Casino Donnie's Insider Trading Racket

3,700 Trades, Zero Accountability

This article is brought to you free by Ground News.

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Let’s start with a number, because the number is the whole story and the rest is just decoration.

3,700.

Between January and March of this year, three months, ninety-odd days, one fiscal quarter of a man who is supposed to be running the country, Donald Trump’s required ethics filings disclosed 3,700 stock trades worth somewhere between $220 million and three-quarters of a billion dollars.

Microsoft. Meta. Oracle. Broadcom. Bank of America. Goldman Sachs. Nvidia. Apple. An S&P 500 index fund, because even a degenerate gambler likes a hedge. Municipal bonds, for flavor.

That’s not a portfolio. That’s a casino floor. And the President of the United States is standing in the middle of it, counting cards at the table while the pit boss looks the other way, and the cameras, conveniently, are off.

You are supposed to find this normal now. You are supposed to scroll past it. That’s the entire design.

So let’s not

.

Here is the part where I am legally and intellectually obligated to be precise, so pay attention. Precision is the enemy of this whole operation, and they are counting on you being too tired for it.

Insider trading is not “rich guy buys stock.”

Insider trading, as a federal crime, has elements: actual, legally defined moving parts a prosecutor has to bolt together. You need material, non-public information. You need a trade made on the basis of it. You need a breach of a duty of trust. And you need the thing lawyers call scienter, which is a fancy Latin way of saying the person knew exactly what they were doing. (Insider trading rabbit holes are shockingly amusing. I’ve been in one for two days.)

The rabbit hole led me to the Supreme Court last night, because of course it did. SCOTUS, over time, blessed two flavors of this in United States v. O’Hagan, the “classical” theory and the “misappropriation” theory, and federal prosecutors get to reach for the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, Rule 10b-5, and the heavy artillery of 18 U.S.C. § 1348, the criminal securities-fraud statute that carries up to twenty-five years in a federal prison. I don’t understand it all, either, but it strikes me that Trump’s legal team will need to be up on these, quite soon.

Now hold that definition in your hand like a ruler, and lay it next to the reporting.

According to the Washington Post‘s reading of these filings, Trump bought Nvidia on February 10. Days later, Nvidia announced a major deal with Meta, and the stock jumped roughly 2.5 percent. He sold Microsoft and Amazon in February, then bought millions more in March, shortly before the Pentagon announced it would put its technology into classified computer networks.

Let me say the quiet part at conversational volume: I am not telling you that is a proven crime. I am telling you that if you fed those two paragraphs to a hundred securities lawyers with no name attached, every one of them would say the same two words before their coffee got cold: “Lawyer up.”

The President of the United States sits atop the single largest pile of non-public material intelligence and information on planet Earth. He knows what the Pentagon is buying before the Pentagon’s vendors do. He knows the tariff rate before the market does, because he is the source of the tariff. Markets are always defined by information asymmetry. For him, the asymmetry isn’t a loophole. It’s the strategy. It’s the job.

A normal person who traded a defense contractor’s stock the week before a classified Pentagon contract would be explaining himself to men in windbreakers with “FBI” on the back. Trump gets a $200 fine. Twice. We’ll come back to the two hundred dollars, because the two hundred dollars is the funniest and darkest detail in the entire file.

Here is the thing that turns this from a scandal into a regime: there is functionally no one on the beat.

The Securities and Exchange Commission, the agency whose entire reason to exist is to walk this exact crime scene, has been hollowed out with the precision of me working a Thanksgiving turkey. Since the administration took over, the SEC has shed the order of 18% of its workforce, dropping from roughly 5,000 employees to around 4,200, the bulk of them walking out the door clutching $50,000 buyout checks dangled by the same government they were supposed to police.

The Enforcement Division and the Office of the General Counsel, the cops and the lawyers, in other words, took the deepest cuts. DOGE set up shop inside the SEC headquarters, occupying actual rooms; nothing good was ever going to come of that. The Philadelphia and Los Angeles field offices were slated to go dark. Enforcement actions against public companies are down roughly thirty percent. The new chairman publicly mused that it’s “good every once in a while to have a house cleaning.” Uh huh.

