If Trump is insider trading, he’s terrible at it



At first glance, President Donald Trump’s latest financial disclosures look like a major scandal.

CBS News recently released an interactive dashboard analyzing what it called Trump’s “unprecedented” volume of investment activity during the first quarter of 2026: 1,296 sales and 2,346 purchases worth somewhere between $212 million and $695 million.

Calling it ‘potential insider trading’ is easy. Proving it requires something more than trades that sometimes came before favorable news.

The report emphasized that much of the activity involved individual stocks rather than index funds and noted that some purchases “preceded policy moves” or public statements by Trump that could affect the companies involved.

“The concern is he is in a position to make all kinds of decisions that can affect stock prices,” one government ethics expert told CBS.

“In the meantime, he could have bought or sold stocks that are affected by these decisions.”

It certainly sounds suspicious. That is exactly what Democrats are counting on. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) has already demanded an investigation into “potential insider trading” as her party tries to cast Trump as an out-of-touch oligarch before the midterms.

But the scandal starts to look much thinner once you move past the insinuation and examine what actually happened.

For one thing, Trump is not personally making these trades. CBS News included a statement from the Trump Organization saying that “independent third-party investment managers” handle the president’s stock transactions without direction from Trump or his family.

Vice President JD Vance put it more colorfully: Trump “doesn’t sit at the Oval Office on his computer on his, like, Robinhood account, buying and selling stocks. That’s absurd.”

Fine. But what about the timing? Doesn’t that suggest some coordination between Trump and his money managers?

Not much, judging from CBS News’ own charts. If Trump is insider trading, he is doing a remarkably bad job of it.

Take Nvidia. CBS noted that Trump’s financial managers bought between $500,001 and $1 million of Nvidia stock on January 6. The following week, the administration relaxed export controls on some of Nvidia’s AI chips, allowing sales to China.

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Jim WATSON/AFP/Getty Images

That sounds explosive until you look at the stock price. Nvidia closed at $187.24 on Jan. 6. After the policy change, it closed the following week at $186.23.

The next two purchases shown by CBS came after — not before — brief but significant drops in Nvidia’s share price. Trump’s disclosure also shows sales totaling between $1.8 million and $3.6 million in Nvidia stock during March. The stock then climbed sharply the next month.

That is not what a clean insider-trading narrative looks like.

It looks much more like ordinary portfolio management: buying dips, trimming positions, missing upside, and generally doing what professional money managers do every day — often while charging clients handsomely for the privilege.

Palantir and Eli Lilly transactions cited in the report show a similarly messy pattern rather than some obvious sequence of privileged information followed by perfectly timed trades.

One investment professional quoted by CBS even speculated that Trump’s managers may have been realizing losses for tax purposes. Maybe. If not, Trump might want to ask what exactly he is paying them for.

Either way, that theory does not establish insider trading. And neither does the mere fact that a trade happened before a policy announcement affecting the same company.

To make the case, you need evidence that Trump possessed material nonpublic information, that he communicated it to the people managing his portfolio, and that they traded on it. The disclosures and timing highlighted by CBS do not establish that.

The simplest explanation remains the least cinematic one: Trump pursues policies he believes are good for the country while outside money managers invest his fortune without his input.

If you want to understand what genuinely suspicious political trading can look like, consider the Pelosi family.

In 2024, Paul Pelosi sold roughly $500,000 in Visa stock. The following month, the Justice Department sued Visa on antitrust grounds, and the stock fell.

That timing naturally attracted scrutiny. But timing alone is not proof there, either. We do not know that former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi tipped off her husband, and the public evidence does not establish insider trading.

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Jim Vondruska/Getty Images

What it does show is why these stories require more than a suggestive chart. A suspicious-looking sequence is a reason to ask questions, not a substitute for evidence.

That standard should apply to Trump too.

Democrats need voters to believe Trump is using the presidency to enrich himself, his family, and his friends. That is why every financial disclosure becomes an invitation to imply corruption before proving it.

Maybe investigators will eventually uncover evidence that Trump directed trades around government policy. If they do, investigate it.

But the material CBS News has presented so far does not get us there.

Calling it “potential insider trading” is easy. Proving it requires something more than trades that sometimes came before favorable news, sometimes after price declines, and sometimes before the portfolio missed a rally altogether.

For now, there is plenty of insinuation and remarkably little proof.

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The left’s icons keep face-planting in public



As their cultural icons fall, leftists cannot accept reality or responsibility. The reality is simple: The market for their increasingly radical beliefs is shrinking. The responsibility is theirs. They moved far away from the American public and then blamed the public for refusing to follow.

So the left does what it always does. It refuses to blame its fallen icons. It refuses to change its beliefs. Instead, it turns its icons into martyrs.

The left makes martyrs of the people and institutions falling from their pedestals. That is easier than admitting the left was wrong.

The latest martyr is Scott Pelley, a former correspondent for CBS’ “60 Minutes.” According to the Associated Press, Pelley accused one of his bosses of “murdering” the show and said “she has no qualifications for her job.” He then reportedly turned on others, saying, “You have slender qualifications for this job.”

Page Six’s Hollywood section put the episode more bluntly: “‘Poison Pelley’: Scott Pelley’s tirade against new ‘60 Minutes’ boss latest example of respected CBS journo’s ‘diva’ behavior.”

Pelley told the New York Times on Sunday that CBS News had lost its way.

“We have people who’ve been installed in these jobs who, through no fault of their own, have no experience in television,” he said. “They don’t know what they’re doing. And there’s a subtle political bias that I’ve never seen at ‘60 Minutes’ before, or at CBS News before. So that is my hope: a return to sanity.”

