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DONALD TRUMP IS ROBBING Americans blind, and even Republicans are starting to notice.
You may recall that back in March, there were some suspiciously timed, uncannily lucrative oil and stock trades. About fifteen minutes before Trump abruptly announced he was retracting some threats against Iran, billions of dollars’ worth of contracts were placed on bets that oil prices would fall and the S&P 500 would jump. And those lucky bastards turned out to be right!
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Less known was that the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, a federal regulator that supervises futures markets, began a preliminary investigation of the suspicious trading volume surge. But according to a bombshell story this week from Bloomberg, a senior adviser to the Trump-appointed CFTC chairman subsequently “intervened” and told them to lay off. Staff had made a referral to CFTC’s internal enforcement division to launch a full-scale insider trading investigation; they were ordered to retract it.
If this was a case of insider trading—and there are some beet-red flags to suggest it was—it would not be a victimless crime. There were losers on the other side of those bets, the chumps whom the insiders got to steal money from by virtue of having an inside line to the White House.
Sure, some of those chumps might have been rich, unsympathetic Wall Street traders; but some of them might have been your pension fund.
Were this an isolated incident, it would be bad enough: Trump and/or his cronies may have used access to market-moving information to enrich themselves, and the Trump-appointed regulators made sure none of their actions were properly investigated.
But this sort of apparent malfeasance looks like one of the defining characteristics of the Trump era.
For months Trump Media has been trying to shake down Wall Street firms for early access to Trump’s Truth Social posts. The idea being to more formally monetize insider access, and give Trump a cut. As San Francisco City Attorney David Chiu, who is suing Trump Media on behalf of Californians, put it: “Trump Media created a marketplace that enables insider trading, which Trump directly profits from. . . . Californians should not be forced to compete against wealthy trading firms buying early access to market‑moving information.”
This is public robbery, and it isn’t confined to selling early information about administration decisions to allies and eager profiteers. Under this administration, selling out American voters is a going concern.
To wit, check out these two stories from just this Wednesday:
The White House aide pushing Trump’s crypto/stablecoin bill last year was simultaneously receiving (through a company he co-owns) millions of dollars from Tether, the world’s largest stablecoin issuer. The Wall Street Journal, which broke the story, reported that after the legislation passed, Tether hired the aide outright to run its American operations.
More than half of the Trump memecoin holders in the running for a steak dinner with the president appear to be based in other countries, according to CBS News. (Will they have trouble securing visas to attend the Trump dinner?)
Then, on Thursday, the Washington Post published a list of the Trump ballroom “donors” who all together forked over some $330 million for the president’s vanity project.¹ As with the other examples above, the White House refused to turn over this information to the public. But thanks to this leak we now know tha