How To Make The Stock Market Work For The Middle Class, Not Just The Rich
The wealth effect of this single transaction could have been massive for everyday people. Now, only the super-affluent will benefit.The wealth effect of this single transaction could have been massive for everyday people. Now, only the super-affluent will benefit.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.
RELATED: Trump has media and left panicking over election national emergency threat
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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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.
Glenn Beck exposes the Fed’s hidden stash — and it’s worse than we thought
For years, Glenn Beck has called for the abolition of the Federal Reserve, arguing it’s nothing more than a private banking cartel that enables endless government spending, devalues the dollar through inflation, and secretly steals wealth from Americans via corrupt monetary policies.
But new evidence that just surfaced proves the problem is even worse than he thought.
To explain what’s been happening behind the American people’s back, Glenn gives an analogy.
“Imagine the U.S. economy is like one giant, never-ending house party that’s been raging for years, and the Federal Reserve is the bartender in charge of the punch bowl. The punch bowl, that’s liquidity, easy money flowing through the banks and the markets and the businesses,” he begins.
For years, the “punch” was overdistributed, making partygoers drunk and willing to make poor decisions. “This is when stocks and houses get wildly overpriced. Companies borrow stupid amounts ... and everybody starts to do stupid things,” Glenn says.
That’s exactly what happened in 2022 when the Federal Reserve “just printed a whole buttload of money,” he says.
But when things “got ugly,” it suddenly reversed course and announced an initiative called “quantitative tightening,” which essentially “drained the whole punch bowl.”
The Federal Reserve “needed to get rid of $2.3 trillion worth of bonds that they owned, and they said, ‘We’re just going to let them expire,”’ Glenn explains.
“In theory, this drains the money out of the system, makes it harder for you to get loans and everything else. Borrowing is more expensive. The bubbles will pop. It forces the economy to sober up.”
But this was just a ruse, Glenn says.
Instead of actually stopping the flow of “punch,” the Federal Reserve during the COVID-19 pandemic quietly redirected it instead.
“A lot of it ended up in a giant backroom keg called the overnight reverse repo facility. ... These are money market funds, big investors, big banks,” Glenn says, “and they parked about $2.5 trillion in for safekeeping, and they were earning a safe interest rate from the Fed.”
But then the backroom keg finally ran dry.
“By 2023, something had changed. The short-term Treasury bills (super safe government IOUs) started paying higher interest than the keg in the back room, so the big investors said, ‘Why are we letting all the alcohol sit in the keg? We can have a party elsewhere,”’ Glenn says. “So they started draining the backroom keg $100-$200 billion every single month, and they poured that money right back into stocks and bonds and lending.”
What was the result?
“More punch than we started with in the first place!” Glenn exclaims.
“That’s why the Dow Jones keeps hitting new highs, government keeps funding huge deficits. ... The bartender was pretending to cut off the drinks while secretly letting the elite guests go into the back room and get the hidden stash.”
These still-drunk elites, Glenn says, continue to “make stupid, dumb bets,” which just makes the “hangover worse” for the normies.
“Look out, gang — you’ve been lied to yet again,” he cautions, calling the Federal Reserve a “criminal organization” that is “stealing from the American people.”
“End the Fed,” he pleads.
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How Reforming Stock Market Rules Would Dramatically Boost America’s Middle Class
Just imagine how much it would help the middle class to enjoy access to America’s wealth engines again.
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