Texas Panhandle I'll see real cheap.

Donald Trump has always been a micro-manager. Nothing happens in his businesses or his administration that he does not know about and approve. I don't doubt that Trump himself does not call his brokers and tell them what he's about to do. But that doesn't mean he's not still in control. It would be very easy for a member of his family or trusted staff to slip a note to them about what stocks it would be smart to buy or sell (because of impending actions by the president).

We've known for a while now that Trump is corrupt on a massive scale. Now we learn he is the King of insider trading. His corruption knows no boundaries.

There should be a law preventing members of Congress (and their government paid staff) from buying and selling on the stock market. But that law should include the president, and any of his staff that receive a government check. 

Corruption is corruption - whether done by Congress or the executive branch.

Trump Wants To Fatten His Bank Account By Selling Insider Trading Info

Trump has come up with a new scheme (probably illegal) to make himself richer. Robert Reich explains:

Starting August 1, Trump Media and Technology Group will launch a new data feed aimed at high-frequency trading firms whose profits are made by making trades a fraction of a second faster than everyone else. 

It will provide “licensed, real-time access to posts from the highest-ranking Truth Social accounts.” In other words, the feed will let you know what Trump has said before anyone else knows, meaning it’s well worth the tab that Truth Social will charge to see Trump’s posts before the rest of the public sees them — up to $100,000 per month.

That’s a pittance relative to what could be made, because Trump’s words on Truth Social — about his war in Iran, about his latest tariffs, about the Fed — have caused the stock market to soar or drop. So, if you’re a trader on Wall Street, you’ll make millions if you know what he’s posting a fraction of a second before everyone else knows. Perhaps more to the point, if you’re behind on that news, “you’ll get crushed,” as one hedge-fund executive told the Financial Times. 

No wonder Trump Media’s interim CEO Kevin McGurn is gloating that the feed will “become a meaningful, ongoing source of revenue for the company, creating lasting value for shareholders.” Trump Media has been unprofitable until now. 

Trump, of course, is the company’s largest shareholder.

 

The scheme is Trump’s most brazen way to illegally profit off his presidency and enrich his Wall Street insider friends. 

I say illegally because the Constitution lists “bribery” as a reason to remove a president from office, and the federal ban on bribing public officials also expressly applies to a president. (Whether these provisions can be enforced against a president who’s been given blanket immunity from “official acts” by the Supreme Court is another matter.)

The good news, though, is Americans are catching on to insider trading, and they hate it — so much so that House Republican leaders are now teeing up a vote this week on a bill that would create new guardrails for lawmakers trading stocks.

 

The “Stop Insider Trading Act” would bar members of Congress and their families from purchasing new shares of stock and require them to file a notice of their plans to sell shares at least seven days ahead of time. 

Most Democrats say the measure doesn’t go far enough because it allows members to keep shares of stock they already own, in contrast with a competing bipartisan proposal that bars members from trading individual shares of stock altogether. And one provision Republicans have snuck into the measure —and that must be removed if they want any Democratic votes — deters mail-in voting. 

The point is that at the same time Trump is rolling out a new tool to give traders more immediate access to his market-moving posts on Truth Social — if they’ll pay him up to $100,000 a month for it — Congress is limiting how members can profit from inside information they obtain through elected office. 

The American public is so disgusted by corruption in Washington that even Republican lawmakers want something to show they’re not in the swamp. 

Trump doesn’t give a damn about the public’s mounting revulsion at corruption. He’s not up for reelection. He doesn’t care that his polls are in the cellar. All he wants to do is make even more money, exert more power, and get even with people who have gotten in his way. 

But the public wants his swamp drained. 

Democrats, take note. Three months from now, ask Americans two related questions: Do they think they’re better off than they were before Trump became president again? Do they approve of the most corrupt White House in American history?

 

The answer to both will be a resounding no. And the best way for Americans to act on their disgust will be to kick the Republican bums out.

Is Trump Guilty Of Massively Corrupt Insider Trading?

 It has been revealed that Donald Trump traded millions of dollars in stock in the first quarter of 2026 - many times in companies that he later affected by his actions or pronouncements. It has the stench of massive insider trading.

