If you’re surprised by any of the Trump family’s grifting since Donald’s return to office, you just haven’t been paying attention. Still, it’s important not to let the incredibly open level of corruption to fall into the background if we want any chance of understanding how we got here.

The latest revelation, first reported by Popular Information, follows the familiar pattern of Trump family ruses.

In a new tranche of public disclosures released last Friday, Donald Trump admitted to executing thousands of stock trades in 2026 so far. Many of the stocks he purchased, PopInfo found, had their values directly inflated by Trump’s policies or his behavior as sitting US president — sometimes to a comically blatant degree.

On March 11, for example, the president took a tour of Ohio-based medical tech company Thermo Fisher.

“It’s a great honor being here,” Trump said in front of eager cameras, alongside Fisher’s CEO Marc Casper. “It’s a great company. You have done a fantastic job and I’d like to congratulate you.”

As we now know, in the weeks leading up to his seemingly-random visit, Trump’s trust — managed by his son Donald Trump Jr — purchased as much as $215,000 worth of stock options in Fisher, PopInfo reported. That would be sketchy enough. But then, on the same day of the tour, Trump placed an additional buy order worth between $15,001 and $50,000 of Fisher stock.

Amazingly, it didn’t quite work. Fisher’s stock fell from a high of $501 on March 11 to $491 the next day, and currently hovers even lower. Still, it’s the principle of the thing: the fact that a sitting president can even attempt to game the stock market to boost his own personal fortune beggars belief.

Fisher is far from the only stock Trump has tried to boost. He tried similar tricks with semiconductor company Micron, which he called “one of the hottest companies” in a live interview on FOX News the day after placing a $50,000-$100,000 order.

Then again on February 19, Trump encouraged a crowd of supporters in Georgia to “go out and buy a Dell computer.” At the time, commentators saw the move as a reciprocal gesture to the Dell family, which had donated $6.25 billion toward the “Trump Account” youth investment program. But unsurprisingly, it turns out the president had also purchased between $1 and $5 million in Dell Technologies stock just nine days before his remarks.

In a statement to Reuters, a spokesman for Trump’s private holdings said that “President Trump’s investment holdings are maintained exclusively through fully discretionary accounts independently managed by third-party financial institutions with sole and exclusive authority over all investment decisions. Trades are executed and portfolios are balanced through automated investment ‌processes ⁠and systems administered by those institutions.”

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