U.S. President Donald Trump gestures during an event at The Villages Charter School at The Villages, Florida, U.S., May 1, 2026.
There is no shortage of statistics indicating that Americans are hurting financially right now, and that they blame President Donald Trump for the situation, with 57 percent saying they are “financially worse off” directly because of his actions. At the same time, thanks to financial disclosures released last week, critics say they have proof that he’s leveraging the presidency to his own financial gain, and that he’s blatantly manipulating markets to do so.
As the iPaper explains, “Details within the disclosures, which showed thousands of transactions in the first quarter of the year alone, are hard to ignore. Trump has bought millions of dollars in tech stocks, including Oracle, Nvidia and Meta — all companies his administration has made deals with or changed regulations to seemingly help. He has bought stock in data analytics company Palantir, even as the Department of Defense gave it massive contracts. Most blatantly, Trump’s disclosures show he bought millions of dollars worth of Boeing stock in the weeks before his state visit to Beijing last week, where he announced a deal to sell 200 Boeing planes to China.”
Journalist Judd Legum laid out more "smoking guns" he spotted in the disclosures, which provide a good overview of how Trump’s insider-trading scam works.
“On March 11,” explains Legum, “President Trump took a tour of a manufacturing facility in Reading, Ohio, owned by Thermo Fisher Scientific, a medical supply company.” During the tour, he lavished praise on the company, praising the CEO and asking an executive to share “some great information about this incredible company.” The executive went on to note that Thermo Fisher is producing drugs for Merck and other companies, and Trump then “explicitly encouraged other pharmaceutical companies to contract with Thermo Fisher.”
“Trump did not mention that, the same day of the tour, March 11, he purchased between $15,000 and $50,000 of Thermo Fisher stock,” says Legum, explaining that disclosure rules only require transactions to be listed in broad ranges. “Trump also purchased between $51,000 and $115,000 worth of Thermo Fisher stock about one month before his visit on February 12. He made another purchase of Thermo Fisher valued between $15,000 and $50,000 on March 2. So at the time of Trump’s effusive remarks about Thermo Fisher, he had purchased as much as $215,000 worth of the company’s stock over the previous month.”
And as Legum notes, that’s not even the only example of Trump’s market manipulation from that very day.
“After touring the Thermo Fisher facility in Ohio,” writes Legum, “Trump traveled to Kentucky and delivered a speech that afternoon. During his remarks, Trump singled out Apple and CEO Tim Cook for praise. ‘Apple, a great company, $2.5 billion to manufacture 100 percent of the glass for iPhones and Apple Watches right here in Kentucky factories,’ Trump declared. ‘Apple [is] spending $650 billion on new plants all over the United States. Think of that. Who the hell else could have done this, nobody else. Nobody else. I say it kiddingly, but I’m actually not kidding. Nobody else could… he’s done a good job, Tim Cook.’”
That day, “Trump purchased between $250,000 and $500,000 of Apple stock.” Nine days earlier, he’d bought between $1,000,000 and $5,000,000. So in the less than two weeks leading up to Trump’s highly public statement that sent Apple stock soaring, he bought somewhere between $2-7.2 million. And for good measure, during his comments on Apple, he also gave Thermo Fisher another mention.
The examples continue: Micron, Dell, and others. Time and time again, Trump has pumped up stocks that he himself has just purchased, raking in a fortune.
As the iPaper’s James Ball notes, “Being rich has never done Donald Trump any harm with his base. If anything, it’s done the opposite,” as they view him as an aspirational figure. “That image relies, however, on Trump’s supporters believing that the President is also making it easier for them to get rich, too,” but as noted above, Americans are not feeling that.
“Against that backdrop,” writes Ball, “Trump’s personal wealth could rapidly shift from serving as a political asset to a liability, especially if it looks like the President is enriching himself at the voters’ expense. That’s why the President’s latest financial disclosures… could come at a bad time for Trump, just six months before crucial midterm elections.” This is especially true when he’s making highly publicized statements like, “I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation.”
“U.S. voters have shown time and again that they are happy to turn a blind eye to Trump’s wealth and controversies, so long as he delivered for them,” Ball concludes. “Increasingly, he’s failed to do that even as his own efforts at self-enrichment become ever-more blatant. With the midterms just months away, Trump could soon find that their patience has run out.”