You do not need a decoder ring. When the man at the top is running a quarter-billion-dollar trading book off privileged information, and the watchdog has been defunded, depopulated, and told to think of mass attrition as spring cleaning, that is not two unrelated news stories. That is one strategy with two press releases.

This is the part that should raise the hair on your neck, regardless of your party. The genius of the grift is not that it’s hidden. It’s that it’s legal-adjacent by demolition. You don’t have to break the law if you can fire the people who enforce it and starve out the ones who remain. The cop didn’t miss the robbery. The cop took the buyout, and the robber signed the check.

Fine. You want to know how this plays as an actual case. Put on the prosecutor’s jacket for a second, because the honest answer is more damning than the cartoon.

It would be hard.

Not because the conduct smells clean. It reeks.

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Going to take a moment to mention where I get my news – at Ground News – who brought you this free article today.

Donald Trump’s 3,700 stock trades — somewhere between $220 million and three-quarters of a billion dollars in a single quarter, while he sits atop the single largest stockpile of market-moving information on planet Earth and the SEC is being deliberately starved — is one of those stories that should be everywhere. Whether it’s everywhere in your feed depends entirely on whose feed you’re in.

In writing this piece, I leaned on Ground News the same way I do every day, to cut through the static and chatter, and to test my assumptions about who is actually covering the trades and who is quietly pretending it isn’t happening. Their analytical tools let me examine the biases in the sources covering this story, the ownership of those media outlets, and the blind spots on every side of this thing.

So, how do you figure out whether the President is running an insider-trading book out of the Oval Office without getting yanked around by whoever is yelling loudest on cable? Ground News.

A lot of the coverage is, thankfully, right up the middle — Reuters, AP, Bloomberg, Axios all running the same numbers with the same skepticism — and Ground News gives me that picture up front:

On the right, seemingly desperate not to look at the actual fact pattern, the news is mostly the predictable shrug — “everyone does this,” “it’s a trust,” “his sons run it” — buried under stories about the President welcoming the Olympic hockey team to the White House:

I mean…that’s some weapons-grade misdirection. A bright spot by the loosest kind of association, I suppose.

On the left, one story hit hard: the SEC, the agency whose entire reason to exist is to walk this exact crime scene, hollowed out by 18%, Enforcement and General Counsel taking the deepest cuts, DOGE setting up shop inside SEC headquarters, enforcement actions down 30 percent. The corruption delivery system has a delivery address:

Amen, folks. It’s powerful enough of an idea that you can watch it travel across factuality ratings and political leans…Mother Jones on the left and the Wall Street Journal on the right arrive at roughly the same conclusion, even when the framing on each side could not be more different.

Ground News is a website and an app I’ve come to rely on for exactly these stories — the ones where the corruption is engineered to be unprovable, and the only way to keep score is to compare headlines, ownership, factuality, and lean in one place. In this story, I could see the Casino Donnie story clearly, without the noise and clutter of partisan media.

Subscribe to Ground News by using my exclusive link for 40% off their Vantage Plan…the same one I use. Just go to Ground.News/Rick or scan the QR code below.

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It’s hard because the structure was engineered to be unprosecutable.

The filings don’t say which accounts the trades ran through. They don’t say who placed them. Some show a broker acting as agent. The assets sit in a trust controlled by his children, and the Trump Organization’s official statement is a masterpiece of the genre: “Neither President Trump, his family, nor The Trump Organization plays any role in selecting, directing, or approving specific investments.”

Read that sentence again. It is not a denial of corruption. It is a ludicrously implausible middle finger to prosecutors, notarized.

To win a criminal insider-trading case, you’d have to prove that he, personally, knew the information, knew it was material and non-public, and that that knowledge drove that trade. Occam’s Razor, sadly, is not an element of the offense. And you’d be proving it against a defendant who can shrug and point at a trust, at a broker, at two large adult failsons, at a wall of intermediaries built for precisely this moment. The materiality is arguable. The non-public part is arguable. The “who pushed the button” part is a smoke machine running at full blast.

And that is the actual scandal. Not that it’s an easy case. That it’s a hard case by design. They didn’t stumble into a gray area. They poured the foundation and moved in. A system in which the most powerful man alive can trade on information only he possesses, through a structure specifically crafted so no prosecutor can ever cleanly pin it on him, is not a system with a corruption problem.

