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Donald Trump told the world “THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY!!!” minutes after Wednesday's opening bell on the New York Stock Exchange.
Then, moments before his announcement of a world-shattering 90-day “pause” on his trade tariff agenda sent Wall Street into overdrive, call volumes for various contracts spiked, the market rallied, and allegations of securities fraud and market manipulation roared across social media.
There is no public evidence the president or administration officials openly manipulated the markets, and White House officials have denied any wrongdoing. But Democratic members of Congress now want answers over what they’re seeing as potentially one of the biggest financial frauds in American history.
“I don’t think that it was a coincidence,” Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said Wednesday.
“I don’t think that Trump just coincidentally said buy stocks and then shortly later made an announcement that dramatically inflated, and dramatically raised, a lot of these asset prices,” the congresswoman told New York’s Spectrum News.
She said she heard “murmuring” among House members that “there may have been people on the floor who knew this was coming.”
“And I’m very interested in seeing some of the stock disclosures that come out when those reports are due, and I’m very interested in what members of Congress have been buying and trading stocks in the last 24 hours prior to this tariff announcement,” she said.
AOC and Democratic members Steven Horsford, Mike Levin, Seth Magaziner, David Min and Joe Neguse have said House Speaker Mike Johnson should call on every House lawmaker to release their trading transactions from April 2-9.
“It would be unconscionable for any member of Congress to use their personal position to benefit financially, especially in a time where Americans across the country are experiencing financial chaos,” they wrote Thursday. “The American people deserve to know if any representatives took advantage of their positions for personal gain.”
Lawmakers are also suggesting those conversations may have been happening during a National Republican Congressional Committee event on Tuesday night as the president delivered remarks in a tuxedo and told a crowd that foreign leaders were “kissing my a**” to drop tariffs against them.
“He made $2.5 billion today, and he made $900 million,” Trump told wealthy guests In the Oval Office the next afternoon.
The president himself holds a bulk of his net worth in his stake in Trump Media & Technology Group, the parent company for his Truth Social platform. The company trades under the ticker “DJT” — the president’s initials and the sign-off he used in Wednesday morning’s Truth Social to “buy.”
The company’s stock rallied after Trump’s announcement of the tariff “pause,” and closed the day climbing 21 percent.
Stock in Elon Musk’s Tesla also spiked 18 percent.
“The president was bragging in the Oval Office about helping his wealthy buddies make a quick fortune off of his tariff flip-flop — this reeks of market manipulation,” House Judiciary Committee ranking member Gerry Connolly said in a statement to The Independent. “What Congress needs to find out now is who else in Trump’s inner circle profited off this global grift while Americans watched their 401(k)s plummet?”
Suspicion of unusual activity typically is reported by the markets to the Securities and Exchange Commission, which then determines whether enough evidence exists to build a case against a party.
Democratic Senator Adam Schiff was the first member of Congress to call for an investigation.
Schiff and Senator Ruben Gallego have formally requested that the federal government investigate potential insider trading and federal ethics violations.
They want to know whether Trump, his family or other administration officials “engaged in insider trading or other illegal financial transactions, informed by advanced knowledge of non-public information regarding his changes to tariff policy, yesterday or at any time during this administration,” the senators wrote in a letter to the White House on Thursday.
“This sequence of events raises grave legal and ethics concerns,” they said.
A spokesperson for Schiff’s office told The Independent that “nothing is off the table” to get answers.
Trump’s surprise turn on Wednesday appeared to be news to the administration’s own trade representative, who was in the middle of testifying to a House committee, deflecting allegations that the president purposefully manipulated the markets.
“How are you in charge of negotiating if the president is tweeting about this from wherever the hell he is?” Rep. Horsford asked trade ambassador Jamieson Greer. “Did you know that this was happening? … Is this market manipulation? Why not? If it was a plan, if it was always the plan, how is it not market manipulation?”
“This could be an enormous scandal,” Senator Chris Murphy said in a video on social media.
“So the question is, who close to Trump knew he was going to suspend tariffs? Which of his Mar-a-Lago friends or his billionaire advisers were able to capitalize on that information? Why did Trump send out that post to his supporters earlier in the day?” he said.
“The chaotic nature of this tariff policy … gives ample opportunity for any individual who has early access to the White House’s change in position to make boatloads of money, either by investing at the right time or pulling their money out of the market at the right time,” according to Murphy. “This entire White House is one giant grift. Donald Trump and his friends are in power in order to use their access to power to make money. It stinks and we should get to the bottom of it.”
