MS NOW host Rachel Maddow blasted President Donald Trump’s “fantastically corrupt” habit of buying stocks and then boosting the companies he has invested in.
During the first three months of 2026, the billionaire president pocketed tens of millions of dollars through more than 3,700 investment trades involving companies with direct ties to his administration.
His predecessors Joe Biden and Barack Obama didn’t trade stocks while in office, but Trump has disclosed at least $220 million worth of financial transactions this year in what Maddow called “bizarre and incredibly energetic stock trading.”
Within days of Trump buying stocks in chip makers Nvidia and AMD, computing companies Dell and Micron, biotech firm Thermo Fisher, and data analytics company Palantir, the president either publicly praised the companies or approved major new revenue opportunities for them.
“This just appears to be fantastically, kaleidoscopically corrupt,” Maddow said.
In January, the president bought hundreds of thousands of dollars of stock in Nvidia, and $50,000 to $100,00 worth of stock in AMD. A week after those purchases, his commerce department gave both companies permission to sell certain chips in China.
In February, Trump bought millions of dollars’ worth of stock in Dell computers and technologies, and then nine days later veered off script in a speech in Georgia to tell the crowd, “Go out and buy a Dell computer,” Maddow continued.
The next month, Trump repeatedly purchased stock from Thermo Fisher, and then went on a presidential visit on March 11 to its headquarters and praised the company as “incredible.”
That same day, the president bought hundreds of thousands of dollars of Apple stock, and then did another event with Apple CEO Tim Cook in which he singled out Apple as a “great company.”
Next, Trump bought $50,000 to $100,000 in Micron stock, and then a day later called into Fox News Channel and described Micron as “one of the hottest companies.”
And in April, after weeks of buying Palantir stock, Trump posted on Truth Social, “Palantir Technologies (PLTR) has proven to have great war fighting capabilities and equipment. Just ask our enemies!!!”
“He literally posted the stock ticker abbreviation for Palantir right after he bought hundreds of thousands of dollars of their stock,” Maddow marveled.
The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House for comment.
The president’s team has repeatedly insisted that Trump “only acts in the best interests of the American public.”
“There are no conflicts of interest,” spokesperson Davis Ingle said when news of the trading flurry first broke.
The Trump Organization, whose sole owner is Trump, has said the president’s holdings are independently managed by third-party financial institutions, Bloomberg reported.
But this year’s trading volume far exceeds anything the president has reported in the past. Analysts told Bloomberg the number of trades was “baffling” and “unusual” by any standards.
The disclosures don’t reveal exactly how much Trump has earned from the transactions, but they include four sales valued at $5 million to $25 million, CNBC reported.
