The Ultimate Insider
Is Trump manipulating the market for his own gain? Would anyone be surprised?
Donald Trump never lets a scam opportunity go to waste, so it would be surprising if he ignored one of the biggest opportunities ever: the chance to send world stock prices either surging or plummeting just by tweeting out his latest whim. This is what he posted on Truth Social yesterday, a few hours before announcing a 90-day pause on the tariff lunacy that has alarmed global markets for the past week:
The announcement, predictably, sent stock prices soaring. It’s not much of a stretch to posit that the Trump crime family and maybe even officials of the Trump junta stood to gain from the announcement, as they would if they were to sell short just before he changes his feral mind, cancels the pause and sends prices plunging again.
There is no firm evidence that Trump profited off his own market power, but he does not deserve the benefit of any doubt. He’s entitled to the presumption of innocence inside a courtroom, but not outside. Remember who we’re dealing with here: a third-rate mob boss and convicted felon who had a stellar career in white-collar crime long before he moved into the White House. The Trump University fraud alone says all you need to know about the seedy, shameless con man that Trump is, and there are plenty of other Trump scams.
Not that Trump would care, but insider trading is a federal crime. Trump is not an insider in the usual sense of the term — meaning a company official who trades on the basis of “material information” not available to the public — but he obviously has the power to move stock prices. (The law defines material information as that which a reasonable investor would consider when trading securities.)
Sen. Adam Schiff, a California Democrat, said yesterday that he would seek information from the White House about who might have known of Trump’s impending pause announcement, saying the abrupt change created “dangerous opportunities for insider trading.” (Yes, asking them nicely should clarify matters.) House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, a New York Democrat, said today that House Democrats will investigate potential wrongdoing.
None of this is likely to upset Trump, who has learned two great lessons in life. One, he doesn’t have to do his homework; that’s what he hires the little people to do. He just shows up to cut the ribbon or wing it through a press conference, hiding his ignorance inside a gish gallop of incoherent babble. After years of bamboozling people, he’s justifiably confident in his abilities here.
Lesson No. 2 is that there are seldom severe consequences for bad behavior. Until last year’s enormous civil judgments in New York’s business-fraud case and in the E. Jean Carroll rape case, there had been few offenses that he couldn’t buy himself out of or complicate with smears and countersuits.
So he’s unlikely to care if he were to get caught profiting on market swings that he himself induces, especially since he controls the mechanisms of prosecution. That would be the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Department of Justice. Trump has tightened executive control over what he dismisses as “so-called independent agencies” (this is being challenged in court) and a Trump appointee has just become the commission’s chair. And it’s hard to imagine Pam Bondi’s DOJ pursuing Trump even without the broad immunity ratified by the Supreme Court last year.
“This entire White House is one giant grift,” Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut said on X Wednesday. “An insider-trading scandal is brewing” that could be “an enormous scam.”
Yes, let’s hope so.
Excellent.