Trump's 3,700 Trades Left Jim Cramer Silent on Air
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- Jim Cramer froze on CNBC's Squawk on the Street for 10 seconds when co-host Carl Quintanilla noted Trump had been personally trading Intel stock—the same company the U.S. government took a 10% stake in last August—leaving co-host David Faber to cut away with "We're not having technical difficulties here."
- The U.S. Office of Government Ethics published two Form 278-T disclosure reports showing Trump's 3,700+ individual stock transactions from January through March 2026, averaging more than 40 trades per market day with cumulative value ranging from $220 million to $750 million.
- Trump's biggest purchases skewed heavily toward technology companies including ServiceNow, Nvidia, Adobe, Microsoft, Oracle, Broadcom, Motorola, Amazon, Texas Instruments and Dell, with his largest sales of Microsoft, Amazon and Meta all occurring on a single day—February 10.
- The Trump administration was helping Oracle secure a deal to keep TikTok operating in the U.S. around the same time Trump purchased millions in Oracle stock, and Capitol Trades reported Trump bought $50,000–$100,000 of AMD on January 6—just before the Commerce Department authorized AMD to sell chips to Chinese customers on January 13.
- Trump is the first sitting president to trigger the STOCK Act disclosure requirement and the first to actively trade individual stocks while in office—a break from Bush and Clinton's blind trusts, Obama's Treasury bills and Biden's stock-free portfolio—and he missed the 45-day legal deadline on some filings, drawing a $200 fine for each late disclosure.
Why it matters: Ordinary investors are now operating in a market where the president is personally trading the same tech companies his administration is actively regulating—from Oracle's TikTok deal to AMD's China chip authorization—while no law bars a sitting president from stock trading and disclosure penalties are capped at $200 per late filing. With no charges filed and trades ranging from $220M to $750M in value, the gap between enforcement and activity is wide open.
