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As Trump insisted the war in Iran would end “soon,” one narrative in his name was “Selling America.”


On the morning of Monday, March 23, President Trump issued his first “TACO” of the war in Iran. After four weeks of fighting, with oil prices already up 55%, Trump issued an ultimatum to Iran on Friday: reach a deal within 48 hours or the United States would strike its power plants and energy infrastructure.

But on Monday morning, Trump reversed course. In an all-caps Truth Social article, he announced that the United States and Iran had had “very good and productive conversations” and that he would extend the deadline for a deal by five days.

Wall Street, for the first time since the war began, expired. Stocks rose. Brent crude plunged nearly 11%. Energy stocks – one of the few reliable winners in the conflict – sold off along with oil.

The brokerage account in Trump’s name spent the day buying them.

A First Look at a President’s Trading

According to the 113-page periodic trading report released by the Office of Government Ethics on May 14, Trump’s brokerage account spent the same day buying a large number of oil and gas stocks, including Phillips 66, Exxon Mobil and Chevron, as well as defense and aerospace names like Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics: companies that could profit if the war drags on.

The day was not unusual. The filing, which covers January through March, shows a consistent posture throughout the Iranian conflict: as Trump continued the war and told Americans it would end “soon,” the account in his name covered it, buying gold, Treasury bonds and cash.

A spokesperson for the Trump Organization, the family’s private conglomerate, told Fortune that brokerage accounts are managed by third-party financial institutions that have “sole and exclusive authority over all investment decisions.” The transactions, the spokesperson wrote in a statement, are executed through “automated investment processes and systems administered by these institutions,” and neither Trump, his family, nor the Trump Organization “play any role in selecting, directing, or approving specific investments.”

Davis Ingle, a White House spokesperson, told Fortune that Trump’s assets are in a trust “managed by his children” and that “there are no conflicts of interest.” Asked about the apparent tension between that statement and the Trump Organization’s assertion that third-party institutions “solely” have authority over transactions, Ingle told Fortune to “defer to the Trump Org.”

There is nothing inherently illegal about a sitting president owning stock: the criminal conflict of interest law that binds almost all other executive branch officials exempts the president.

But for more than half a century, presidents have deliberately avoided any appearance of conflict, resorting to blind trusts, index funds or, in the case of Jimmy Carter, liquidation. What’s notable here is not that Trump owns securities, but that the account in his name actively trades them.

“It’s an unusual position for a president to be in,” Richard Painter, a securities law professor at the University of Minnesota and former chief ethics adviser in the White House under George W. Bush, told Fortune.

Trump’s new filing appears to offer the first public glimpse in modern presidential history of an active procurement portfolio on behalf of a sitting president. The Office of Government Ethics report documents 3,642 individual transactions made through the account during the first three months of 2026, amounting to between $220 million and $750 million in volume, at a rate of approximately 60 transactions per day. The filing does not always clarify whether a given transaction is a stock, bond, or ETF.

“I’ve met with every president,” Painter said, “I don’t think we’ve had any presidential stock trades.”

Since Lyndon Johnson pioneered the use of a presidential blind trust in 1963, every modern president has either placed his assets in a blind trust managed by independent trustees, held them in index funds and Treasury bonds, or, in Carter’s case, liquidated all of his assets (including his peanut farm). None actively traded individual securities during his tenure. Until recently.

During Trump’s first term, his assets were held in the Donald J. Trump Revocable Trust, which controlled his business empire, and the periodic transaction reports he produced attracted little attention. During the first year of his second term, the account traded almost exclusively in municipal and corporate bonds.

But before stock trading even began, the arrangement drew immediate backlash from federal ethics officials.

Walter Shaub, then director of the Office of Government Ethics, called Trump’s original trust agreement “not even half-assed” in a January 2017 speech at the Brookings Institution. He resigned in July of that year after clashing with Trump over the president’s refusal to divest from his businesses.

Coverage of the war he was waging

The buildup began on the very day of the war. Disclosure reports only trade in ranges, not exact dollars, with purchases falling between $50,000 and $5 million depending on position.

Markets generally fall into two camps: risk assets (US stocks, growth, technology) that investors buy when they are sure the economy will grow, and safe havens (gold, Treasuries, cash) that they retreat to when they are not. During the war in Iran, the discourse gradually shifted from the first camp to the second, even as Trump told Americans that the conflict was almost over.

On March 2, the first trading day of the war, the account purchased Newmont, the gold miner, for $50,000 to $100,000. On March 4, the day Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz, he purchased the iShares US Treasury Bond ETF for $250,000 to $500,000. The next day, she purchased between $500,000 and $1 million worth of iShares Gold Trust.

The purchases continued even as Trump publicly insisted the war was under control. On March 7, he announced that Iran had “apologized and surrendered.” On March 10, the account purchased a wide range of international and emerging market exposures: Europe, Japan, Canada and, in its biggest move of the day, an emerging markets ETF in the $500,000 to $1 million range. The next day, Trump told Axios that the war would end “soon” because there was “virtually nothing left to target” and that it would end “whenever I want to.”

The next day, Trump told Axios that the war would end “soon” because there was “virtually nothing left to target” and that it would end “whenever I want to.”

The following week, the account purchased between $1 million and $5 million in cash. The Strait of Hormuz is still not open at the time of writing.

Sources

1/ https://Google.com/

2/ https://fortune.com/2026/05/18/trump-stock-trading-iran-war-conflict-of-interest-ethics/

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