Here is how notus.org reports it:

President Donald Trump personally bought and sold millions of dollars worth of stock in technology companies and government contractors early this year, according to new government records.

The Trump administration directly regulates some of these companies and many of these trades coincided with favorable regulatory decisions.

Trump purchased $1 million to $5 million dollars worth of Nvidia stock on Feb. 10, only a week before Nvidia announced a major computer processing power deal with AI and social media giant Meta. Trump previously purchased $500,000 to $1 million worth of Nvidia stock on Jan. 6, a week before the Commerce Department officially approved the sale of some Nvidia chips to China. The Chinese AI market is a long-sought target for Nvidia since the federal government controls the sale of advanced AI chips to countries designated as foreign adversaries, such as China.

Nvidia, the most valuable company in the world, sells and designs advanced semiconductors that are necessary for the development of artificial intelligence. It is also a major government contractor. The company has become a popular investment among national politicians. . . .

Investigative news organization Sludge first reported Trump’s disclosures, which he filed May 14 with the Office of Government Ethics. The disclosure indicates Trump made more than 3,600 individual stock and other financial trades during the first three months of 2026. This represents a shift in Trump’s personal investing strategy, as he had largely avoided stocks and invested in corporate and municipal bonds during the first year of his second presidential term.

AMD, another AI semiconductor company, was also authorized by the Department of Commerce to sell their chips to Chinese customers on Jan. 13. Trump purchased $50,000 to $100,000 worth of AMD stock on Jan. 6. In all, Trump bought at least $740,000 in AMD stock last quarter.

While the Trump administration spent billions of dollars on immigration enforcement and mass deportation efforts, Trump also invested in companies that contracted with immigration enforcement agencies.

Chief among them: Palantir Technologies. Trump purchased at least $260,000 worth of Palantir stock during the first three months of 2026.

In January alone, Trump bought $65,000 to $150,000 of Palantir stock. In February, Trump sold between $1.1 million and roughly $5.3 million of his Palantir stock. In March, Trump’s Palantir stock purchases totaled between nearly $200,000 and $500,000.

In February, Palantir struck a billion-dollar agreement with the Department of Homeland Security to use the company’s software in the president’s deportation surge. Palantir also has a contract surpassing a billion dollars with the Pentagon to develop AI systems that help orchestrate attacks.

On Feb. 10, Trump also purchased $1 million to $5 million in shares of Axon, the company that makes Tasers.

Trump bought more Axon stock — valued between $15,000 to $50,000 — on March 2, and also made a pair of sales each worth $1,001 to $15,000 around the same time.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement outlined its plan to spend $220 million on Tasersover five years on Feb. 24, NOTUS first reported. The agency stated it wanted to purchase about 17,800 new Tasers in what would be a major boon for Axon.

ICE spent $2.2 million in January on body cameras from the Arizona-based company.

Trump also spent millions of dollars on shares of other government contractors, including Microsoft, Boeing, Amazon and Alphabet, the parent company of Google.

Trump also traded stock in several companies led by executives who are traveling with the president on his trip this week to China. Among them: Apple, Meta, GE Aerospace, Blackstone, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup and Blackrock.

Voters Overwhelmingly Want A Ban On Using Insider Info To Bet In Prediction Markets

The chart above is from the Navigator Poll -- done between April 2nd and 6th of a nationwide sample of 1,000 registered voters, with a 3.1 point margin of error.
 

People In Or Connected To White House Are Engaged In Corrupt Insider Trading

The following is part of a post by Robert Reich:

 15 minutes before Trump announced that the U.S. would postpone strikes against Iran’s energy infrastructure, the volume of stock market trades mysteriously spiked and the price of oil just as mysteriously plunged. 

Yet at that time — 15 minutes before Trump’s announcement — there were no public indications that any serious talks had been taking place between the U.S. and Iran. 

So this huge spike in stock market trades and drop in oil futures must have been made by someone, or some people, who had prior knowledge of Trump’s announcement.

This person or these people made a boatload of money off this inside information. 

But who was the inside trader, or traders, who placed such huge bets on Trump doing exactly what he did?

