The E-Trade presidency: Trump trades stocks while America burns

Last month was a nerve-racking time for investors in the massive military-tech contractor Palantir. They’d expected big returns on the Miami-based firm’s close ties with Donald Trump’s warfighting regime, only to instead see shares plummet amid Wall Street fears the firm is falling behind its rivals on artificial intelligence, or AI.

The plunge was very bad news for one particular high-profile Palantir backer who’d purchased as much as $630,000 in its stock in the preceding weeks. But unlike thousands of other passive investors, this billionaire could do something about the situation, considering that he is also the 47th president of the United States.

“Palantir Technologies (PLTR) has proven to have great war fighting capabilities and equipment,” Donald Trump posted on his own social media platform, Truth Social, on April 10. “Just ask our enemies!!!”

It’s so hard to be shocked by anything these days, but it was stunning to see the American president using Palantir’s Nasdaq ticker symbol — no, no president has never done this before — in a post that read like a tout for a dubious penny stock. And that was before the subsequent government ethics filing revealing that Trump was personally trading Palantir, and scores of other stocks in companies that do substantial business or are regulated by his regime.

It doesn’t even matter that Trump is about as successful a stock tout as he is a president. In the minutes after his April post, Palantir’s shares shot up by 3%, fueled by his diehard MAGA fans and probably by some who saw Trump’s endorsement as a sign the company will retain its favored status as the U.S. looks to resume bombing Iran and God knows who else. But investors with actual savvy used the bump as an excuse to bail out, and Palantir shares were down by day’s end.

It was just another day in the life of a presidency so corrupt that it makes the previous record-holder, Richard Nixon, and all that president’s men look like jaywalkers.

Yet the mandated ethics report which exposed that a supposed wartime president found time in the first three months for more than 3,700 stock trades — in a range between $220 million and $750 million, in firms like Meta, Goldman Sachs, Oracle and many others — barely registered as a blip in the 24-hour news cycle.

It comes as there’s been a robust if also under-the-radar online debate: Why don’t Trump’s high crimes and misdemeanors — “A Watergate everyday,” as the writer Garrett M. Graff described them — ever gain public traction in the way that Nixon’s scandals or even Bill Clinton’s extramarital affair once did?

» READ MORE: Your guide to Cryptogate, Trump’s $4 billion corruption scandal that’s 10 times bigger than Watergate

A lot of it has to do with the utterly jaded cynicism of a battered electorate that, in a broken media environment, no longer knows who or what to believe in. But it’s also clear that Team Trump has flooded the zone with so much raw sewage that it’s difficult for journalists, let alone the few remaining news consumers, not to get inundated.

Last week, I told my editors that I hoped to play catch up with the many White House corruption scandals, including one that was breaking that day: The president’s family had launched a company called Trump Mobile that had taken $100 deposits from 590,000 eager marks — that would be $59 million — for a phone that, a year later does not exist and, according to the fine print, probably won’t ever happen.

But that day’s Watergate quickly came and went — sucked into the news vortex like an unlucky cow in the path of an EF5 tornado, and then it was quickly replaced by the following days’ Watergates, like the exposure of Trump’s dodgy stock trades, which by tomorrow will be subsumed by...

STOP!!!

Can we all take a deep breath and linger for a few seconds on the image of a president who managed to all but lose a war in the Persian Gulf in a matter of days, and who admittedly doesn’t care that the average American is suffering from astronomical gas prices or unaffordable health insurance spending his workday yelling at his broker to buy the dips.

This is the E-Trade presidency. In an era when the everyday American is increasingly addicted to sports gambling, or loading up on crypto, or betting on the next drone strike, Trump has emerged as our gambler-in-chief. And like any other average schlub addicted to The Bet, the president said to be “bored” with the Iran War is neglecting all his real-world responsibilities for the next Wall Street sugar high.

During the 2000 Super Bowl, just a month into this cursed century and right before the dot-com boom crashed, E-Trade famously ran a commercial that featured a chimpanzee dancing for 30 seconds to “La Cucaracha” with the tagline: “Well, we just wasted 2 million bucks. What are you doing with your money?”

Now, that dancing chimp is the American president. He is wasting as much as $2 billion every day on an Iran War that is as pointless as it is illegal. What are you doing with your tax dollars?

The touting and trading of shares in Palantir — which has a $10 billion contract with the U.S. Army and powers some of the government’s most controversial programs from targeting sites for bombing in Iran to aiding in immigration raids — is an impeachment worthy offense, in and of itself.

But the new filing also reveals that Trump this year has purchased between $1 million and $5 million in shares of the AI chipmaker Nvidia, right before his regime cleared the regulatory path for Nvidia to sell its chips to firms in China — which caused the Trump-owned stock to jump by 4% — and also brought its CEO Jensen Huang with him on Air Force One to last week’s summit in Beijing.

Then there’s Boeing. Trump also bought between $1 million and $5 million of the jet manufacturer’s shares in early February, then hoped to be able to announce on his China trip that Xi Jinping’s regime is buying 500 jets from the U.S. aviation giant. When the real number (maybe) turned out to be only 200, the president’s shares tumbled by 4%. That’s what happens when you fiddle with day trades while America burns.

If we all had enough hours in the day, I’d also tell you why it’s massively corrupt and arguably illegal (and if not, it should be) for Trump to be buying and selling shares of companies like Oracle, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Meta (Facebook), Alphabet, Google, and others with contracting or regulatory issues in Washington.

The fact that we now give such major scandals the American equivalent of the famed Philly Shrug has created a climate of utter cynicism that permeates the entire regime. In the case of Trump’s Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, he found time — while America’s aviation system was imploding — to not only film a reality show, but solicit companies with matters before his agency, such as Boeing, United Airlines, and Toyota. But this is a fish that ultimately stinks from the head.

Again, there should have been individual columns that screamed bloody murder about Trump’s meme coin, his sons’ anti-drone business profiting off the Iran War, his sons’ Pentagon dealings, his negotiator son-in-law on the payroll of Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states, the Melania Trump meme coin, the Melania Trump Amazon documentary deal, the $400 million Qatari jet, the family crypto business, and...

Do I need to go on...?

This on top of everything else he’s focused on besides tackling high prices, expanding access to health care, and figuring out how to end his idiotic war in Iran, including the ballroom, the “victory” arch, the turning-blue reflecting pool, the pardons for friends and donors, and his latest gob-smacking scheme for the Justice Department to create a $1.7 billion slush fund to reward the goons of his Jan. 6, 2021 coup attempt.

Undoing this mess is not going to be easy, but if we pretend that we cannot do anything about it, then — as Trump himself is wont to say — you won’t have a country anymore.

Nothing should be more fundamental to the Democrats’ fall campaign to retake the House and possibly even the Senate than to promise voters that their No. 1 priority — considering they won’t have a veto-proof supermajority to pass legislation — will be using their newfound subpoena power to hold corruption hearings. That includes Trump’s House impeachment, which will not remove him from office but provide the venue to hold what would amount to national truth and reconciliation hearings on America’s sorry slide into this tyranny.

Pass legislation that would ensure that no future president can sell his office to the highest bidder as Trump has done. Ban stock trading by the president and cabinet members (and Congress, too) and make a blind investment trust an unquestioned legal requirement — along with annual disclosure of income tax returns. Force Trump to veto these bills in 2027 and then work like hell to get a new POTUS who will sign them in 2029.

While Trump was buying all those tech stocks, he sold short the American people. To save democracy, it’s past time for a margin call.

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