The President of the United States appears to have further increased his record level of personal enrichment during his presidency this year by purchasing shares of companies just before his own administration made favorable decisions for these businesses.
Donald Trump bought up to $1 million in Nvidia shares just a few days before the company received authorization to sell advanced computer chips to China, according to a recent official statement. He also bought up to $100,000 in AMD shares, another chip manufacturer, shortly before that company was also authorized to sell in China.
A few weeks before Palantir received a new contract with the Department of Homeland Security to support its deportation policy, Donald Trump also bought up to $150,000 in shares of that company.
Trump promises to serve only the United States
“By trading significant amounts of shares before his administration’s decisions that would directly impact the price of these shares, Trump has become the sum of all fears related to corruption: a president whose every decision must be questioned to see if it is made in his own financial interest,” said Jordan Libowitz of the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.
These stock transactions, detailed in a report published this Friday, May 15 by the site NOTUS, bear (much more serious) resemblance to the type of activity that Donald Trump had asked members of Congress to ban in his State of the Union speech earlier this year. It is worth noting that members of Congress cannot award public contracts or make regulatory decisions. “The president has a unilateral power that no member of Congress comes close to,” Libowitz added.
Neither the White House nor the Trump Organization, Trump’s private company, responded to questions from HuffPost US. In the past, the White House had stated in response to articles about the use of his office for personal gain that everything Donald Trump does is in the best interest of the United States. The Trump Organization, in a statement to NOTUS, claimed that the management of Trump’s stock portfolio is externally handled and that “neither the president, his family, nor the organization itself play any role in the investments and are not informed about trading activities”.
Trump has openly used his office to personally enrich himself – a clear case of corruption – marking a striking departure from previous presidents who had all been careful to avoid any appearance of conflicts of interest.
When Trump Advertises with Public Money
This week, Trump traveled to China to meet with the country’s authoritarian leader, Xi Jinping, and was accompanied by 17 business leaders from major American companies, several of which Trump personally holds shares in. Among them were Kelly Ortberg from Boeing and Jensen Huang from Nvidia. Both companies reported that this trip had resulted in business opportunities.
Since returning to power in January, Trump has used nearly $18 million in public resources to promote his souvenir cryptocurrencies, his golf resorts in Florida and Scotland, and the golf league LIV funded by Saudi Arabia, with which he has been associated since its creation five years ago.
The money he earns from these activities and stock transactions, however, pales in comparison to the billions he would earn through the cryptocurrency exchange platform World Liberty Financial, which he founded with his sons. This creation came at a time when Trump was getting closer to the cryptocurrency industry after spending years calling it “a scam.”
Note: This article is a translation done by the editorial team of HuffPost France, based on an article published in May 2026 on HuffPost US.
The original article can be read here.