 

Could it be, say, Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, who is one of the people representing the United States in negotiations with Iran, and is also operating a private-equity firm with over $6 billion in investments, heavily funded by Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds, especially Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund? 

Or Steve Witkoff, who’s also representing the U.S. in these negotiations and who also has his own investment firm?

Or Howard Lutnick?

Or Melania?

 

Or all of them? 

Who knows?

The Securities and Exchange Commission is in charge of policing against such insider trading. On the basis of the trading I mention above, ordinarily the SEC by now would have opened an investigation. 

But so far, nothing. 

This isn’t the first time spikes in betting have occurred just before Trump did something unexpected.

In January, wagers surged on Polymarket, a crypto-powered predictions platform, as bets were made on Venezuela’s president Nicolás Maduro being out of power by the end of the month. Hours later, he was seized by American forces. (One account made more than $436,000 from a $32,537 bet.)

Why should we worry about people with insider information profiting in the stock market, futures markets, or even crypto-powered predictions markets? 

For one thing, it’s unfair. It hurts average investors while increasing the wealth of certain people who know, for example, what Trump is about to do (including Trump and members of his family). 

For another, such rigging erodes public confidence in market fairness, which ultimately destroys markets. Put simply, if the public believes the market is rigged in favor of privileged individuals, they may withdraw their investments. 

This is why the Securities and Exchange Commission is supposed to police the market against insider trading.

And why we should all be concerned that the top enforcement officer at the SEC abruptly resigned last week because the SEC’s chairman and other Republican appointees wouldn’t allow her to be more aggressive in pursuing charges of fraud and other misconduct against Trump’s inner circle. 

And why what occurred Monday morning, 15 minutes before Trump’s public announcement, is so damned troubling. 

Friends, there’s a word for this. It’s called corruption.

Congress Should Not Own/Trade Individual Stocks

 The following is part of an editorial by the editorial board of The New York Times:

Americans are in a sour mood with their elected officials. Blame the pandemic or inflation or Trumpism or stress or structural problems like inequality, but people do not feel that the system, much less its leaders, are working for them. The nation is experiencing a crisis of confidence that is eating away at its strength and unity.

Addressing this problem calls for long-term vision and commitment — things politicians aren’t always known for. But a straightforward idea gaining traction on Capitol Hill could reassure a frustrated and exhausted public that lawmakers at least recognize this trust deficit: a ban on stock trading by members of Congress and their spouses.

This idea got a fresh jolt in the early days of the pandemic after some lawmakers faced awkward questions about whether they used nonpublic information to make lucrative stock trades just as the severity of the threat posed by the coronavirus was becoming clear.

A report in December by Insider was more definitive. It revealed that in 2020 and 2021, dozens of lawmakers failed to abide by rules requiring them to promptly disclose stock trades above a certain threshold. The investigation also found that Congress does a poor job of enforcing accountability and transparency measures.

In response to the uproar, there has been a push by both parties, in both houses of Congress, to establish stronger guardrails on congressional stock ownership. Multiple lawmakers have introduced bills pushing variations of a ban on trading individual stocks, some tougher and more expansive than others. . . .

In a high-stakes election year, with lawmakers eager to show voters that they feel their rage, now is the moment to drive home this popular, common-sense reform. Americans have lost faith in Congress. Restoring trust in this institution requires concrete, bipartisan change.

It has been a decade since Congress last made a significant effort at policing itself in this area. The Stock Act of 2012, among other measures, made it illegal for lawmakers to trade based on access to nonpublic information. The reforms were well intentioned but inadequate. In practice, there are too many legal shades of gray. A clearer, brighter line needs to be drawn. . . .

Members of Congress have access to a steady stream of information that regular Americans do not. They already exist in a different, more privileged situation.

The common argument that a trading ban would pose a hardship for lawmakers is no more compelling. Most of the proposals under consideration do not call for members of Congress to sell all their stock holdings. They would merely prohibit lawmakers from trading stocks in individual companies. Assets could still be held in vehicles such as index funds or blind trusts.

It also bears noting that only a sliver of American families, about 15 percent, directly hold stock in individual companies, as opposed to indirectly through mutual funds and the like. A stock trading ban would put lawmakers more in sync with the 85 percent of Americans who own no individual stock, rather than align their interests with the 15 percent who do.

