Trump Hit With Bombshell Demand Over Staggering Stock Trades
Democrats want answers over Trump’s stock trades since returning to office.

Reuters
President Donald Trump is facing new demands from two top Democrats to explain a staggering volume of stock trades made in his name while he has been in the White House.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Rep. Robert Garcia sent Trump a 17-page letter Wednesday, first reported by CNBC, questioning more than 21,000 trades in 2025 and another 3,500 during the first three months of 2026.
The transactions generated more than $2.2 billion in revenue last year, according to the New York Times.
Warren and Garcia say that’s unprecedented.
“The sheer volume of stock trading by a sitting president is unprecedented,” Warren and Garcia wrote. “You—or the entities responsible for your accounts—made an average of approximately 50 trades every day markets were open during the first quarter of 2026.”
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Trump has insisted he has no role in the decisions.

Senator Elizabeth Warren has previously accused Trump of corruption.
Heather Diehl/Getty Images
“We have funds that run my money,” Trump said in July. “They invest my money, and I don’t talk to them. I never—I don’t even speak to them.”
His son Eric Trump has similarly claimed the president’s investments are handled independently, writing on X that his father’s holdings “are maintained exclusively in fully discretionary accounts managed by independent third-party financial institutions.”
But Warren and Garcia want Trump to identify the money managers overseeing his portfolio and explain whether he knew about individual trades that appeared to coincide with government actions or policy announcements.
The lawmakers highlighted 15 trades they said raised potential conflicts of interest. Among them was Trump’s purchase of Nvidia and AMD stock on Jan. 6, shortly before the administration announced changes that would make it easier for the companies to sell chips to China.

Rep. Robert Garcia is ranking member of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.
Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Imag
They also cited a Feb. 10 purchase of between $1 million and $5 million in Axon Enterprises, which makes Tasers. Two weeks later, Immigration and Customs Enforcement announced a $220 million Taser contract.
“The appearance of numerous conflicts of interest from a President trading in individual stocks — including the potential for insider trading, market manipulation, and policy decisions that benefit the President’s stock portfolio rather than the public interest – undermines public trust in government,” Warren and Garcia wrote.
“The American people deserve to know that the President is not using his office to increase the value of his stock portfolios, rather than working to bring down the cost of groceries,” they added.
Warren said the controversy underscores the need for new restrictions on presidential investments.
“The American people deserve to know if the president is working for them or for his own stock portfolio,” Warren told CNBC. “It’s past time we ban Members of Congress, the Vice President, and the President from owning and trading individual stocks.”
The White House and Trump’s family have denied that his trading presents a conflict of interest.
White House spokesperson Anna Kelly told The Daily Beast: “All of President Trump’s investment holdings are in held in fully discretionary accounts managed by independent third-party financial institutions.
“This is the same, tired narrative that Democrats have pushed against President Trump, his family, and his administration for a decade. President Trump only acts in the best interests of the American public – which is why they overwhelmingly re-elected him to this office, despite years of lies and false accusations against him and his businesses from the fake news media. There are no conflicts of interest.”
“To suggest that individual stocks are being bought or sold, at the discretion of any member of the Trump family, would be a lie and blatantly false,” Eric Trump wrote on X in May.
Eric Trump has also claimed that “all of our assets are invested in a blind trust.”
But that claim has come under scrutiny. Trump has placed much of his wealth in a revocable trust bearing his own name, with Donald Trump Jr. serving as its sole trustee, according to CNBC.

The letter is a sign that the Democrats are planning to investigate Trump if the win back Congress in the midterms.
Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images
That structure gives Trump more control than a traditional blind trust, under which a president would not know what assets are being held.
The New York Times has reported there is no indication Trump has a true blind trust.
Warren and Garcia pointed to that discrepancy in their letter, telling Trump: “You yourself signed a financial disclosure certifying your awareness of thousands of individual stock transactions.”
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