The evidence is growing: Trump’s team are using his chaos to get richer on the stock market

Then, at 7.05am, Washington DC time, Trump had big news to announce: peace talks were going wonderfully, he claimed, any offensive was delayed for at least five days, and possibly forever. Traders, desperate for some good news, reacted instantly. Oil prices plummeted about 12% and stocks rose. 

Yet something significant had happened just before that – an unusually large trade in oil stocks. According to the financial news service Bloomberg, at least six million barrels of Brent and West Texas Intermediate were sold between 6:49 am and 6:51 am. Whoever did the selling at prices that were soon about to drop made a killing.

A  major hedge fund trader told the Financial Times: “My gut from watching markets for the last 25 years is this is really abnormal. It’s an unusually large trade for a day with no event risk. . . . Somebody just got a lot richer.”

Democratic senator and stock market observer Chris Murphy went much further: “In one move, $1.5 billion in S&P 500 (ES) futures was bought while $192 million in oil (CL) futures was sold. $1.5 BILLION. Let me say it again – a $1.5 BILLION BET. Bigger than any futures purchases made at the time. 5 minutes before Trump’s post.

“Who was it? Trump? A family member? A White House staffer? This is corruption. Mind blowing corruption.”

Murphy was highlighting that whoever made that trade had to be extremely confident – to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars – that the price of oil would drop and the stock market would rise. That’s the scale of bet you only make when you’re very sure of winning: just the size of the bet on its own, with that timing, is enough to be suspicious, in his view. 

The Iran peace deal was the latest in a long line of Trump announcements that seemed to come from nowhere, timed conveniently for the markets, and which would allow anyone with any foreknowledge they were coming to quickly make a fortune.  

As the world economy recoiled from the shock of Trump’s Liberation Day tariffs, imposed last April 2, US publisher ProPublica wrote that “more than a dozen high-ranking executive branch officials and congressional aides have made well-timed trades since Trump took office in January, most of them selling stock before the market plunged amid fears that Trump’s tariffs would set off a global trade war.”

At the same time as all of this, there have been a flurry of reports on suspicious trading activity on prediction markets – with new accounts making large, amazingly-timed bets with uncannily high success rates. Never before has it been so easy to cash in quickly and directly on knowledge of geopolitical events.

The question is the extent to which this is deliberate, and if so, who is behind it. Some are pointing the finger directly at Trump himself, looking at the timing of his posts – good news often comes shortly before markets open, they note, and bad news waits until they’ve closed.

In reality, Trump is probably not directly part of any insider trading plans. Prediction markets are small. A bet of a few hundred thousand dollars is considered large in this world, and would make profits in the low millions at best. That’s chicken feed to Donald Trump: his family is able to make deals in the billions trading off Trump’s political power and connections.  

The president is venal and is cashing in on his office in unprecedented ways, but he doesn’t need to engage in prediction markets nor day trading on the stock markets. 

Those around him, though, are a different story. There is no shortage of White House staffers who lack the president’s vast wealth and hear enough of what is going on to trade off the back of it. 

Given the amoral culture of Trump’s White House operation, it would be more surprising if people weren’t cashing in than if they were. It will likely turn out that those not doing so are being mocked by their colleagues as bagholders or chumps. 

Trump is inadvertently showing why the rules – and laws – his staffers seem to be disregarding exist in the first place. Once the possibility for a corrupt financial motivation for announcements is a possibility, it becomes impossible to ignore. 

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Did White House insiders bet on the Iran war?

Matt Muir

There are relatively good reasons why Trump might be encouraged to time announcements before markets open and after they close. It gives traders time to digest the implications of whatever news breaks, and not react in a blind panic. 

It is the job of Treasury secretary Scott Bessent – himself worth hundreds of millions of dollars already – to try to keep the markets happy and the USA’s economy strong. If he is encouraging Trump to find ways to minimise the economic damage of his war, and reassure traders, he is doing his job. The timing might have an innocent explanation. But it might not.

The reality is that the US has long tolerated a degree of legalised political corruption that most Western democracies would utterly reject. Congress has exempted itself from insider trading laws, meaning that representatives are free to use information they learn in confidential sessions to trade in companies for which they create laws. It is barely even noteworthy for members of the House to make millions on the markets in their first terms. It often passes with barely a comment.

Beyond this, recent Supreme Court rulings have made corruption all but impossible to prosecute. Donald Trump’s border tsar Tom Homan accepted a literal brown bag full of cash – $50,000 – in a sting operation, only to have all charges dropped, because a successful prosecution now requires the recipient to name a specific official act they will do in exchange for the cash. White collar crime is legal now. 

The Court similarly extended its theory of presidential immunity so expansively that Trump himself is unlikely to ever have to worry about legal consequences for anything he does.

Those around him, though, could come in time to regret cashing in. If Democrats do return to power and decide to actually take action against the corruption of the Trump administration, US laws on insider trading are especially punitive and already cover prediction markets. 

Trump, out of office, would have no ability to offer pardons to his team (unless he remembers to do so in advance). He has in the past shown little loyalty or gratitude to people once they are no longer of use to him. 

If Democrats actually demonstrated the political will to prosecute the crimes of those in the Trump administration, many junior- and mid-ranking staffers might find the rules could be made to apply to them after all. The exemption on insider trading only extends to members of Congress – not them.

It is vanishingly unlikely that Donald Trump is shaping his Iran strategy – or lack of it – to help his staff make money by trading or betting. The White House still insists that he “does not tolerate any administration official illegally profiteering off of insider knowledge, and any implication that officials are engaged in such activity without evidence is baseless and irresponsible reporting.”

But the evidence that his team are taking advantage of the chaos he causes, and maybe even trying to nudge and manipulate the president to suit their trades, is mounting. 

The reality is that until Democrats take the House in the midterms, we have no chance of getting anywhere near the truth of what is happening. Until they’re in the White House, there is no prospect of justice for any of it – and perhaps not even then. In the meantime, doubt will pervade everything. 

Trump is a mad old man, not an evil genius deliberately moving the markets. Those around him, though, could be a very different story indeed.