Trump Has Made 28,700 Stock Trades Since Taking Office, More Than All of Congress Combined

Roughly 28,700 individual stock trades moved through Donald Trump's investment accounts in the first 17 months of his second term, from his January 2025 inauguration through the end of June 2026. That is more than the 22,300 trades reported by all 535 members of the House and Senate combined over the same stretch, according to a Bloomberg data analysis reported by Quartz and Fortune. The pace works out to about 80 transactions on an average trading day.

The trades are not published as a single ledger. They surface through periodic transaction reports Trump files with the U.S. Office of Government Ethics, the same category of filing behind his 2025 annual disclosure, which alone listed more than 21,000 trades worth between $600 million and $1.86 billion. His first-quarter 2026 filing added roughly 3,600 more trades, worth between $220 million and $750 million, touching Microsoft, Meta Platforms, Oracle, Broadcom, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, Nvidia, Apple and Amazon, along with municipal bonds, according to disclosures reviewed by NBC News.

A Bush-era ethics lawyer's warning

Richard Painter served as chief White House ethics lawyer under President George W. Bush from 2005 to 2007 and now teaches securities law at the University of Minnesota. He has reviewed Trump's disclosures and reached a blunt conclusion about what that volume of trading means when the trader also sets federal policy.

“I believe that that is a huge problem.”

Painter's objection is not the trade count by itself. It is what a sitting president can do to the value of what he owns. "If the president owns a bunch of oil company stocks, he's making money if the price of oil goes up," he said, according to Fortune. A president who can move an oil price or a bank's stock through his own official decisions, and then profit from an account he still owns, holds the kind of financial conflict of interest that federal law generally bars other executive branch officials from carrying, in Painter's assessment. Separately, positions in oil and gas companies gained as much as $15.5 million in value during this summer's Israel-Iran conflict, according to Truthout's review of the Bloomberg dataset. The filings do not say whether those positions were added, held or expanded because of the conflict.

The exemption Congress carved out for him

A House bill passed in July would bar members of Congress and their immediate families from trading individual stocks. It explicitly exempts the president. Trump urged Congress to pass it "without delay" during a State of the Union address, arguing lawmakers "cannot corruptly profit from using insider information." He took the opposite position when Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri proposed folding the presidency into the same ban, calling Hawley a "pawn of Democrats," according to Quartz's review of the legislative record.

What the White House says

White House spokesman Davis Ingle says the roughly eight investment accounts listed on Trump's disclosures are run by outside institutions through what he described as computer-based model portfolios that automatically replicate recognized indexes such as the Schwab 1000. Ingle has said neither Trump nor any member of his family can direct, influence or provide input on how the portfolio is invested. Eric Trump, who oversees the trust holding the assets, has separately called reports that family members pick individual stocks "a lie and blatantly false." The disclosures themselves list transactions in specific, named companies rather than a single index fund, and neither the White House nor the filings identify which institution manages each account or who places each order.

A break from four decades of precedent

Every president since the 1970s placed assets beyond routine holdings into a blind trust managed by an independent trustee, according to a Brennan Center for Justice review of the practice. Trump did not adopt one in his first term and has not adopted one in his second. What the disclosures do not resolve is whether Trump personally selects any given trade. Federal reporting rules require him to list the transactions after the fact. They do not require him, or the White House, to say who decided to make them.