Corruption · The Presidency

BURN THE PLAYBOOK

The Conflicts File · May 21, 2026

He Bought The Stock. Then He Cut The Deal.

3,700 trades in 90 days, into the companies his administration was about to reward. “No conflicts,” they said.

The president of the United States made more than three thousand seven hundred stock trades in ninety days. Then his government went to work for the companies he had bought.

I spent years around the people who write the rules and the people who profit from them. The whole job was keeping those two in different rooms. This administration put them in the same chair.

Forty Trades A Day

Trump’s first-quarter ethics filing posted last Thursday. More than 3,700 transactions — over forty on every trading day — worth somewhere between $220 million and $750 million. Wall Street veterans did not recognize it as investing. “This is an insane amount of trades,” one hedge-fund manager told Bloomberg — comparing it to an algorithm, not a man.

A president is allowed to do this. Sit with that first. Members of Congress at least pretend to live under the STOCK Act. The president lives under nothing. He only has to disclose.

He Bought Intel. His Government Bought Intel Too.

Among the buys: Intel. Across the quarter, Intel shares climbed roughly 20% — lifted by the same federal government taking a stake worth nearly $9 billion in the company. The government he runs. The timing raises the one question the filing cannot answer: who decided, what did he know, and when did he buy?

Nvidia. Boeing. The Pattern.

He bought Nvidia — the company at the center of his administration’s chip-export deals. He bought Boeing before announcing in Beijing that China would purchase 200 of its jets. One trade is a coincidence. Three dozen of them, into the exact companies your administration is about to reward, is a portfolio strategy.

“A Trust Managed By His Children”

The White House answer: the assets sit in a trust managed by his children, so “there are no conflicts of interest.” Read that again. A conflict is not cleaned by handing it to your kids — it is kept in the family. And the filing could not say whether the president directed a single trade. Some it simply marked “unsolicited,” a word it declined to explain.

This Is The Operating System

It does not stop at the brokerage account. The same week the trades surfaced, his acting attorney general defended a $1.776 billion taxpayer fund to pay people who say the last administration “weaponized” the government. The inspectors general and the ethics office that would flag any of this were hollowed out months ago. The trades are not the scandal. The trades are what the scandal looks like when no one is left to call it one.

Say It At The Grocery Store

Here is the whole thing in one sentence you can repeat in a checkout line: the man who decides which companies the government rewards is buying their stock, and the only reason it is legal is that no one ever wrote the law saying a president could not.

This is not a glitch. This is the operating system.

The Work That Needs Doing

If you want to fight this where it is actually fought: the Campaign Legal Center is hiring — the people who litigate exactly these conflicts.

Recommended Reading

Read Bill Allison and Jessica Menton’s Bloomberg accounting of the filing (linked above). It is the clearest picture of what 3,700 trades in ninety days actually looks like — and who was on the other side of the President’s buy orders.

The Verdict

The Accountability Desk Is Hiring

Mad enough to do something about it? The watchdogs that actually chase this stuff are hiring:

• Campaign Legal Center — campaign-finance & government-ethics law.
• Brennan Center for Justice — democracy & rule-of-law reform.
• ProPublica — investigative accountability journalism.
• Demand Progress — anti-corruption & reform advocacy.

May the bridges we burn light our paths forward.

Burn The Playbook