The day before President Trump announced a 90-day pause on his sweeping tariffs, sending markets exploding higher, his investment accounts quietly purchased hundreds of stocks near the market low, trades that were not publicly disclosed until more than a year later despite federal disclosure requirements.
The purchases, finally disclosed in a 927-page annual financial disclosure filed with the Office of Government Ethics on Monday, reveal a churn of transactions that was quietly playing out all last year: Trump’s accounts were actively trading stocks throughout 2025 while he was making policy decisions that moved markets, and the public had no idea.
On April 8, 2025, the day before Trump announced the tariff pause, the disclosure shows 327 individual stock purchases worth as much as $12.8 million, one of the largest single-day stock buying sprees disclosed in the filing. . . . . The S&P 500 jumped nearly 10% the following day when Trump announced the pause, one of the largest single-day gains in the index’s history.
Again, the insider trading is just the tip of the ice berg. The New York Post editorial board writes:
Insider deals, finders’ fees and backdoor introductions to family members are business-as-usual in Third World banana republics, but these slimy practices have now been normalized in the White House, to the shame of the nation.
The New York Times reports that Eric and Donald Trump Jr., sons of President Donald Trump, and Kyle and Brandon Lutnick, sons of Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, are tied to a billion-dollar tungsten-mining deal that the US government is financing in Kazakhstan. The prez himself actually called into a meeting between Howard Lutnick and Kazakhstan’s president as the deal was being finalized.
The Trump sons, meanwhile, are part-owners or investors in companies neck-deep in a key defense contract to mine tungsten reserves in Central Asia. It stinks to high heaven.
Meanwhile, JD Vance shrugs off the shocking corruption and even said Watergate would barely be a blip in the newsfeeds now adays, ignoring the reality that what Richard Nixon did was child's play compared to the Felon's non-stop improper behavior. A piece at The Atlantic looks at Vance's pathetic and disingenuous remarks:
He [JD Vance] wrote to a law-school classmate that he went “back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical asshole like Nixon who wouldn’t be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he’s America’s Hitler.”
Vance went on to suggest that the scandal that toppled Nixon was no big deal, and that the 37th president was a victim of nefarious forces. “If Watergate happened tomorrow, it would be, like, a 12-hour news story,” he said. “The idea that it would have taken down a presidency is crazy.”
Vance is correct about how Watergate would’ve landed today, but the lesson is not what he claims. Since 1974, Americans have become pessimistic about their leaders, deeply polarized in their partisanship, and distrustful of the media—all of which means that Watergate very well might pass quickly in today’s environment. The best evidence is that the Trump administration weathers scandals on the Watergate level routinely. As Representative Jim McGovern, a Massachusetts Democrat, wrote of Vance’s remark, “‘We do a Watergate twice a day’ is a crazy way to confess your own corruption.”
Vance, who has previously admitted to making up stories for political purposes, also offered a bogus history of what happened in Watergate: “If you look at the story of how the deep state took down Richard Nixon, it’s not all that different from what the same groups of people, the same institutions, tried to do to Donald Trump in the first Trump administration.”
Trump’s first impeachment, for soliciting foreign interference from Ukraine in the 2020 election, and Nixon’s downfall share two important things: First, both men did what they were accused of, though both insisted that their actions had been fine. (Trump: “a perfect conversation.” Nixon: “When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.”) Second, the most damning evidence against both of them came not from “deep state” bureaucrats but from their own appointed political aides. The question of accountability is where the stories start to differ: Nixon was forced to resign by Republicans dismayed by his behavior; today, lockstep partisanship means that many GOP members of Congress pulled their punches in Trump’s two impeachment trials. Now Trump, like Nixon before him, is using the muscle of the federal government to bully and persecute his political adversaries.
More than one year ago, my colleague Anne Applebaum described the Trump administration as the most corrupt in American history, and the headlines routinely provide attestation. Over the weekend, for example, The New York Times reported on how Trump and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick struck a deal with the Kazakh government to give an American company access to Kazakh tungsten deposits, and to provide $1.6 billion in financing; the sons of both Trump and Lutnick now stand to profit from business arrangements based on the deal. A week before this, the Times reported that the administration killed an investigation into how a convicted fraudster had obtained clemency from the president—only one of many cases of what look like pay-to-play commutations and pardons.
The Wall Street Journal recently delved into how the billionaire Larry Ellison’s roughly $45 million donation to a Trump-supporting nonprofit in the 2024 election helped facilitate his son David’s acquisition of Paramount, the corporate parent of CBS News, which he has moved to make a media ally of the White House, and pending acquisition of CNN. (A Paramount spokesperson told the Journal that the company had made no commitments to any government body about coverage.)
The Washington Post reported earlier this month that more than half of the publicly identified donors to Trump’s intended White House ballroom have won new or larger federal contracts in recent months—totaling more than $50 billion. The president is aiming to host a major international conference at his own property—a step scandalous enough that he was forced to back down by Republicans when he tried it during his first term. No wonder the FBI has dissolved its public-corruption unit.
This is not an exhaustive list, even for the past few weeks, which is part of the point: Watergate shocked the conscience because it was so rare to have such a fetid scandal break into view. But by following Steve Bannon’s maxim to “flood the zone with shit,” Trump has avoided the monthslong drip-drip of Watergate revelations, overwhelmed the press, and desensitized the public. Hardly anyone can maintain a mental list of all the improprieties..
This would be a powerful argument coming from the vice president, who has worried about what he sees as insufficient morality in American society and has said that his role is “to try to apply moral principles in ways that get the best outcomes.” Instead, Vance has concluded that his best chance at political advancement is to hitch himself to the corrupt and unethical Trump. Such cynicism would do Nixon proud.
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