U.S. President Donald Trump appears to have added to his already record-setting level of enriching himself while president earlier this year by purchasing stocks in companies ahead of actions by his own administration favorable to those same companies.
Stock Purchases Before Favorable Actions
Trump bought up to $1 million in Nvidia stock days before the company was granted permission to sell advanced computer chips to China, according to a recent ethics filing. He also bought as much as $100,000 in AMD, another chip maker, shortly before it, too, was allowed to sell in China. And weeks prior to Palantir winning a new contract with Trump’s Department of Homeland Security to help his deportation push, Trump bought as much as $150,000 of stock in that company as well.
Ethics Watchdog Response
“By trading massive amounts of stock ahead of actions by his administration that would directly impact those stocks’ prices, Trump has essentially become the sum of all corruption fears: a president whose every action must be questioned whether it’s being made in his own financial self-interest,” said Jordan Libowitz with the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.
The stock trading, which was detailed in a Friday report by NOTUS, is similar to the activity that Trump demanded members of Congress ban in his State of the Union address earlier this year — only far more egregious. Members of Congress can neither award government contracts nor make regulatory decisions.
“The president has unilateral power that no member of Congress comes close to,” Libowitz said.
White House and Trump Organization Response
Neither the White House nor the Trump Organization, Trump’s private business, responded to HuffPost’s queries. In the past, the White House has claimed, in response to articles about his use of the office to enrich himself, that everything Trump does is in the interest of the United States. The Trump Organization, in a statement to NOTUS, claimed that management of Trump’s stock portfolio is done externally and that “the president, his family and the organization itself don’t play a role in the investments and don’t receive notice of trading activity.”
Pattern of Self-Enrichment
Trump has openly used his office to profit himself — the very definition of corruption — in a dramatic departure from the previous presidents over at least the past century, who all went out of their way to remove appearances of conflicts of interest. This week, Trump traveled to China to meet with that country’s autocratic ruler, Xi Jinping, and brought with him 17 chief executives of American corporations, including several in which Trump personally owns stock. Among them were Kelly Ortberg of Boeing and Jensen Huang of Nvidia. Both companies announced that the trip had generated business for them.
Trump has used nearly $18 million in taxpayer resources since returning to office last January to promote his souvenir crypto “meme” coins, his golf resorts in Florida and Scotland and the Saudi-backed LIV golf league with which he has partnered since its inception five years ago. The money he makes from those enterprises and his stock trading, though, pales in comparison to the billions he is making through the cryptocurrency exchange World Liberty Financial, which he and his sons founded. That founding took place just as Trump embraced the crypto industry after years of calling it a “scam.”