It is a corruption delivery system with a government attached. The unprovability isn’t exculpatory. It’s a confession of guilt.

For the record, the clock matters too. Criminal securities fraud generally has to be charged within about six years; the civil insider-trading provisions run roughly five years from the last transaction. The window is not infinite, the conduct is recent, and “wait it out” is, transparently, part of the plan. Every quarter of normalization is a quarter closer to the statute doing the job the SEC was gutted to avoid.

Here is the part where they want you to believe everyone does this. Everyone does not do this. Nobody did this.

The entire modern norm, boring, unglamorous, load-bearing, is the blind trust. You hand your assets to an independent trustee. They manage it. You don’t know what you own, you don’t know what’s traded, you can’t tip, and you can’t be tipped, because the whole point is that your right hand has no idea what your fortune’s left hand is doing. It is not a courtesy.

It is the firewall between “President” and “beneficiary,” and presidents of both parties submitted to it precisely because they understood the alternative looks exactly like this.

What Trump has is not that.

What Trump has is a trust run by Don Jr. and Eric, his own kids, his own employees, which makes “blind” do the kind of work that “REQUIRES VISION CORRECTION FOR NIGHT DRIVING” does on a driver’s license. The Daily Beast put it gently: a setup that “differs from the blind trusts typically used by other presidents.”

Oh, you think? Calling this a blind trust is like calling a one-way mirror a privacy screen. It depends entirely on which side you’re standing, and he’s standing on the side that can see everything.

And the public is not confused about this. Eighty-eight percent of Americans say public officials should not be trading individual stocks while in office. That is not a partisan wedge. That is one of the few things left that Americans agree on, and the President is doing the precise opposite of it, at nine-figure scale, in writing, on a government form.

Because of course he is. You didn’t think the trading floor had only one trader.

The same two sons who run the not-blind trust run an empire that has, in the family’s boom years, expanded into crypto and real-estate licensing across the Middle East and Asia. Forbes clocked Eric as roughly ten times richer than he was when this started, net worth in the neighborhood of $400 million, now the wealthiest of the Trump children. The New Yorker reported the family is on track to pad its wealth by something like $3.4 billion by the end of the term. The Daily Beast reported a new Trump Tower in Tbilisi tied to a firm linked to a sanctioned pro-Kremlin billionaire. I know you’re as shocked as I am. And Jared Kushner, the son-in-law who collected two billion dollars from the Saudi sovereign wealth fund after a White House tour spent conspicuously friendly to the people writing the check, is practically a footnote now. When the two-billion-dollar Saudi guy is the part you almost forget to mention, the baseline has moved somewhere no republic should ever let it go.

That’s the texture to hold onto. The stock trades are not an anomaly poking out of an otherwise clean presidency. They are one instrument in an orchestra: the crypto ventures, the foreign licensing, the tower in Tbilisi, the Gulf resorts, the pay-to-play pardon machine, the wrecked SEC, and an Acting Attorney General who still seems to think he’s Trump’s personal lawyer. These aren’t scandals, plural. This is one scandal, and it has a household.

I’m not going to insult you with a tidy bow. Here are the only three things that are actually true.

It is not normal. Not “unusual.” Not “norm-breaking” in the gentle NPR sense. A sitting president running a quarter-billion-dollar securities book, minimum, atop the largest stockpile of market-moving secrets in human history, through a trust run by his own kids, while the agency that polices exactly this is deliberately starved, has no American precedent, because every previous occupant of that office understood, on a gut level, that this was the bright line you do not so much as lean on.

It is built to be impossible to prosecute, which is not the same as innocent. Those are opposite things wearing the same coat. “You can’t quite prove it” is the product, not the defense.

And it is only invisible if you agree to stop looking. That is the entire wager. Not that you’ll approve. They know you won’t; the 88 percent won’t. The wager is that you’ll get tired. That the number becomes wallpaper. That Casino Donnie ends up a punchline instead of an indictment of all of us for leaving the table open.

It’s not that Trump paid no price for the spree. He did.

He paid a two-hundred-dollar fine. Twice. For the late paperwork on hundreds of millions in trades.

Four hundred dollars and a shrug.

That’s not the penalty. That’s the receipt of the United States government, in its own ledger, pricing the corruption of the presidency, and daring you to care more than it does.

This article is brought to you free by Ground News.