We are all sleeping through Trump's monetization of the White House |
We are all sleeping through Trump’s monetization of the White House
Back in 2023, I wrote the wildly underrated (or so I believe) book “Filthy Rich Politicians.” It was a field guide detailing how the rich get elected and how the elected get rich.
It was a bipartisan hit job. Democrats, Republicans, lobbyists, and congressional spouses with supernatural stock-picking abilities — I did my best to roast them all.
But I have to confess that the book now feels quaint. It is like a corruption museum exhibit where schoolchildren point at the old-timey artifacts and say, “Gee, Grandpa, politicians only used to steal millions?”
Because nothing — and I mean nothing — I wrote about and nobody I criticized (including President Trump in his first tour of duty) comes remotely close to the industrial-scale money machine that is Trump’s second term.
Take insider trading. I devoted an entire chapter to the topic, which heavily featured Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and her husband Paul’s suspiciously well-timed stock trades. This was fair game: Pelosi had both public policy influence and access to inside information.
But Trump has something infinitely more valuable: the power to create the information. He can move markets — and he does.
According to the Associated Press, during the first quarter of 2026 alone, Trump made “more than 3,600 buy and sell orders, many of them involving companies whose profits have been directly impacted by his decisions as head of the government.”
Just to give you one example from earlier this year: MSNBC’s Michael A. Cohen reported that Trump bought as much as $5 million in Nvidia stock “right before the artificial intelligence chipmaker received permission to export its........