A ban on congressional trading enjoys a bipartisan appeal that is rare in this polarized age. A January poll found that 63 percent of American voters are at least somewhat in favor of such a move — with strong backing among Democrats, Republicans and independents alike. . . .

Proponents of reform need to keep the pressure on to ensure that this effort does not get slow-walked or bogged down in the devilish details. . . .

Lawmakers’ top priority — arguably, their first duty — should be to clean up their own branch of government. They are, as elected officials, directly accountable to their voters, and many of the people to whom they owe their jobs and salaries have grave doubts about their ethical guidelines and rules of fair play.

In a series of recent Times Opinion focus groups, voters across the political spectrum described their frustrations and even anger at the political class and the system, seeing elected officials in both parties as acting in self-interest without rules or consequences. “They all just go to their barbecues and cocktail parties and laugh,” said one independent voter. “They just want the power. They couldn’t care less about us.” Some Democratic voters expressed interest in term limits, curbs on lobbyist influence on lawmakers and new rules on money in politics.

The push for a trading ban is about more than imposing rules to keep lawmakers on the straight and narrow. It is about changing the widespread perception of public service as a playground for corruption and self-dealing. It is about restoring Americans’ faith in their government. For Congress, there may be no worthier cause.

STOCK Act Has A Giant Loophole

Insider trading is when someone takes knowledge not available to the general public and makes money off that knowledge by trading on the stock market. It's illegal to do this -- at least it's illegal for most Americans. But there's one group of people who's job puts them at the center of a ton of insider knowledge and until recently, this group was exempt from the insider trading laws. That group is our elected and appointed officials in the Senate and the House of Representatives. And quite a few of these officials (from both political parties) were able to make a lot of money through insider trading.

Last April, Congress passed the Stop Trading On Congressional Knowledge Act (STOCK Act) and it was signed into law by the president on April 4th. It was hoped that this new law would put an end to the congressional insider trading. But it seems that the House of Representatives shifted some language around in the bill when it came to them, and the result was to leave a loophole in the law big enough to drive an armored truck through. Here's how CNN describes it:

The STOCK Act requires that any trades of $1,000 or more made on or after July 3 have to be reported to the House and Senate within 45 days. But the House and Senate have two completely different interpretations of that rule.


In the Senate, the Ethics Committee released one page of guidelines last month ruling that members and their spouses and dependent children all have to file reports after they make stock or securities trades. But the House Ethics Committee disagreed.


Its 14-page memo notifies House members and aides covered by the law that their spouses and children aren't covered. The Office of Government Ethics, which oversees all federal executive branch employees, sided with the House, informing its employees that their spouses and children don't need to file these periodic reports. . .


Robert Walker, a Washington ethics attorney and former chief counsel for both the House and Senate Ethics Committees, explained that the Senate bill did include a provision that covered spouses and children, but when Cantor's office wrote the House version, this language was shifted to a different section of the bill. The change meant that spouses and dependent children weren't subject to the new reporting requirements.


"The House recrafted some of the provisions of it and moved some of the provisions around. In that process, some of the Senate bill that applied to filing of these new reports was moved from one section of the bill to the other," Walker said.


The Senate Ethics Committee decided to stick with the spirit of the law that senators originally intended, but the House Ethics Committee went with the letter of the law, which included the loophole not requiring spouses and children to report financial transactions in a timely fashion.

I guess we should have known that the politicians wouldn't really kill their golden goose. This loophole allowing spouses and children to ignore the new law makes the law worthless. All any politician has to do is just let his/her wife/husband or adult child make the trades, and he/she can keep right on collecting those golden eggs from insider trading.

The House has now been embarrassed by CNN's discovery of the giant loophole, and Majority Leader Cantor is saying they will look "at ways to fix it". I'm not going to hold my breath until they fix the loophole, and I suggest you don't either. They're not going to be in any hurry to kill the illegal golden goose they so carefully and deviously protected.

This makes me wish we could just toss out every single House member and start over. They knew what they were doing, and if any of them opposed it they could have yelled loud enough for the media to take notice. But they didn't. They just tried to pull a fast one on the American people -- and it looks like they succeeded.