Robinhood Ol Trading
TRUMP Acct bs
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an 5 26
Rarely does President Donald Trump evoke bipartisan applause while delivering a State of the Union address, but he inspired just such a moment last February — when he called out former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi over her husband's history of stock trading.
"As we ensure that all Americans can profit from a rising stock market, let's also make sure that members of Congress cannot corruptly profit from using insider information," said Trump as members of both parties stood to applaud.
While Republicans and Democrats in both houses have long invested in markets, with some banking huge profits from such dubious trades, it is Pelosi who has endured the most flak. Republican members named a bill to restrict congressional stock trades after her: the Preventing Elected Leaders from Owning Securities and Investments, or PELOSI, Act. During that speech, a smirking Trump urged the former speaker to stand up and demanded that Congress "pass the Stop Insider Trading Act without delay."
Yet neither that bill nor any other reform legislation would have stopped the eye-popping orgy of recent stock trades by none other than Trump himself, with thousands of individual market transactions on his account revealed this week in disclosure documents. A new filing with the Office of Government Ethics, released on May 14, showed more than 3,500 specific trades in Trump's name during the first quarter of 2026, with a value between $220 million and $750 million. This represents by far the largest series of securities transactions by a sitting president in American history.
As one observer noted on X, it adds up to 60 trades per day, while he issues executive orders, talks with foreign leaders, shifts tariffs, and gives policy directives that directly affect the value of his holdings.
Former White House ethics counsel Richard Painter told Forbes magazine that he had researched the financial history of every preceding chief executive. "I don't think we've had any president trade in the stock market," he said. Previous presidents had blind trusts with index funds, if they owned any stocks at all.
What outraged ethics experts was not just the volume of Trump's market activity but the obvious overlaps between his actions and policies and the equities that he bought and sold. Although it is impossible to determine exactly how much he may have profited from what looks suspiciously like insider trading — exactly the crime he accused the Pelosis of perpetrating — there can be little doubt that he has made millions.
The Dell Deal
Not long before he delivered that State of the Union slap at Pelosi, Trump bought somewhere between $1 million and $5 million in Dell Computers stock. Then on May 8, less than three months later, he gave a public speech at the White House where he urged "everyone" to "go out and buy Dell," driving the company's stock to an all-time high. Since he bought Dell stock in February, it has gone up a whopping 96%.
Nvidia and Defense Deals
Around the same time, Trump bought a big chunk of Nvidia stock, just before that firm announced a big chip agreement with Meta, and then he purchased still more Nvidia a week before the Commerce Department permitted the sale of the company's chips to Saudi Arabia. Ironically, Nvidia was among the stocks whose purchase by Paul Pelosi provoked Republican outrage; he later sold it before its value rose astronomically.
Trump praising such companies as Palantir and Intel on his social media platform has similarly inflated their stocks after he bought chunks for his account.
The Palantir Pattern
Trump increased his Palantir holdings just as the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security were awarding billion-dollar contracts to the company, whose principal shareholder is the fascist-curious, Trump-backing billionaire Peter Thiel. So now the president too can profit from the company's Orwellian surveillance technologies.
Robinhood and Federal Programs
During the same period, Trump invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in Robinhood, the financial technology firm. News reports indicate that those purchases occurred as the Treasury Department named Robinhood as the brokerage and trustee for the federally funded "Trump Accounts" to be set up for American kids. Those children don't stand to earn much, but never mind — Trump will do very well.
The list of sleazy transactions goes on and on, with many more examples no doubt to be unearthed in months to come. The response from the White House and the Trump family echoes their usual "move along, nothing to see here" refrain. Don Jr. recently complained that charges of rampant corruption against his father were "getting old." And it is true that the crooked misconduct dates back to the first Trump administration; it is simply more widespread, more encompassing and more brazen now.
Contradictory Explanations
At least it would be better if the family and the administration flacks could get their stories straight. Eric Trump says his family's stock holdings are exclusively in broad market indexes like the Schwab 1000, a claim belied by Donald Trump's own filings, which show thousands of individual trades. Meanwhile, a White House spokesman told Fortune that all of Trump's assets are in a trust "managed by his children" with no conflicts of interest, another obvious contradiction.
A Pattern of Deception
The Trumps — and the Kushners, and many others associated with the first family — have gaslighted the American public with such bogus "explanations" of their grift-gorging for many years. Everyone in the Trump circle, including Cabinet officers such as Secretary of State Marco Rubio, has long known that the president is a crook. Out of cowardice and personal ambition, and sometimes greed, they have turned away from challenging his self-enrichment. The public, too, has largely ignored Trump's corruption, believing that "both parties do it," and there is plainly some basis for that cynicism.
