President Donald Trump has brazenly engaged in what appears to be insider trading. A bombshell story published in Bloomberg on May 14, 2026, revealed that Trump made thousands of stock trades in the first quarter of this year with companies connected to the government. This isn't fake news. Bloomberg analyzed publicly available information from the U.S. Office of Government Ethics regarding Trump's financial disclosures—information that Trump was forced to divulge because of a government regulation called the STOCK Act.

Bloomberg summarized its findings, stating that "President Donald Trump's latest financial disclosures show that he or his investment advisers made more than 3,700 trades in the first quarter, a flurry totaling tens of millions of dollars and involving major companies that have dealings with his administration."

Insider trading is blatantly illegal. Among the flood of Trump's highly questionable, unethical, immoral, and criminal dealings, this one may be the most egregious.

The federal agency, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), defines insider trading as "buying or selling a security, in breach of a fiduciary duty or other relationship of trust and confidence, on the basis of material, nonpublic information about the security." Perpetrators usually include corporate executives with inside information that gives them an edge on stock prices, enabling them to buy or sell to their advantage. But the SEC also singles out "Government employees who traded based on confidential information they learned because of their employment with the government."

So blatant are Trump's trades that a Bloomberg headline states they even "astonished" Wall Street insiders. But the White House dismissed the idea that Trump engaged in any wrongdoing by simply claiming that he "only acts in the best interests of the American public," and that "there are no conflicts of interest."

A USA Today report found that the president's stock purchases "reflected a broad overlap of companies that Trump has promoted at the White House and on his trip to meet with China's President Xi Jinping," including stocks of Apple, Nvidia, and Tesla. Executives of all three companies accompanied the president during his recent visit to China.

Trump is now worth hundreds of millions of dollars more than he was before his second term began, much of it through the buying and selling of cryptocurrency—yet another venture where he used his public office for personal gain. The New York Times explained, "Mr. Trump's sale of crypto has been by far his biggest moneymaker, according to Reuters. People who hope to influence federal policy, including foreigners, can buy his family's coins, effectively transferring money to the Trumps, and the deals are often secret. A United Arab Emirates-backed investment firm announced plans last year to deposit $2 billion into a Trump firm—two weeks before the president gave the country access to advanced chips."

The president of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, Donald Sherman, denounced the deal involving the sale of the chips as a "blatant, disgraceful conflict of interest and a possible violation of the Constitution's Federal Emoluments Clause."

Trump has engaged in a dizzying array of insider-trading-type moves that the Brennan Center for Justice called "Epic Corruption in Plain Sight." These include buying up stocks of Paramount, Netflix, and Warner Brothers at the same time as his administration was overseeing a merger deal involving the three companies, investing in Palantir just before lauding the company in public and approving its contracts with the federal government, and buying stocks of Oracle while approving its deal to buy the social media company TikTok.

That the president is openly cheating is not at all surprising. In an infamous exchange with Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton in 2016, he claimed he was "smart" rather than a cheat for outwitting the IRS.

Such behavior in any other elected official would be cause for a major uproar—investigations, hearings, and possible impeachment. Instead, because Trump has skewed the standards of acceptable behavior to such a great degree, it will likely be met with a collective shrug.

Worse, while Trump is busy cheating his way into extreme wealth, his voters are starving. Literally.

In an NPR interview, Gerald, an ardent fan of the president, who lives in Atlanta, revealed that his precarious financial situation—one that he hoped would improve with Trump in the White House—has only worsened over the past year. Among the reasons for Gerald's struggles are rising gas prices, which are directly linked to the president's decision to wage war on Iran. Gerald, who remains "very happy with the president," was stoic about his situation, saying he skips meals to save money. "[M]e and my wife have been fasting, and there's a lot of benefits, including one of those benefits is saving money on groceries," he told NPR.

Anecdotal evidence shows Gerald isn't the only one suffering. Trump supporters are realizing that their leader has not, in fact, enacted the economic relief he promised. Even a Fox News poll spelled a dire warning, with the headline "As Economic Pain Deepens, Disapproval of Trump Hits New High."

How concerned is Trump with the public's suffering? "Not even a little bit," he said, in response to a journalist's question before his China trip. "I don't think about Americans' financial situation," he added.

While the Iran war is seen as a source of much economic pain, Trump's war on immigrants has also hurt U.S. citizens. Conservatives like to claim that immigrants take jobs meant for U.S. citizens and depress wages because they're willing to work for less. But a new study by the University of Colorado Boulder found that arrests and disappearances by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have resulted in a worse economic outlook for all.

Rather than increase wages to attract U.S.-born workers, employers in immigrant-heavy industries, such as agriculture and construction, downsized their businesses when their immigrant workers failed to show up because of deportation or fear of ICE terror. That, in turn, led to job losses among U.S.-born workers. One of the study's authors noted that "For every six male undocumented workers lost, we found that the labor market also loses one male U.S.-born worker."

It turns out immigrants work in jobs that complement rather than steal jobs held by citizens, and Trump's war on immigrants has only caused more economic pain for everyone. Everyone, except for Trump, who received campaign contributions from the private prison industry, which is in the business of imprisoning immigrants.

Trump's "One Big Beautiful Bill" of 2025 also slashed funding for food stamps and Medicaid, the very government programs that low-income Americans, including his supporters, need in dire times such as these. But this matters little to the president as long as his grand White House ballroom gets built—one that could cost taxpayers $1 billion in security costs.

As Trump's wealth soars, the economic pain of ordinary Americans is reaching a breaking point—including those of his supporters forking over hundreds of dollars for cheap gold-colored "Trump phones" the president is shilling. The grift is brazen—and apparently made in Taiwan, not the U.S. as promised.

People are hurting, and for now at least, are expressing their rage in opinion polls. In a recent CNN poll, a whopping 76 percent of Americans said the high cost of living was their most important concern. Trump's Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent's only explanation for the public's economic pain is that the respondents seem to be collectively lying: "The consumer, while they may be sounding grim, is actually quite buoyant," he said. "[I]n their heart of hearts, they feel good. I'm not sure what they're telling the survey people."

Sonali Kolhatkar is an award-winning multimedia journalist. She is the founder, host, and executive producer of "Rising Up With Sonali," a weekly subscriber-funded television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. Her books include Talking About Abolition: A Police-Free World Is Possible (Seven Stories Press, 2025) and Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice (City Lights Books, 2023). She is a writing fellow for the Economy for All project at the Independent Media Institute and was a senior editor at Yes! Magazine covering race and economy. She serves as the co-director of the nonprofit solidarity organization the Afghan Women's Mission and is a co-author of Bleeding Afghanistan. She also sits on the board of directors of Justice Action Center, an immigrant rights organization.

Source: Independent Media Institute

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.