Trump's Accounts Made Nearly 28,700 Stock Trades in 17 Months, More Than All 535 Members of Congress Combined, Bloomberg Found. He's Backing a Bill That Bans Lawmakers From Trading and Exempts the President.

President Donald Trump has spent the past year urging Congress to ban its own members from trading stocks, telling lawmakers in his State of the Union address to pass the measure "without delay" because members "cannot corruptly profit from using insider information." A Bloomberg analysis of his own financial disclosures, published Tuesday, September 15, puts that push in an awkward light: between his second inauguration in January 2025 and the end of June 2026, Trump's accounts executed nearly 28,700 individual stock trades. Every member of the House and Senate combined reported about 22,200 similar transactions over the same 17 months.

The numbers come from the periodic transaction reports Trump is required to file under the 2012 STOCK Act, the same law that governs congressional disclosures. Bloomberg's review found that Trump or the money managers acting for him traded at a pace no individual lawmaker approached, and that roughly 20 of those purchases came within a week of the president publicly promoting the company in question. The examples cited include a position in DoorDash bought shortly before Trump hosted a delivery-industry event at the White House, and stakes in Nvidia and Tesla, both of which he has touted from the podium and on social media. In several cases, Bloomberg found, Trump bragged about a stock's gains within days of buying it.

The White House does not dispute the trade count. Its position is that the activity is mechanical. Outside firms manage the president's holdings through index-tracking models, the administration says, and "neither Trump nor his family directs any trades." A portfolio that is rebalanced to mirror an index can generate thousands of small buy and sell orders without anyone choosing an individual stock, which would explain both the volume and the overlap with companies that are large index constituents. Ethics lawyers interviewed for the analysis said that explanation may well be accurate and still miss the point: a president moves markets with a sentence, and trades made by a model on his behalf can look conflicted whether or not he touched them.

That is precisely the argument Trump has made against Congress. The House passed a Republican-sponsored ban in July, led by Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, R-Fla., that would bar members, their spouses and dependent children from trading individual stocks. The bill exempts the president and vice president. Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., has proposed extending the ban to the presidency, an idea the White House has not embraced. Trump has repeatedly singled out former Speaker Nancy Pelosi's trading record as evidence of why the ban is needed. Public support is lopsided: a May Economist/YouGov poll found 75% of Americans favor barring elected officials from trading stocks.

Even if the exemption were removed, enforcement against a sitting president is close to theoretical. The STOCK Act's penalty for a late disclosure starts at $200, and legal experts told Bloomberg the Justice Department, now run by Trump's former personal defense lawyer Todd Blanche, would be unlikely to pursue a case against the man who appointed its leadership. A disclosure filed in May covering just the first quarter of this year had already shown 3,642 trades worth up to $750 million; the new figure extends that pattern across a year and a half.

The report landed the same week Trump attacked his own Supreme Court appointees for refusing to limit mail-in ballots and days after Senate Democrats blocked the crypto market-structure bill partly over his family's digital-asset holdings. Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., called those holdings "a fundamental conflict of interest." The stock-trading numbers give that argument a second front, and the presidential exemption in Luna's bill is now the obvious target for Democrats when the Senate takes it up.