But the scale of Trump's exploitation of public resources, his incessant stealing with both hands, is exponentially worse than any theft previously perpetrated by Democrats or Republicans. At a time when voters expected this president to look out for their pocketbooks, he does nothing but stuff his own, plundering them and profiting hugely. Polls suggest that they have at last begun to notice — and don't like what they see.
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crypto-money-trump-inauguration-00199088
Jasper Goodman01/17/2025
The cryptocurrency industry, fresh off a 2024 elections spending spree, has turned its influence efforts in recent months to a new target: celebrating the start of President-elect Donald Trump’s second term.
Leading crypto firms have pumped at least $10 million into the Trump inaugural fund, and top executives are flocking to Washington ahead of the incoming president’s swearing-in on Monday.
Crypto companies including Ripple, Coinbase, Kraken, Robinhood and Circle have made seven-figure donations to Trump’s inaugural committee since Election Day — part of a wave of corporate contributions that Trump has reeled in as big businesses scrambled to curry favor with the incoming administration.
The donations, which will fund the glitzy official events surrounding the inauguration, exemplify the giddiness across the digital asset sector as Trump prepares to become the first-ever explicitly pro-crypto U.S. president. The industry is eyeing any avenue of influence as it pushes the incoming administration and a GOP-controlled Congress to complete a regulatory overhaul that could boost its growth.
“This is a moment of celebration for the industry,” said Kristin Smith, CEO of the Blockchain Association, a leading crypto trade association.
The industry laid the groundwork for that celebration by pouring more than $160 million into a super PAC that helped elect a bipartisan slate of lawmakers sympathetic to its agenda. The high-dollar influence campaigns illustrate how the crypto industry has become a major new well that politicians are tapping for contributions, helping it play an outsize role in American politics.
Crypto firms are hosting a sold-out unofficial inaugural ball on Friday at the Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium in downtown Washington. The event, which is set to feature Snoop Dogg as a musical guest, is being put on in part by David Bailey, who runs a bitcoin conference that Trump spoke at last summer. Other sponsors include the Coinbase-backed advocacy group Stand With Crypto and the digital asset firms Exodus, Anchorage Digital and Kraken.
It all comes as crypto executives and their lobbyists are scrambling to gain sway over the policy changes that Trump has vowed to usher in, which include stockpiling bitcoin and putting in place a new framework for how digital assets are regulated — “written by people who love your industry.”
One target of fixation for players in the crypto space is a digital assets advisory council that Trump has vowed to create, led by incoming White House crypto and AI czar David Sacks and former North Carolina Congressional candidate Bo Hines.
“Everyone is jockeying for it,” said one Washington crypto lobbyist, granted anonymity to speak candidly about sensitive dynamics within the industry.
Several top executives are expected to be in town for the inauguration, along with other tech leaders who have taken steps to get in Trump’s good graces in recent months. And many firms have shelled out to fill the inaugural fund’s coffers.
The crypto firm Ripple, a major target of enforcement action from the SEC that the industry decried during the Biden era, donated $5 million in digital tokens to the inaugural committee, according to a spokesperson for the company. Two of the firm’s top executives, CEO Brad Garlinghouse and Chief Legal Officer Stuart Alderoty, who met with Trump earlier this month at Mar-a-Lago, plan to attend the swearing-in.
The U.S. crypto exchanges Coinbase and Kraken and the stablecoin company Circle, which issues a token that is pegged to the value of the U.S. dollar, each donated $1 million to the inaugural fund. Robinhood, a leading online brokerage that dabbles in crypto, donated $2 million, according to a spokesperson. Top Coinbase executives including CEO Brian Armstrong were on Capitol Hill on Friday, ahead of the inauguration. Armstrong has twice met with Trump, according to a spokesperson for the company, including once since Election Day.
“I think it’s important to ensure that industry … can engage with this administration and engage in a meaningful way during the transition period,” Kara Calvert, vice president for U.S. policy at Coinbase, said of the firm’s donation. “This is the most pro-crypto president that we’ve ever seen, and he has made a platform clear now for months. And that is a really attractive characteristic right now.”
The donations have become an early target for Democrats and watchdog groups, who say the president is selling influence.
“Billionaires think they bought this government,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), a leading critic of the crypto industry in Congress, told reporters Thursday. “They’re sure throwing their weight around.”
*Irie Sentner and Eleanor Mueller contributed to this report.
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