‘A huge problem’: Trump has traded more stocks than all of Congress combined. A Bush-era ethics lawyer explains why you should worry

According to a Bloomberg analysis published this week, he has made roughly 28,700 in 17 months, or about 80 trades every market day,

It’s a new habit of Trump’s. In his first term, Trump’s financial disclosures consisted mostly of his real estate and privately held businesses. 

For his second term, the periodic reports he filed through early 2026 showed an account buying municipal and corporate bonds—more than $100 million by August 2025 and more than $337 million in all—along with bank preferred securities and bond ETFs.

The stock trading surfaced in May of this year, when a first-quarter filing listed roughly 3,600 transactions in 90 days. Then the annual disclosure, released June 30 at nearly a thousand pages, showed more than 21,000 trades in 2025, worth between $600 million and $1.86 billion, at 85 per market day. Trump lists eight separate investment accounts but doesn’t give any indication of which institutions manage them.

“I believe that that is a huge problem,” Richard Painter, who served as chief White House ethics lawyer under President George W. Bush and now teaches securities law at the University of Minnesota, told Fortune. “I’ve gone through every president. I don’t think we’ve had any president trade in the stock market.”

Since Lyndon Johnson, essentially every president has used a blind trust, held index funds, or just owned Treasuries. Jimmy Carter, for example, put the family peanut business in a blind trust that eventually sold it.

However, Trump’s portfolio is handled differently. In May, after the stock trades appeared, White House spokesman Davis Ingle told Fortune the assets are held in a trust managed by the president’s children. Eric Trump posted that any suggestion a family member was buying individual stocks “would be a lie and blatantly false.” 

“There’s a financial conflict of interest if he has an ownership interest in the account,” Painter said. “It doesn’t matter who manages it.”

In a statement, the White House’s Ingle told Fortune that third-party financial institutions independently manage the portfolio through “computer-based model portfolios that automatically replicate recognized indexes, such as the Schwab 1000.”

He did not answer questions about which institutions manage the portfolio or why the White House described a family trust in May. “There are no conflicts of interest,” the statement said.

Fortune’s review of the president’s first-quarter filing in May found the account bought up to $1.38 million of DoorDash stock; in April, Trump had DoorDash deliver a McDonald’s order to the White House for a tipped-worker tax event.

The account sold hyperscaler stocks in the $5 million-$25 million range on Feb. 10, the day after a chip-tariff carveout leaked. It bought energy stocks in the weeks after the Iran war began, as Trump was downplaying the conflict as a short-term conflagration. It bought Cal-Maine, the country’s largest egg producer, during the egg shortage and sold it two months later for two to five times more.

Every executive branch official except the president and vice president has to abide by 18 U.S.C. 208, a criminal statute that bars participation in government matters that affect one’s own holdings. “If he were Treasury Secretary, he’d have a big, big problem with that account,” Painter said.

He was careful, though, not to allege that anyone is trading on government information, which could constitute criminal insider trading, explaining that stock-trading disclosures can’t prove that. 

That, Painter said, is the argument for a ban. A new House measure, passed in July and attached to a voter-ID bill, bars members, spouses and dependent children from trading stocks; Trump endorsed it in his State of the Union address, saying it should pass “without delay” so Congress “cannot corruptly profit from using insider information.”

Yet when Sen. Josh Hawley advanced a version last July that would have extended the ban to the president and vice president—not until 2029, after Trump leaves office—Trump called him a “pawn” playing “right into the dirty hands of the Democrats,” and a “second-tier Senator.”

To Painter, this is all familiar. On Jan. 6, 2021—”obviously, there was some other news that day,” he added—he and Indiana University law professor Donna Nagy published a letter to congressional leadership calling for a ban on stock trading by members, the president and the vice president.

Neither party acted on it; Republicans wanted to avoid embarrassing Trump, while Democrats wanted to avoid embarrassing Nancy Pelosi, whose husband is an active trader.

The stakes are pretty clear to Painter. “If the president owns a bunch of oil company stocks, he’s making money if the price of oil goes up,” he said. “So if he bombs Iran and the price of oil goes up and he owns oil company stocks, he’s making money, and the rest of us are paying for  $6 gas.”

The account bought energy stocks in March.

“If it’s like a mutual fund,” Painter said, “why not just buy a mutual fund?”