Trump Broke the Law — Again
Newly filed disclosures show the same late-filing violation that let Trump’s April 2025 tariff-pause trades go unreported for over a year has repeated itself with his 2026 trades
President Donald Trump has violated the federal law requiring timely disclosure of his stock trades for a second consecutive year. Political Wallet has used that same law — the STOCK Act — to document violations by members of Congress from both parties. Republican Rep. Scott Franklin (R-Fla.) failed to disclose 31 stock trades on time. Democratic Reps. LaMonica McIver (D-N.J.), Danny Davis (D-Ill.) and Summer Lee (D-Pa.) were among six House Democrats and Republicans who missed last year’s annual disclosure deadline entirely. (More examples of our past coverage on congressional STOCK Act violations are available at news.politicalwallet.org.)
Two Periodic Transaction Reports (U.S. Office of Government Ethics Form 278-T), signed June 25 and received by the OGE on June 29, cover more than 2,500 stock, bond and fund transactions made between April 7 and May 29. Both reports appear to include transactions that were filed late, but only report noted that late fees were paid. Not every trade inside them violated the law: transactions from May 11 onward fell within the STOCK Act’s 45-day filing window as of the June 25 signing date. It’s the trades from April 7 through May 10 — including the large tech purchases below — that were disclosed well past the deadline.
Among the trades: purchases of Meta and Microsoft each valued between $5 million to $25 million, dated April 17, the same calendar day the S&P 500 and Nasdaq Composite hit record highs after Trump told reporters the U.S.-Iran war “should be ending pretty soon.” President Trump also purchased Palantir stock valued between $1 million and $5 million that same day.
Federal disclosure forms record only the date of a trade, not the time — so whether the purchases came before or after Trump’s remarks that day is not knowable from the public record, and likely never will be.
CBS News, Fortune and NBC News have separately documented a similar pattern in Trump’s January-through-March trades: a Vanguard Dividend ETF sale the day Trump announced new tariffs on buyers of Iranian oil; safe-haven purchases of gold and Treasury bonds the day Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz; a cash-fund purchase the day Trump signaled to Ireland’s Taoiseach that the war was nearly over. This isn’t new behavior — it’s the same pattern Trump exhibited in 2025. And in both years, the disclosures required by law to let the public see his trades in real time arrived late.
As Sludge reported, Trump’s annual disclosure for calendar year 2025 — also filed months late — revealed 327 individual stock purchases worth as much as $12.8 million on April 8, 2025, the day before Trump announced a 90-day pause on his sweeping tariffs, a move that sent the S&P 500 up nearly 10% in a single day. Those trades went undisclosed for more than a year.
Political Wallet’s review of the annual report confirms, directly from the document, an OGE reviewer’s note reading: “The filer was granted a 45-day extension to file this annual report... The filer paid late filing fees related to transactions not previously reported on 278-Ts.” The note does not specify how much Trump paid. Federal law caps the late fee for a periodic transaction report at $200 per report — but with hundreds of previously unreported transactions bundled into this single late report, the total amount he actually paid is not disclosed anywhere in the public record.
Political Wallet’s Trump’s Wallet database is the only public tool that tracks every one of Donald Trump’s federal financial disclosures — covering his personal finances from 2016 until now — in a single, cross-referenced record. Where any single report shows a snapshot, our database shows the pattern: tens of thousands of individual transactions, and, now, two consecutive years in which required disclosures of market-moving trades arrived only after the deadline had already passed. Explore it yourself at Trump’s Wallet.
In a statement to Political Wallet on July 1, White House spokesperson Anna Kelly said:
“Neither the President nor his family has ever engaged — or will ever engage — in conflicts of interest. President Trump proudly made the United States the crypto capital of the world through executive actions, supporting legislation like the GENIUS Act, and other commonsense policies to drive innovation and economic opportunity for all Americans. All actions by President Trump and his administration are taken in the best interest of the American people — and any so-called ‘reporters’ pushing otherwise are recycling the same, tired, false narrative that Democrats and the legacy media have been pushing for a decade.”
The Trump Organization did not respond to a request for comment.
The STOCK Act’s disclosure deadline exists so the public can monitor officials’ trades in real time, not a year later. Trump is not accused of insider trading by Political Wallet — that would require proof he traded on nonpublic information, which the public record cannot supply. What the record does show, clearly and now twice in a row, is a president who did not meet his legal obligation to disclose his trades within 45 days, in years when his own public statements happened to move the same markets his portfolio was exposed to.
Why Does It Matter?
Please be informed of your politicians’ personal finances.
That’s our goal at Political Wallet. We believe it is important for constituents to understand how their government officials’ personal finances may affect their policy-making decisions, as well as being aware of the potential income and wealth gap between many politicians and their constituents.
Remember our favorite questions: Would you make a decision that costs your family money for the public good? Isn’t that what we ask of our government officials?
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