Following the release of President Donald Trump’s financial disclosure filing for 2025, showing that in the first year of his second term he pocketed $2.2 billion, including $1.4 billion in cryptocurrency deals, the World Socialist Web Site wrote, “The scale of Trump’s self-enrichment renders the great corruption scandals of American history almost quaint by comparison.”

Recent analyses of the disclosure report, which were filed with the Office of Government Ethics, have brought into sharper relief Trump’s use of the presidency to line his own pockets and those of family members.

On July 17, CNN published an investigative report documenting the fact that in 2025 Trump made at least 44 stock purchases of 21 different companies within a week of posting a complimentary Truth Social message about the firms, their executives or their products. Trump also made other stock purchases shortly before posting more general messages highlighting policy changes that could benefit those companies, but without naming them.

CNN used artificial intelligence to review Trump’s Truth Social posts in relation to the stock transactions listed in the disclosure filing. That report gives the amount of each purchase in broad ranges.

·         On January 6, 2025, Trump bought at least $1,000 in US Steel stock. The same day he posted on Truth Social that his planned tariffs would “make it a much more profitable and valuable company.”

·         On March 10, 2025, Trump bought between $15,000 and $50,000 in stock in each of GE Aerospace, Eli Lilly and Apple. On March 12, he mentioned all three companies in a single Truth Social post, quoting from a Fox News article highlighting their new investments in US industries.

·         On April 5, 2025, Trump purchased $200,000-$500,000 in shares of chip manufacturer Nvidia. On April 15, he posted the following on Truth Social: “NVIDIA COMMITS 500 BILLION DOLLARS TO BUILD A.I. SUPERCOMPUTERS, PLUS, IN THE UNITED STATES EXCLUSIVELY… All necessary permits will be expedited and quickly delivered to NVIDIA.”

·         On July 23, 2025, Trump purchased $500,000-$1million in Tesla stock. The following day, July 24, he posted on Truth Social: “Everyone is stating that I will destroy Elon’s companies by taking away some, if not all, of the large scale subsidies he receives from the U.S. Government. This is not so! I want Elon to THRIVE.”

Trump made more than 50 purchases of Tesla stock last year, investing at least $4 million. In March of 2025, he posted videos of himself and Tesla CEO Elon Musk standing alongside Tesla cars at the White House and promoting the firm’s pledge to increase production in the US. Several of Trump’s Tesla stock purchases, involving at least $17,000, were made days before those Truth Social posts promoting Tesla.

·         On July 28, 2025, Trump purchased $15,000-$50,000 in American Eagle stock. A Truth Social post on August 4 declared: “Sydney Sweeney, a registered Republican, has the “HOTTEST” ad out there. It’s for American Eagle, and the jeans are “flying off the shelves.” Go get ‘em Sydney!”

·         On August 18, 2025, Trump bought at least $250,000 in stock in two defense contractors that produced components of the F-22 Raptor jet—RTX and Boeing—as well as at least $100,000 in stock in a third, Northrop Grumman. Days later, he posted a video of the F-22 Raptor, proclaiming it “the greatest and most beautiful fighter ever made.”

By such criminal actions, the Trump White House has institutionalized at the height of state power the insider trading that pervades the wheeling and dealing of the financial oligarchy. Unlike every US president going back at least five decades, Trump has not placed his assets in a blind trust. He has refused to divest from his businesses and placed them instead in a trust he can still access. One of the trustees is his son Donald Trump Jr.

White House spokesperson Anna Kelly responded to CNN’s report with the brazen lying and impudence that typifies the Trump administration:

President Trump only acts in the best interests of the American public—which is why they overwhelmingly re-elected him to his office, despite years of lies and false accusations against him and his businesses from the fake news media. There are no conflicts of interest.

In what must rank as the understatement of the decade, Dylan Hedtler-Gaudette of the Project on Government Oversight called Trump’s combination of social media posting and stock trading “a case study in presidential conflicts of interest.”

Other examples of Trump’s corruption include:

On August 1, Trump Media & Technology Group, which owns Truth Social, will begin selling quicker access to Trump’s Truth Social posts to Wall Street firms, so the firms can make more money trading on the posts. The service, called Truth API, is aimed at financial services organizations, including high-frequency trading firms that rely on rapid access to market-moving information.

Trump Media has played up how much Truth Social impacts the markets. Interim CEO Kevin McGurn said, “Markets already move on Truth Social posts.” He added that Truth API would provide traders with a more instantaneous feed on the platform’s “most market-moving Truths,” helping to “monetize proprietary assets.”

The new venture will only expand Trump’s use of Truth Social to manipulate markets and increase his personal wealth.

In May, at the time of Trump’s state visit to China, Nvidia was granted approval to export H200 AI processors to 10 Chinese companies, potentially opening up a $50 billion market for Nvidia, whose shares rose 4 percent on the news, pushing the company’s market cap to more than $5.7 trillion. Trump, who holds between $1 million and $5 million in Nvidia stock, brought CEO Jensen Huang on Air Force One to China, where the chip export approval was announced on day one of the trip. The approval increased the value of Trump’s stock holdings by as much as $5 million.

The New York Times reported last week that the top investor in a South Korean aluminum company facing US Commerce Department penalties on exports to the US made a $2 million contribution in 2025 to Trump’s holding company. The payment by the parent company, Base Group, was revealed for the first time in Trump’s financial disclosure filing released in June. Base Group recently hosted Eric Trump at its Seoul headquarters.

The $2 million from Base Group is only a small fraction of the millions collected in 2025 by Trump’s holding company from foreign sources. According to the Times, Trump’s business received a total of at least $125 million in payments from many countries, including Britain, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Oman, the Philippines, Qatar, Romania, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Turkey, Vietnam and the United Arab Emirates.

The fact that none of the official institutions of American capitalism—least of all the Democratic Party—are willing or able to rein in Trump’s criminality testifies to the rule of a staggeringly wealthy and parasitic financial oligarchy, which has installed a fascistic product of the New York real estate and gambling mafia in the White House.

When asked by the New York Times in January why he’s so open about using politics for personal profit, Trump said, “I found out that nobody cared. I’m allowed to.”