Donald Trump has been milking every dollar and cent he can find out of his second presidency. Personal jets, real estate deals, crypto rug pulls and shady foreign investment deals are just the tip of the international corruption iceberg, and while far
less grand, he’s also partaking in more mundane forms of graft. Namely lots, LOTS, of stock trades.
New stock trading data published this week by the Office of Government Ethics revealed that Trump made over 1,000 stock trades in the month of June. The president, whose financial portfolio is theoretically supposed to be held by an independent third-party trust, moved millions in stocks and ETFs for major companies including SpaceX, Palantir, Vanguard, Berkshire Hathaway, Nvidia, Apple, and Microsoft.
According to an analysis by Yahoo Finance, the total volume of trades made in June clocked in between $78.1 million and $263.1 million. The administration denies that the president had any direct hand in the trades.
“Neither President Trump nor any member of his family has any ability to direct, influence, or provide input regarding how the portfolio is invested or when investments are bought or sold,” the White House told The Wall Street Journal. “All holdings are maintained in discretionary accounts and invested through computer-based model portfolios that automatically replicate recognized indexes, such as the Schwab 1000.”
Yet, given how openly the president and his family are building a multi-billion dollar fortune by exploiting the power of the presidency, the notion that their trade portfolio is their last bastion of ethical behavior has been received with a heavy serving of skepticism. For example in April, Trump posted on Truth Social that it was a “GREAT TIME TO BUY” just hours before announcing his first round of global “liberation day” tariffs, triggering wild swings in investment markets.
In July Trump bragged to CNBC that his sons — who manage the majority of his family’s business empire — had access to “insider information” when conducting transactions and crafting deals.
“Every time my kids do, if they invest in a stock, or they go and do a building, anything they do, because the presidency is so powerful, so big, everything, if they buy a cupcake company, well, the energy to make the cupcakes is, you know, sort of like, how’s my energy policy? So, therefore, you have a conflict,” Trump said at the time.
All in all, regardless of the doubtful independence of the Trump family’s stock portfolios, financial analysts estimate that the president’s portfolio has moved over $1 billion in volume during his first year in office. According to financial analyst and investor Steve Rattner, Trump’s growth in net worth over his first two years in office is an astronomical $4.2 billion increase. Next to that, the $3.2, $1.6, and $0.6 million dollar jumps former presidents Geroge W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden respectively saw in their first two years look positively meager.
Democrats have taken notice. Earlier this month, Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Representative Robert Garcia (D-Calif.) issued a letter to the president highlighting the recent push in Congress for a ban on stock trading by elected officials. “We all support a ban on Members of Congress trading individual stocks in order to avoid conflicts of interest—or even the appearance of conflicts. Your stock trading in 2025— reportedly more than 14,000 stock trades worth up to $1.06 billion—was more than all 535 members of Congress last year combined,” they wrote.
“The appearance of numerous conflicts of interest from a President trading in individual stocks –
including the potential for insider trading, market manipulation, and policy decisions that benefit
the President’s stock portfolio rather than the public interest – undermines public trust in
Government,” the letter added.
That trust is long gone, and the president will be ending his term significantly richer than when he was sworn in. It’s up to elected lawmakers to find the mechanism to hold him — and his financial cronies — to account. So far, he’s gotten away with all of it.
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