Two recent press reports provide information on President Trump or his agents buying and selling shares in companies whose financial fortunes turn on securing profitable contracts or permissions from the federal government working under Trump’s personal direction.
Under the Caux Round Table Principles for Government, “power given by public office is held in trust for the benefit of the community and its citizens. Officials are custodians only of the powers they hold. They have no personal entitlement to office or the prerogatives thereof.”
Taking selfish advantage of public power for personal gain or other advantage is an abuse of such trusteeship authority and may constitute, under the U.S. Constitution, an impeachable offence warranting removal from office.
The first report was in Bloomberg, published by Bill Allison and Jessica Menton.
The transactions, spelled out in more than 100 pages of documents filed Thursday with the U.S. Office of Government Ethics, list purchases and sales in broad ranges, making it hard to calculate an exact value. But the volume of trading – more than 40 per day over a three-month period – stands out as much as the potential dollar value. …
“This is an insane amount of trades,” said Matthew Tuttle, chief executive officer of Tuttle Capital Management, in an interview, adding that it looks more like something done by “a hedge fund with massive algo trades” that buys and shorts securities than a personal account. …
In the first quarter, the president bought at least $1 million each in companies including Nvidia Corp., Oracle Corp., Microsoft Corp., Boeing Co. and Costco Wholesale Corp., according to the documents. Other trades involved eBay Inc., Abbott Laboratories, Uber Technologies Inc., AT&T Inc. and discount store Dollar Tree Inc. …
The disclosure reignites conflict-of-interest concerns that have shadowed Trump’s terms in the White House. Critics have regularly accused him of mixing his official duties with his business interests. Unlike his predecessors, Trump didn’t divest or move his assets into a blind trust with an independent overseer. His sprawling business empire is managed by two of his sons and operates in several areas that intersect with presidential policy. …
Netflix Inc. and Paramount Skydance Corp. battled to acquire Warner Bros Discovery Inc. in a months-long fight with both suitors raising potential antitrust concerns. Trump made investments related to all three companies. He bought a modest stake in Warner Bros. in March, worth at least $30,000, a stake in Paramount Skydance worth at least $15,000 the same month. He also had 19 transactions naming Netflix, including sales worth as little as $1,000 and as much as $5 million during the first quarter. …
“All of this raises questions that you’d rather not raise as a president,” said Tuttle. “So, now people are asking why is he buying Nvidia and other companies now? When you’re the president, you know everything, so any stock you buy, there’s a huge question mark.” …
Trump’s biggest sales came on February 10, when he unloaded holdings in three technology firms: Microsoft, Meta Platforms Inc. and Amazon.com Inc., in amounts between $5 million and $25 million. He also sold a stake in a Vanguard ETF in January, worth at least $5 million.
The second report was written by Edith Olmsted and was published in the New Republic.
On February 10, Donald Trump purchased between $1 million and $5 million worth of stock in Nvidia, a massive AI chip maker. A week later, Nvidia announced a major computer processing power deal with Meta. …
Trump previously purchased between $500,000 and $1 million worth of Nvidia stock on January 6, after clearing the sale of Nvidia’s H200 chips, the company’s second-most powerful AI chip, to China. A week later, the Commerce Department officially approved the sale. This week, after Huang traveled with Trump to China, the Commerce Department cleared 10 Chinese firms to buy Nvidia’s chips – making way for Trump to make millions more. …
Also on January 6, Trump purchased between $50,000 and $100,000 worth of stock in AMD, another AI semiconductor company, which was authorized to sell their chips to Chinese customers a week later. Trump purchased at least $740,000 in AMD stock last quarter, according to NOTUS. …
In the first quarter of 2026, Trump also purchased at least $260,000 worth of stock in Palantir, a private weapons manufacturer with hefty government contracts and ties to the president. …
In January, Trump bought between $65,000 to $150,000 of Palantir stock and sold between $1.1 million and roughly $5.3 million of it in February. That same month, Palantir won a billion-dollar purchasing agreement with the Department of Homeland Security to use the company’s software to aid Trump’s sweeping deportation efforts. …
In March, Trump purchased between $200,000 and $500,000 in Palantir stock. Last month, Trump made a public call for people to buy stock in Palantir – including the stock’s ticker symbol in his social media post – in an obvious effort at market manipulation. A few weeks later, Palantir landed yet another major federal contract.
The Caux Round Table has proposed the following schema to describe the moral dynamic of systems of crony capitalism. It uses philosopher Jurgen Habermas’s construction, where morality emerges in the engagement of normativity (at the top) through human agency, with facticity (at the bottom) and reciprocally, the engagement of facticity with normativity, similarly through human agency.