Pelley is right about one thing. CBS News has never had a “subtle political bias.” The bias has always been obvious and leftward, as AllSides’ media bias rating makes clear.

His elevation to martyr status joins a long and growing list.

Network news did not need Scott Pelley to damage itself. It was already doing that quite well. According to Gallup polling in 2025, only 28% of Americans had a “great deal” or “fair amount” of trust in mass media. In February, Pew Research found that 57% of Americans had low confidence in journalists to act in the public’s best interest.

That helps explain why NBC News cut loose MSNBC, why MSNBC tried a major rebrand and cut salaries and staff, and why CNN underwent another major overhaul in 2025. These outlets did not suffer because America suddenly became too stupid to appreciate them. They suffered because Americans understood them too well.

Hollywood tells the same story. “Supergirl” is a super flop, another link in the industry’s chain of progressive pandering. It was short on plot and long on marketing budget. The marketing could not overcome the product. And if the force-feeding of ideology were not enough, the film’s star insulted the prospective audience before viewers had a chance to walk out.

“Supergirl” is symptomatic of Hollywood’s superhero genre and of the larger industry. Both now treat entertainment as beneath them. A movie is no longer a movie. It is a vehicle for indoctrinating supposedly backward Americans who can absorb the left coast’s “higher values” only through metaphor and spandex.

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David Jon/Getty Images/Warner Bros. Pictures

Late-night television offers the same lesson through Stephen Colbert. Or rather, it did. Colbert is no longer on television and for good reason. He was not funny. His show was too expensive. Like Pelley, he repeatedly insulted his bosses. Now, the left lionizes him as a brave man who stood up to President Trump.

Colbert was to late night what “Supergirl” is to Hollywood: a symptom of a larger disease. What was true of him individually is true of late-night television generally. It became another forum for the left to talk to itself while demanding that the rest of America listen.

Print media is no better. The Washington Post is suffering the same fate as its brethren in film and television: declining readership, mounting financial losses, and staff cuts. As with TV, what can be said of the Post can be said of newspapers generally. Their audience shrank because their contempt grew.

In all these cases, the left has transformed icons into martyrs because it refuses to accept reality. In Pelley’s case, the reality is especially obvious. Publicly lashing out at your bosses is showboating stupidity. Everyone knows this. Everyone follows that basic rule except the left, which believes its heroes deserve a different standard.

In the other cases, the left refuses to accept the market’s verdict. Life does not operate as a charity or a government program. Charities can treat losses as proof of need. Governments can tax and borrow their way around failure. Markets are less sentimental. When audiences stop watching, buying, reading, or subscribing, the message is clear.

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Kent NISHIMURA/AFP/Getty Images

The left hates that message because it hates markets. Markets reveal what people actually want. They do not care what cultural elites believe people should want.

That is why the left prefers government and bureaucracy. Regulation can soften market verdicts. Subsidies can delay them. Institutional capture can disguise them. But none of it can make Americans love products they have already rejected.

The left also refuses to accept responsibility for the collapse of its icons. America’s left has become more radical, and the rest of the country has not followed. To admit that would require admitting failure.

So the left makes martyrs of the people and institutions falling from their pedestals. That is easier than admitting the left was wrong. It is less painful than asking why so many Americans stopped listening.

But the answer is not hard to find. The icons fell because the public fell away.

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Glenn Beck unveils the TRUTH about Scott Pelley's FIRING from '60 Minutes'



Veteran investigative journalist Sharyl Attkisson knows what really happened inside CBS News with the firing of "60 Minutes" reporter Scott Pelley — and it’s not what the left is making it out to be.

“The story is she [Bari Weiss] just appointed a new producer for '60 Minutes' and Scott Pelley, who you know, one of the lead guys there, he said this guy’s going to kill '60 Minutes' ... there’s a big showdown in the newsroom, and he’s fired, and now Pelley is upset and making a big deal,” Blaze media co-founder Glenn recounts to Attkisson.

“The left is upset about all of this,” he adds, before asking Attkisson if she has any “insight” about his firing.


“I do, I mean, Scott Pelley was not a popular anchor in terms of his skill as an anchor as well as his personality. And I can’t explain why he persisted in the chair for some years anyway, because gosh, quite a while before they removed him, I was told by a level above David Rhodes that they were trying to fix what they called the Scott Pelley problem,” she tells Glenn.

“One of the issues they had with him was, as it was told to me, he takes his managing editor role too seriously. He was interfering with the correspondent stories in a way that was not productive. And the veterans were complaining, and longtime CBS names that you would recognize, were complaining to the high executives about this,” she continues.

While Attkisson was told that the show would be “all about” her investigative reporting under Pelley, she instead was censored by the anchor.

“The very first week, the very first investigative piece, one of the best ones I think I ever did that I offered them, he censored, never aired. And that was the pattern,” she tells Glenn.

This story was on high school students being lured into going on “amazing global trips” as ambassadors — but instead the children were getting injured, and in some cases, they were killed.

“I don’t know if it was people connected at a higher level that didn’t want these stories to air,” Attkisson says.

While Pelley claims that the new editor in chief of CBS, Bari Weiss, is the one “censoring the stories” and that management had instructed him to “inject lies” into his reporting, Attkisson doesn’t believe it.

“I believe that most likely based on my experience, they were trying to make the stories more balanced and fair. And the culture among some at CBS ... was not to do so. And I think they don’t understand or came to not understand the very basic tenets of journalism,” she explains.

“Weiss is simply trying to tug CBS News back a little bit closer to the center, but the inmates have been running that asylum for a long time, and they’re going to go down quietly,” she adds.

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