Lenin famously said that war is “terribly profitable.” Donald Trump has made sure of that—for himself and his family.
In just the first quarter of 2026, Trump made nearly 3,700 trades on the stock market. That’s orders of magnitude above the average. Even more suspicious is the choice and timing of the trades.
In January, Trump bought Nvidia stock days before his Commerce Department approved the sale of Nvidia chips to China. In February, he invested even more in the tech giant right before Nvidia announced a deal with Meta.
Nvidia and Boeing CEOs joined Trump in his humiliating meeting with Xi Jinping in May. The Chinese government bought 200 Boeing planes as a result. Coincidentally, Trump had bought millions in Boeing stock just before the trip.
Trump made nine purchases of Palantir stock worth up to $680,000 this year. When its market valuation dropped almost 15% in April, Trump posted: “Palantir Technologies (PLTR) has proven to have great war-fighting capabilities and equipment. Just ask our enemies!!! President DJT.” Within days of the post—which included the ticker symbol—the stock surged once again.
The speculation with oil stocks is perhaps the most blatant of all. Throughout the Iran War, Trump has traded in Phillips 66, ExxonMobil, and Chevron stocks, while manipulating prices through well-timed sham updates on the progress of negotiations. On March 23, he posted that the US and Iran had “very good and productive conversations.” This led to a drop in oil prices. His brokerage account spent the rest of the day buying the energy stocks that were being sold off. Whenever Trump zig-zagged, making big military threats against Iran, oil prices spiked, boosting his portfolio. No wonder he said he “loves the inflation”!
The list goes on and on, and this mafioso style of governance extends to his family. As the Iran War hit the 60-day mark, Eric and Don Jr. struck a drone deal with the US Air Force via their newly acquired company, Powerus. What’s suspicious about a drone company merging with a Trump golf course company?
Last year, the White House intervened to get the Pentagon to loan $620 million to Vulcan Elements, a minerals company linked to Donald Trump Jr. Trump’s boys also got $1.6 billion in government support for a tungsten mining deal in Kazakhstan.
This is nothing new. Already in 1884, Friedrich Engels wrote that in a bourgeois democracy “wealth … employs its power indirectly, but all the more surely. It does this in two ways: by plain corruption of officials, of which America is the classic example, and by an alliance between the government and the stock exchange.”
Corruption isn’t an accidental feature: it’s intrinsic to capitalist government. While Trump is more careless about it, he’s far from the first bourgeois politician to indulge in insider trading, and he won’t be the last. This is one instance in which the Democratic and Republican Parties are in bipartisan agreement.