The President is Getting Richer

No law prevents Trump from moving markets to enrich himself

Due to a publishing error, you may have received a copy of this story earlier. We apologize for the duplicate emails.
— The Preamble Team

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At 9:37 a.m. on April 9, President Donald Trump posted a message on Truth Social as financial markets reeled from the sweeping new tariffs he had announced a week earlier.

“THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY!!! DJT,” he wrote.

About four hours later, Trump abruptly reversed course, announcing a 90-day pause on most of those tariffs. The S&P 500 surged nearly 10% by the closing bell, recovering roughly $4 trillion in market value.

The following day, Trump was celebrating the windfall. Speaking in the Oval Office, he pointed to billionaire investor Charles Schwab and businessman Roger Penske, boasting about how much money they had made from the market rally. “He made $2.5 million today, and he made $900 million! That’s not bad,” Trump said.

President Trump with Charles Schwab

Let’s start with the obvious: anything a president says can move markets. Investors have long parsed every presidential speech for clues about interest rates, wars, sanctions and trade.

But Trump has taken that relationship to another level, openly encouraging investors to buy while demonstrating just how quickly his own policy announcements can erase or create trillions of dollars in market value. According to CNN, the president posted more than 6,000 times on Truth Social last year, commenting almost daily on companies, industries, and policy. Most presidents make only a handful of market-moving remarks each year.

What’s more, Trump’s words and his wealth often intersect. CNN found a related pattern in Trump’s own trading: his investment accounts, managed on his behalf but reported under his name in his disclosures, made at least 44 stock purchases across 21 companies in the week before he posted something favorable about those companies. Nvidia is the clearest example. His accounts bought between $200,000 and $500,000 of the stock in April 2025, just days before he posted that the government would expedite permits for Nvidia’s AI supercomputer plans.

CNN found no evidence the president used those posts deliberately to lift his own holdings, and most of his more than 20,000 trades last year had no post attached to them at all. Seventeen of his purchases were even followed by posts criticizing the company, not praising it — Comcast and Microsoft among them.

The White House’s answer has been the same one, repeated by spokesperson Anna Kelly: “There are no conflicts of interest.”

An ethical conflict without rules

For the last 50 years, every president who owned individual stocks or businesses handled the conflict the same basic way: they got rid of it. Jimmy Carter put his family’s peanut farm into a blind trust before taking office, meaning that he was not aware of how it was being run. Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush also used blind trusts and did not know what specific investment decisions were made on their behalf while they held office. Barack Obama shifted his money into broad, diversified mutual funds rather than picking individual companies. Joe Biden didn’t trade individual stocks in office at all. Different methods, same goal: make it impossible for the president’s decisions and the president’s money to touch each other, even in theory.

Trump broke that pattern. He did not put his investments in a blind trust, instead outsourcing trading decisions to brokers. His stake in Trump Media sits in a trust managed by his son, Donald Trump Jr. Trump can’t direct trades, but he can see what trades are made and has signed the disclosure forms listing those assets.

Richard Painter, who was the chief White House ethics lawyer under George W. Bush, says that distinction is the whole ballgame. He argues that this isn’t really about who is clicking “buy.” Simply knowing you own stock in an industry you can regulate is itself the conflict, he says, regardless of who executes the trade. “If he were defense secretary,” Painter said, “he would be committing a crime.”

That’s because federal ethics rules prohibit cabinet officials from owning assets affected by their own decisions. But the presidency is exempt. As Gary Kalman of Transparency International US notes, the one official who isn’t legally required to recuse himself from conflicts is also the one the law largely does not cover.

That criticism isn’t coming only from Trump’s usual opponents. Dan Greenberg, a senior legal fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute — a think tank generally skeptical of government regulation and no ally of the Democratic Party — called Trump’s investment arrangement “an ethics disaster.”

Congress has started to notice the same problem, though not quite the way you’d expect. Trump has said he supports banning members of Congress from trading individual stocks. Lawmakers in both parties have increasingly embraced that idea, and last year Republicans and Democrats introduced bills that would have barred congressional stock trading. Some proposals, including one backed by Republican Senator Josh Hawley, would also have applied to the president. Those provisions didn’t survive. The version that passed the House restricted members of Congress but left the presidency untouched — an odd omission, given that no member of Congress can move markets with a sentence the way a president can.

Stocks are only one channel where the presidency and Trump’s financial interests overlap. Crypto is another, and a bigger one. Trump once called bitcoin “a scam.” He doesn’t anymore. Sometime between 2019 and his second term, crypto became one of the largest sources of his personal income. At the same time, cryptocurrency executives and companies increasingly backed Republicans — including Trump — making the industry one of the 2024 election’s biggest political spenders.

Early in his term, Trump signed an executive order pushing regulators toward a lighter touch on the industry, at the same time his family’s own crypto venture, World Liberty Financial, was still raising money from investors. Trump also launched a personal memecoin, $TRUMP, days before his inauguration; its value spiked, then collapsed, with early insiders profiting most while later buyers were left holding the losses. His 2025 disclosures show that more than half of his reported $2 billion income his first year back in office came from crypto.

Closing the loop between information and profit

For years, Wall Street has paid for speed. Firms pay for Bloomberg terminals and direct data feeds because a few milliseconds of advance notice on market-moving news can be worth millions of dollars in a single trade.

Trump Media is about to sell that same kind of speed, using the president’s own words as the product. Starting August 1, its new offering, called the Truth API, will give paying firms faster access to posts from the ten most-followed accounts on Truth Social. One of those accounts belongs to the president of the United States. The company has pitched pricing as high as $100,000 a month, or a discounted $60,000 a month for firms willing to sign a three-year contract.

Sit with that for a second. Trump’s posts already move markets. He owns assets that respond to those moves. Now his media company wants to sell traders faster access to the posts themselves. The loop has closed.

Donald Sherman, who leads the government watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, called the early access “wildly unethical.”

But Sherman stopped short of calling it illegal. Insider trading law is built around information that is non-public. If hundreds of firms are paying a subscription fee for early access to a presidential post, is that post still non-public information, or has it simply become a product anyone can buy? Nobody wrote the laws with that question in mind, presumably because no president has ever tried to sell early access to his own words before.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, the top Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee, called the arrangement “an egregious scheme to profit off the presidency.”

The White House has, so far, referred questions about the Truth API to Trump Media, which hasn’t answered them.

Every president in modern memory has tried to build a real barrier between the office and his own money. Whatever the method, all of them treated that separation as the entire point.

Trump has collapsed that separation. He’s no longer merely participating in the market. He is simultaneously the person whose words move markets, the investor who sees his wealth rise and fall with those movements, and, through his media company, the seller of access to those market-moving words.